Do you need a permit to restump?
Yes, always, and it is not a technicality you can quietly skip. Restumping is building work under Victorian law, which means a registered building surveyor, an engineer’s footing design and mandatory inspections. Here is exactly what that involves in Greater Shepparton, what it costs, and what happens when someone skips it.
Restumping is building work. Full stop.
Restumping and reblocking are building work under the Building Act 1993 and the Building Regulations 2018, and they are not on the list of exempt minor works. A building permit must be issued before the first stump comes out. That is true whether the house is in Shepparton, Mooroopna, Tatura or out at Numurkah, whether it is a full restump or a partial one, and whether the work is done by a registered builder or by an owner-builder. Any contractor who tells you a restump does not need a permit is telling you something that is simply not correct, and the liability lands on your title, not theirs.
People get confused because a fence or a small deck can be exempt. Those exemptions are about scale and about structure. You are replacing every load-bearing element between your house and the ground, on soil that moves 20mm to 60mm a year. There was never a version of the rules where that was exempt.
Council or private surveyor?
Either can. In Victoria a building permit is issued by a registered building surveyor, and you may use the municipal building surveyor at Greater Shepparton City Council or engage a private registered building surveyor. Most restumps in this district go through a private surveyor, simply because turnaround tends to be quicker and they will attend the mandatory inspections on a builder’s schedule. The permit is legally identical either way. Whoever issues it also carries out the inspections and issues the certificate of final inspection at the end.
What the surveyor needs before they issue it.
- An engineer’s footing design to AS 2870, sized for your actual soil class, with computations. This is the document the whole permit rests on.
- A site soil classification, because a Class M design and a Class H1 design are not the same footing and Greater Shepparton has both.
- A copy of title and the owner’s consent to the application.
- The builder’s VBA registration, or a Certificate of Consent if you are proceeding as an owner-builder.
- A domestic building insurance certificate where the contract price is over $16,000, which most full restumps are.
- Drawings or a scope showing stump layout, spacings, material and the extent of the work.
Realistically that is one to three weeks from the go-ahead to a permit in hand, and nothing happens on site during it. The engineer needs the soil information, the surveyor needs the engineer, and both of them go quiet over Christmas. It is the single most under-estimated part of every restumping timeline, and it is why we start the paperwork the day a quote is accepted rather than the week the crew is free.
What it costs.
The building permit itself runs about $600 to $1,400 in this district depending on the value of the work and the surveyor, and the engineer’s footing computations another $500 to $1,200. Call it $1,100 to $2,600 of compliance on a job that might total $14,000. We include both on every quote as separate line items rather than burying them, so you can see exactly what you are paying for and compare quotes honestly. The full rate card is on our pricing page.
When planning gets involved too.
For a straight restump at the same floor level, almost never. Planning and building are separate systems, and restumping does not change the footprint, the height or the use, so it usually does not trigger the Greater Shepparton Planning Scheme. Two situations change that. If the property sits in a Heritage Overlay, works to the building can need planning consent even when they look like maintenance. And if you are raising the house, which owners on the Goulburn floodplain sometimes consider after a flood, land subject to inundation controls and floor-level requirements come into play and that is a planning conversation before it is a building one.
That second one matters more here than in most Victorian towns. Shepparton and Mooroopna sit on the Goulburn floodplain and a meaningful number of properties carry inundation controls. Restumping at the existing height is a building permit and nothing more. Restumping and taking the floor up 600mm while you are under there is a different project with a different approval path, and it is worth knowing that before you start planning it in your head. Check the property’s planning certificate rather than assuming either way.
The footing inspection is the one that matters.
The permit itself sets them out, and for a restump they are typically a footing inspection and a final inspection. The footing inspection is the important one: the building surveyor attends with the holes open, before any concrete is placed, and confirms the excavations match the engineer’s design for depth and bearing. That is the single point where a shortcut on footing depth gets caught, which is exactly why it exists. At the end the surveyor issues a certificate of final inspection, and that certificate is the document you want in your file for any future sale.
