The NCC’s Dated Reference Dilemma
From 1 May 2026, Victoria is moving to National Construction Code (NCC) 2025. Simply put, NCC 2025 will apply to new building work in Victoria, with transition arrangements in place for projects where substantial design progress has already been made [1].
One interesting revision is around dated references. Not many people outside the compliance and building industry care about this, but the NCC usually does not refer to the latest Australian standard. Instead, it generally points to a specific edition of a standard. That is a small administrative detail, but in practice it decides which document a designer, builder or certifier can rely on for a Deemed-to-Satisfy (DTS) pathway.
This is where the dilemma starts. If Standards Australia publishes a newer version of a standard after the NCC has adopted an older dated edition, that newer version is not automatically available as a DTS pathway. The newer version may have clearer wording, better test methods, updated assumptions or even fixes to problems in the older edition. Still, if the NCC has not recognised it, the industry remains tied to the older reference for compliance purposes. An NCC-referenced standard may appear as “superseded” in an online standards database, while still being the correct edition for NCC compliance [2].
When we consider that the Australian Standards themselves can take years to develop and update, this becomes a frustrating bureaucracy. For a standard to absorb new technologies, it needs sufficient real-world evidence, committee review and industry consensus. But by the time a new technology has enough field evidence to influence a standard, it may already have gone through years of research and development. Then, the NCC adoption cycle can add another delay on top of that. It becomes a chain of delays that discourages risk capital, and therefore slows innovation.
Performance Solutions are meant to help with this, and they genuinely do. Without them, performance-based codes would be much less useful. However, those solutions come at a cost. Say for a new building system, a Performance Solution can mean fire testing, acoustic testing, engineering judgement, expert reports, project-specific details, peer review and then all work on repeat when the next project is slightly (or significantly) different. It is not a cheap shortcut. In many cases, it becomes the R&D pathway itself.
This is where the Alternative Referenced Document Register (ARDR) in NCC 2025 can potentially become useful. The new ARDR mechanism gives practitioners the option to use more recent editions of referenced standards for DTS compliance where those alternatives are recognised [3]. If it works well, it may give the industry a more practical bridge between fixed dated references and newer technical documents. It may also allow faster adoption of new technologies into buildings.
I am not sure yet whether it will work as such. This industry has a very strong ability to slow things down, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for no reasons. For anyone working on new products in lower-carbon materials, advanced building systems or alternative construction technologies, the ARDR is worth paying attention to.