Trust account audit deadlines by state (2026-27)

If you hold other people’s money under a real estate, conveyancing, settlement or legal licence, somewhere in legislation there’s a date by which an independent auditor must examine your trust account and tell the regulator what they found. There is no national scheme — eight jurisdictions, eight sets of rules — and the differences are exactly where multi-state groups get caught.

Here’s the 2026-27 landscape for real estate and conveyancing licensees. Confirm your own dates with the regulator or in your engagement letter — rules move, and your licence category can shift the answer.

The table

Law practices run under separate legal-profession rules in each state — different examiner requirements, different dates — which is why law-practice external examinations are priced and scheduled as their own engagement.

The three traps in that table

Trap one: “done” is not “lodged”. In several states — NSW most prominently, where the auditor lodges through Fair Trading’s online portal — the obligation is only discharged when the auditor files the report. An audit PDF sitting in your inbox on 29 September is not compliance. Ask your auditor, explicitly, who lodges and when you’ll receive evidence that it happened.

Trap two: Queensland’s floating deadline. While the rest of the country crams into September, Queensland ties each agency’s audit period to its licence, with the report due four months after that period ends. Groups managed from interstate routinely misdiarise this. If you hold a QLD licence, the first job is confirming your audit month — not assuming June.

Trap three: WA’s second season. Western Australia audits the calendar year with a 31 March due date. An eastern-states group with a Perth office therefore has two audit seasons a year, and the March one lands in the middle of tax time when nobody is thinking about trust accounts.

What the auditor actually tests

Wherever you are, the substance is consistent: month-end three-way reconciliations (cash book, ledger, bank) done on time; receipts and disbursements traced and authorised; no ledger overdrawn; interest and unclaimed money handled per the rules; and the records kept in the form the legislation prescribes. The findings are consistent too — unreconciled months, stale cheques or unpresented transfers left to age, and “temporary” transfers between trust and general that a licensee will struggle to explain to a regulator no matter how innocent they were.

The management letter that comes with a good audit is where the value lives: it tells your property managers precisely what to tighten so next year’s audit is clean by construction.

One auditor, one calendar

Our trust-account audit service runs every jurisdiction online — records exported from Console, PropertyMe, VaultRE and the rest, one batched query round, the prescribed report lodged with your state’s regulator, and every licence in a group diarised on its own clock. Fixed fee per account, whichever state the office is in. For the audit season currently bearing down on you, the arithmetic is simple: booked in July, it’s paperwork; started in September, it’s a gamble on the queue.

Questions we get about this

General information only — it doesn’t consider your circumstances and isn’t financial product advice. Get advice on your own position before acting; that’s literally what we’re for.