Your team launches a national scratch-and-win campaign. Total prize pool: $8,000 — comfortably under New South Wales’ $10,000 threshold. No permits needed, right? Two weeks later, South Australia’s Consumer and Business Services gets in touch. Turns out, SA requires a licence for any instant-win promotion regardless of prize value.
This is the competition permit trap, and Australian brands fall into it constantly. The problem isn’t that compliance is complicated — it’s that most marketers assume national rules exist when every state plays by its own. Four jurisdictions require a permit or licence for games of chance. Four don’t. And the four that do have thresholds, definitions, and carve-outs that look nothing alike. Here’s what you actually need to know to run a national promotion without a regulatory headache.
Do You Need a Competition Permit in Australia?
You need a competition permit in Australia if your promotion is a game of chance — a prize draw, instant win, scratch-and-reveal, or spin-to-win — and it’s open to residents of New South Wales, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory, or the Northern Territory above each state’s prize threshold. A national promotion almost always crosses at least one of those thresholds, so for most brands the answer is yes.
Games of skill — where winners are chosen on merit or creativity, like a best-photo entry or a 25-words-or-less response — don’t require a permit anywhere in Australia. The catch is that the line between chance and skill isn’t where most people assume. A judged competition with a subjective panel is skill. A “random draw from all correct entries” is chance, even though entrants had to answer a question first. If there’s any random element in selecting the winner, regulators treat the whole thing as chance. Getting that classification wrong at the briefing stage is the first domino that knocks everything else over.
Which Australian States Require a Competition Permit?
Four jurisdictions require a permit or licence for a trade promotion that’s a game of chance: New South Wales, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory, and the Northern Territory. The other four — Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, and Tasmania — don’t require one, though they still impose conditions on how a promotion is run. The detail that catches people out is that each of the four permit states sets its own threshold and its own definitions, so the same campaign can be exempt in one state and illegal in another.
New South Wales requires an Authority to Conduct a Trade Promotion Lottery when the total prize pool for a single game of chance exceeds $10,000 and the promotion is open to NSW residents (NSW Government, trade promotions). Since the Community Gaming Regulation 2020, NSW runs a duration-based authority model: rather than applying every time, you hold a single 1, 3, or 5-year authority and run as many qualifying promotions as you like within it, provided you notify NSW Fair Trading of the gaming rules at least 10 working days before each promotion. Responsibility for trade promotions has moved from Liquor & Gaming NSW to NSW Fair Trading. One restriction worth flagging for liquor brands: no more than 20 litres of alcohol at 20% ABV or below, and no more than 5 litres above 20% ABV, can be awarded per promotion to NSW residents. For the current authority fees, check the Service NSW application page rather than relying on a figure that may have moved.
South Australia is where the most expensive assumption lives. SA’s threshold for a standard prize draw is $5,000, but any promotion using printed scratch-and-win, break-open, or similar instant-win ticket mechanics requires a Trade Promotion Lottery Licence regardless of prize value (SA.GOV.AU, trade promotions). A $500 scratch-and-win activation in a single SA store still needs a licence. SA splits this into two licence types — Major Trade Promotions (prize pool over $5,000, no instant tickets) and Instant Prize Trade Promotions (any value, using scratch or break-open mechanics) — each with its own pathway through Consumer and Business Services under the Lotteries Act 2019. Standard applications take at least 14 business days to assess, with a premium fee for a five-business-day turnaround. Miss this distinction and you’re operating illegally even when your prize pool is modest.
The Australian Capital Territory sets the lowest bar in the country. A permit isn’t required where the total prize value doesn’t exceed $3,000; above that, you need a Trade Promotion Lottery permit approved by the ACT Gambling and Racing Commission before the promotion is advertised or run (ACT Gambling and Racing Commission). For a national promotion with any real prize pool, this threshold is almost always triggered. The ACT also requires winners to be notified in writing within 21 days of the draw, and prizes valued at $1,000 or more to be published in a Commission-approved format such as the promoter’s website.
