From 1 April 2026, every 10-year capital works fund plan prepared, updated or replaced in New South Wales must use a standard form published by NSW Fair Trading. Your existing plan isn't cancelled. Under section 80(3) of the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015, an owners corporation must review its plan at least once every five years, and the new form applies from that review onward.
So the deadline most committees are worried about isn't the one that matters.
A 10-year capital works fund plan is the schedule of anticipated major expenditure your owners corporation expects to meet from the capital works fund over a decade. Section 80(4) of the Act requires it to set out the proposed work, the timing and anticipated cost of that work, the source of funding and anything else prescribed by the regulations. That last limb is where the new form comes from.
What is actually changing on 1 April 2026?
The format becomes compulsory. NSW Fair Trading has published a standard form for the 10-year capital works fund plan, updated on 31 October 2025, and the NSW Government's Capital Works Fund Planner states that "all new and updated 10-year capital works fund plans must be prepared using the standard form". The change arrives through the Strata Schemes Legislation Amendment Act 2025, which also lands developer obligations on the same date.
Three other things commence with it, and committees keep missing the third.
Developers of new schemes must prepare their Initial Maintenance Schedule on a prescribed form. For multi-storey schemes, King & Wood Mallesons reports that an independent surveyor must certify both that the schedule complies with the prescribed form and that the estimated contributions to the administrative fund and the capital works fund meet the scheme's expected annual expenditure. Strata information certificates must now disclose embedded network details.
The third one is worth sitting with. For the first time, someone independent has to sign their name to the proposition that the levies match the building. Developers now carry that test at the start of a scheme's life. Established owners corporations don't.
Does our existing plan become invalid?
No. The requirement isn't retrospective. Strata Partners states that existing capital works fund plans "remain valid until they are next due for review (within 5 years), replacement, or update", and PBL Legal confirms that a plan already in place "does not need to be immediately transferred to the new format".
Which sounds like relief, and is the most expensive sentence in this article.
A scheme that reviewed its plan in late 2025 has no obligation to open the new form until 2030. Four years of a building ageing against a document nobody is required to look at. The reform gives you permission to defer, and deferral is precisely the behaviour that produces the special levy.
What does the standard form ask for?
Categories and cash flow. The form itself (Fair Trading Form FT6648, prescribed under clause 17I of the Strata Schemes Management Regulation 2016) sets out seventeen expenditure categories, running from structural components, roofing and waterproofing systems through electrical, plumbing, HVAC and fire safety systems to lifts, security alarms, car parking, landscaping and furnishings, with an eighteenth for anything that doesn't fit. Under each category you list the items, the current cost in today's dollars including GST, and the cost in the year the work falls due, inflated at an assumed rate. A contingency allowance sits at the bottom. A source of funding table then runs the cash flow year by year: opening balance, levy contributions, interest earned after tax, anticipated expenses, closing balance.
Two lines in that form deserve more attention than they have received. The funding table has exactly two income rows, levy contributions and interest. There is no row for a special levy and none for a loan. The form is built on the premise that a properly funded building pays for its own decade. Most plans currently in circulation quietly assume the opposite.
The second is the form's own worked example. It encourages schemes to start budgeting now for long-life items that fall due in the next plan, and it uses a lift: $600,000 due in twelve years, set aside at $50,000 a year from today, so the next committee inherits a fund rather than a shock. Fair Trading has written the case for forward funding into the template. What the template can't do is make anyone use it.
What does an underfunded plan look like from the inside?
It looks like a compliant document and a wet ceiling.
The building below is a composite. It isn't a LUNA client, and the figures in it are illustrative. The pattern is ordinary, which is the point.
Twelve lots, four storeys, inner west, rendered brick, built in 1974. Flat roof, patched in the eighties, patched again in 2009 by a contractor whose invoice described the work as "make good to affected area". The 10-year plan lists one line for the roof: replacement, 2032, ninety-five thousand dollars. That line has appeared in the plan, unchanged, for eleven years. It was tabled at every annual general meeting. Nobody ever asked where the number came from.
In March, the ceiling in lot 4 starts to stain. By May the stain has a shape and the owner has stopped inviting people over. The committee does what committees do, which is get a quote, and the quote comes back at a hundred and eighty thousand because the membrane has failed under the plant deck and the balustrade has to come off before anyone can reach it.
The capital works fund holds sixty-one thousand dollars.
At the meeting somebody does the arithmetic out loud, because someone always does. Just under ten thousand dollars each. The treasurer is a retired teacher who took the role four years ago because nobody else put their hand up, and she is the one holding the page when the room goes quiet. In lot 9 there is a woman in her late seventies who has lived in the building since 1988 and does not have ten thousand dollars. Everyone in the room knows this, and nobody looks at her.
