How often should termite inspections happen?

A termite inspection should be carried out at least every 12 months, and every six months where the property is high risk. That is the maximum interval AS 3660 recommends, and it is the interval almost every warranty in the industry is written against.

High risk is a judgement about the specific property, and the factors are ones a timber pest report already records: a history of termite activity on the site or next door, high local termite pressure, subfloor moisture or poor ventilation, drainage that holds water against the building, timber in contact with soil, concealed or restricted access, and construction that would make a breach hard to see. A property carrying several of those does not get an annual inspection simply because annual is the default.

The interval is a maximum, not a target. Twelve months and three weeks is not about annual if the warranty says annual, and the client will discover the difference at the worst possible moment.

The inspection interval is a condition of the warranty, not a recommendation attached to it. Termite management systems are warranted on the basis that they will be inspected and maintained; a system nobody has looked at for eighteen months is a system nobody can say is intact, and the warranty terms reflect that.

The practical consequence is that a missed inspection can void cover — including cover the client paid a premium for and has been relying on without thinking about it since. That is a conversation nobody wants to have, and it is entirely preventable by a reminder that fires on time.

Record the interval as an attribute of the property on the day the system is installed, and set the reminder then. An interval that lives only in the body of a PDF report is an interval that will be missed. This is simultaneously the client's protection, your recurring revenue and your own liability exposure — which is a good reason to treat re-inspection scheduling as a core business process rather than as admin.

Two warranties usually sit over a termite management system and they have different terms. The installer's warranty — yours — typically runs one to two years and is renewed at each annual inspection. The manufacturer's warranty sits behind the product, can run considerably longer, and on some schemes carries a substantial sum insured.

Both are conditional on the inspection regime. Manufacturer schemes generally require the annual inspection to be carried out by a licensed operator and documented, and many require the installation and each subsequent inspection to be registered with the manufacturer inside a set window. Miss the registration step and the cover may never have started at all. Read the scheme rules for each product you install — these are the manufacturer's terms, not the standard's, and they differ.

Be precise with clients about which warranty covers what. A homeowner who believes they hold a large manufacturer-backed warranty when what actually lapsed was a registration step is a complaint waiting to happen. Set the conditions out in the termite management proposal and agreement, in the same document that prices the work, so the client agreed to them in writing.

Bait and monitoring stations are checked far more often than the property is inspected, and how often depends on what the system is currently doing.

Station checks do not replace the annual inspection. They tell you what is happening at the stations; the annual inspection tells you what is happening at the building. A programme that services stations diligently and lets the property inspection lapse has the warranty exposure of a property nobody inspects at all.

Cadences shift with the season and with the last result. Build the schedule so that an active reading pulls the next visit forward automatically, rather than leaving it to whoever gets round to reading the report.

Every station visit should produce a reading against that specific station, not a note against the visit as a whole.

A cumulative per-station timeline is what turns individual readings into a diagnosis. Consumption rising steadily at stations four, five and six along the eastern boundary while everything else stays quiet is a directional signal about where the colony is; the same information spread across six visit reports is invisible.

Each station is an asset with an identifier and a mapped location, and the reading belongs to the asset rather than to the visit. A note saying all stations checked, two active cannot be compared to last month, cannot be plotted, and cannot be handed to the next technician. Twenty-four numbered readings can be. Photograph anything unusual with the station number in frame — a photograph that cannot be attributed to a station is a photograph of a garden.

The timeline also does the commercial work. A homeowner three months into a baiting programme with nothing visible to show for it is a homeowner about to question the invoice; a chart of consumption per station over those months answers that far better than reassurance, and it makes the eventual quiet period read as success rather than as nothing happening. At resale or on a warranty claim, the same history is the evidence that the system was serviced at the intervals claimed.

Treat the next inspection date as a scheduled obligation from the moment the current one is completed. The cycle that works is unglamorous: complete the inspection, issue the report, set the next due date from the interval the report states, and let a reminder fire far enough ahead that the client has time to book.

The 12-month and six-month intervals come from AS 3660, a copyrighted work sold by Standards Australia. The current edition is the authoritative source, and this guide does not reproduce it. Warranty terms are the installer's and the manufacturer's own and vary from scheme to scheme — read the rules for the product you install.

This is general information, not legal or engineering advice. Never take a chemical's expected life, application rate or re-entry period from anything but the current APVMA-approved label, and confirm licensing and record-keeping obligations with your state regulator.