The Northern Territory requires a Permit to Conduct a Trade Lottery for a game of chance with a total prize pool over $5,000, administered by Licensing NT under the Gaming Control Act (NT.GOV.AU, trade lotteries). It offers a practical shortcut, though: if you already hold a permit for the same national promotion in another state or territory, you don’t need a separate NT permit. In effect, once your NSW, SA, or ACT paperwork is sorted, the NT is usually covered.
What About Victoria, Queensland, WA, and Tasmania?
These four don’t require a competition permit, but “no permit” doesn’t mean “no rules.” Promotions in these states still have to comply with the Australian Consumer Law, and each imposes conditions on how a trade promotion is operated — record-keeping, fair conduct of the draw, and honest representation of the odds. The mistake brands make is reading “no permit required” as “anything goes.” It isn’t. The ACCC can pursue misleading or deceptive conduct under federal law regardless of whether a state permit was needed, and that federal layer applies to all eight jurisdictions at once.
How Do Competition Permits Work for a National Promotion?
This is where brands most often get burned. A national promotion open to all Australians has to comply with every state at the same time, which in practice means meeting the requirements of the most restrictive jurisdiction and holding permits from every state that needs one. For a typical national game of chance with a prize pool over $10,000, that usually means NSW, SA, ACT, and — unless the interstate exemption applies — the NT. Your terms and conditions have to satisfy all eight jurisdictions simultaneously, and the free-entry requirement (consumers must be able to enter without buying anything) applies nationally under the Australian Consumer Law.
Trevor Services manages exactly this complexity for brands running national promotional campaigns. When you’re coordinating permits and terms across eight jurisdictions, having a fulfilment partner that handles the permit logistics means your marketing team can stay on the creative and the strategy rather than chasing state regulators.
What Does Non-Compliance Actually Cost?
The permit fees themselves are modest — a few hundred dollars per state. The penalties for getting it wrong are not. Under the Australian Consumer Law, the maximum penalty for a corporation that breaches the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 is the greater of $50 million, three times the benefit obtained, or 30 per cent of the corporation’s adjusted turnover during the breach period (ACCC, penalties and remedies).
Even short of a maximum penalty, the real cost is usually operational and reputational: a voided promotion that has to be re-run, entries refunded, or a public correction issued. Consumers remember the brand that botched its competition. Nobody remembers which brand had perfectly filed permits — which is rather the point of filing them.
How Do You Build Permits Into Campaign Planning?
The brands that handle competition permits well don’t treat compliance as a final step; they build it in from the brief. In practice that comes down to a few habits. Decide the mechanic early, because the entire permit question turns on whether the promotion is chance or skill — a late switch from a prize draw to a skill-based competition cascades through everything from T&Cs to the media plan. Apply early, allowing three to four weeks rather than the minimum 10-to-14 business days, particularly for SA during peak promotional seasons. Take the multi-year authority where it’s on offer, as NSW’s duration-based model removes one jurisdiction’s paperwork for years at a time. And get the terms and conditions right the first time, since every trade promotion needs comprehensive T&Cs that satisfy all the jurisdictions you’re entering.
This is the kind of structural decision Trudy, Trevor’s predictive promotional intelligence platform, is built to pressure-test — flagging the compliance implications of a mechanic before the creative is locked, rather than after. Compliance built into the workflow, not bolted on at the end.
The Advantage Most Brands Overlook
Here’s what most permit guides won’t tell you: compliance isn’t only risk mitigation, it’s a head start. Brands with their permit framework already sorted can launch faster, run nationally without carving out states, and avoid the costly mid-campaign pivots that happen when legal spots a problem a fortnight after launch. The brands running the most ambitious promotional campaigns in Australia aren’t the ones ignoring permit complexity — they’re the ones who’ve already done the work, and that preparation is what lets them be bold.
Planning your next promotional campaign and want compliance handled properly from day one? We’d be happy to talk it through.