Here is the part that should bother you. Nothing in that story is a breach. The plan existed. It was reviewed. It would have satisfied every requirement in section 80(4), and from April it would print cleanly onto the standard form, categories and all. The roof line was there in black and white under Roofing, with a year and a cost.
The document was compliant for a decade and the building was underfunded for a decade, and those two facts never once contradicted each other on paper.
"Every underfunded building I have walked into had a plan. What it didn't have was anyone who had gone and looked at the thing the plan was describing."
Dino Biordi, Founder and Principal, LUNA Management
Why is a compliant plan not the same as a funded building?
Because a plan records intentions and a building has a condition. The form asks when you propose to do the work and what you think it will cost. It doesn't ask what state the asset is in today, who last inspected it or whether the number in the cost column was a quote, an estimate or a guess someone made in 2015 and nobody has touched since.
An asset register is the missing half. An asset register is a record of the physical things your owners corporation is responsible for, listed individually, each with its age, its make and model, its condition at a known date, its assessed remaining life and the basis of its replacement cost.
The difference is the difference between a budget and an inventory. One tells you what you plan to spend. The other tells you what you own and what shape it is in. A capital works plan built on a real register is a forecast. A capital works plan built on the previous plan is a photocopy.
| The standard form plan | An asset register | |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of record | Category, for example Roofing | Individual asset, for example membrane to west plant deck |
| Answers | When do we intend to spend, and how much | What do we own, how old is it, what condition is it in |
| Cost basis | Estimated cost adjusted for inflation | Basis stated: quote, tender, benchmark or estimate, with the date |
| Condition | Not captured | Assessed and dated, by a named inspector |
| Trigger for action | The calendar | The condition, whichever comes first |
| Compulsory from 1 April 2026 | Yes, on next preparation, update or replacement | No |
| Will tell you the roof is failing | No | Yes |
Only one of those columns is required by law. The other is the one that stops the meeting from going quiet.
How do you judge whether your plan is adequate?
Read it against the building rather than against the Act. Six questions will tell a committee most of what it needs to know, and none of them require a consultant to answer.
If you want the wider version of this test, the Building Management Scorecard runs the same logic across compliance, assets, finances and communication, and returns a score and a report on where the gaps sit. It takes about three minutes.
Where did each cost figure come from, and when. If nobody can name the source, the figure is decoration.
When was each major asset last physically inspected, by whom, and what did they find. Not serviced. Inspected, with a condition recorded.
Which line items have carried the same number for more than three years. Those are the lines nobody has revisited, and they are where the gap lives.
Does the plan reach the end of its ten years with a positive balance without a special levy or a loan. If it doesn't, the plan isn't a plan, it is a schedule of future shocks.
What is missing from the list entirely. Lift controllers, pump seals, intercom head units, distribution boards, roof anchors and building management systems are the assets most often absent from a category-level plan, because they sit inside a category rather than on top of one.
What happens if the largest single item fails five years early. If the answer is a levy nobody can pay, the plan has a single point of failure and you have just found it.
What should a committee do before its next review?
Build the register first, then fill in the form. The form is a reporting format and it will take an afternoon. The register is the work, and it's what makes the form worth filling in. Do them in that order and the standard form becomes a genuine ten-year forecast. Do them in the reverse order and you have transcribed last decade's guesses into this decade's template.
Asset intelligence is the second pillar of The 90-Day CALM Framework™ for exactly this reason: Compliance first, Asset intelligence, Levies aligned, Managed communication. Levies can't be aligned to a building nobody has measured.
Committees running a scheme without a full-time manager on site carry this work themselves, which is the position most boutique buildings are in. The register is also the document that makes a handover survive a change of manager, and it is the first thing we build when a building comes to us.
If your building does have a manager, the register is one of the things you are entitled to ask them for. The Building Manager Accountability Checklist sets out what a committee should expect to be handed and how often. The Building Management Field Guide is written for the person doing the job rather than the person paying for it, which makes it the clearest statement available of the standard you are buying.
If your scheme has a lift, a fire system, a plant deck or any waterproofing over occupied space, the condition assessment behind those lines should be done by someone qualified to make it, and the cost figures should be tested against a current market rate rather than an inflated version of an old one. That's a job for an engineer or a quantity surveyor, and it is worth the fee.
There is a version of the next four years where the reform passes over your building without touching it, because the law permits that. There is another version where the deferral is the thing you use the time for.
We do not seek scale. We seek standards.