Think about what that inspection actually protects you from. The cheapest way to underbid a restump in Shepparton is to dig shallow, because depth is time and time is the cost. A stump founded inside the active clay zone works perfectly on handover day and fails in three summers. The footing inspection is an independent professional standing over open holes with the engineer’s numbers in hand. It is the reason a permitted restump and an unpermitted restump are different products, not different paperwork. The same logic applies to underpinning, where pier depth is the entire job.
What an unpermitted restump costs you later.
It becomes the owner’s problem, and it does not expire quietly. There is no certificate of final inspection, so there is no evidence the footings were ever checked against an engineer’s design. A council can issue a building notice or a building order requiring the work be made compliant, which can mean opening excavations back up. It has to be dealt with at sale, where a purchaser’s conveyancer will ask why structural work has no permit. And an insurer assessing a later claim on that part of the structure has a clean reason to decline. Retrospective approval is possible but it is slower, dearer and entirely at the surveyor’s discretion.
Work the example. A cash job saves you maybe $2,000 in permit and engineering on a $14,000 restump. Five years later you list the house, the purchaser’s inspector notes recent stump work, the conveyancer asks for the permit and there isn’t one. Now you are explaining unapproved structural work to a buyer holding a contract, with no engineer’s design to point at and no certificate to produce. That $2,000 has become a price negotiation you cannot win. Our contractor checklist and our owner-builder guide both come back to the same point: the permit is the cheap part.
Permit questions from Greater Shepparton owners.
Do I need a building permit to restump a house in Shepparton?
Yes. Restumping and reblocking are building work under the Building Act 1993 and the Building Regulations 2018, and they are not on the list of exempt minor works. A building permit must be issued before the first stump comes out. That is true whether the house is in Shepparton, Mooroopna, Tatura or out at Numurkah, whether it is a full restump or a partial one, and whether the work is done by a registered builder or by an owner-builder. Any contractor who tells you a restump does not need a permit is telling you something that is simply not correct, and the liability lands on your title, not theirs.
Does Greater Shepparton City Council issue the permit, or a private surveyor?
Either can. In Victoria a building permit is issued by a registered building surveyor, and you may use the municipal building surveyor at Greater Shepparton City Council or engage a private registered building surveyor. Most restumps in this district go through a private surveyor, simply because turnaround tends to be quicker and they will attend the mandatory inspections on a builder’s schedule. The permit is legally identical either way. Whoever issues it also carries out the inspections and issues the certificate of final inspection at the end.
Do I need a planning permit to restump as well?
For a straight restump at the same floor level, almost never. Planning and building are separate systems, and restumping does not change the footprint, the height or the use, so it usually does not trigger the Greater Shepparton Planning Scheme. Two situations change that. If the property sits in a Heritage Overlay, works to the building can need planning consent even when they look like maintenance. And if you are raising the house, which owners on the Goulburn floodplain sometimes consider after a flood, land subject to inundation controls and floor-level requirements come into play and that is a planning conversation before it is a building one.
What inspections happen during a restump?
The permit itself sets them out, and for a restump they are typically a footing inspection and a final inspection. The footing inspection is the important one: the building surveyor attends with the holes open, before any concrete is placed, and confirms the excavations match the engineer’s design for depth and bearing. That is the single point where a shortcut on footing depth gets caught, which is exactly why it exists. At the end the surveyor issues a certificate of final inspection, and that certificate is the document you want in your file for any future sale.
What happens if a restump was done without a permit?
It becomes the owner’s problem, and it does not expire quietly. There is no certificate of final inspection, so there is no evidence the footings were ever checked against an engineer’s design. A council can issue a building notice or a building order requiring the work be made compliant, which can mean opening excavations back up. It has to be dealt with at sale, where a purchaser’s conveyancer will ask why structural work has no permit. And an insurer assessing a later claim on that part of the structure has a clean reason to decline. Retrospective approval is possible but it is slower, dearer and entirely at the surveyor’s discretion.
Permitted restumping across the municipality.
Permit and engineering included, itemised.
We lodge the permit, supply the engineer’s AS 2870 footing design and book the inspections. It appears as its own line on your quote, not buried in a total.