If something breaks while you are house sitting in Australia, no rule automatically makes you pay for it. Who wears the cost turns on three things: whether what happened was accidental damage, negligence or ordinary wear and tear, what the homeowner's insurance covers and what excess applies, and what the two of you agreed before the keys changed hands. On a non-monetary sit, where nobody is paid, the third one carries most of the weight, because the consumer law built around paid services does not reach a private arrangement between two individuals in the same way.
The fear underneath the question is worth naming, because it is specific. A glass cooktop cracks under a heavy pan. A washing machine hose lets go and floods a laundry in Mandurah. A benchtop chips. Or the dog that has been fine for six days stops eating on the seventh, and you are half an hour from an after hours clinic with someone else's animal in the back seat. Nobody wants to be the person who owes four figures for an appliance they did not choose, and nobody wants to be the person who did not notice.
General information only
This article is general information about how these situations usually play out and what to agree in advance. It is not legal, insurance or veterinary advice, and Sitterly does not provide insurance, hold funds, supervise sits or mediate disputes. For a specific situation, speak to your insurer, your own solicitor or your veterinarian.
Three different things get called damage, and they are settled differently
Most arguments after a sit are really arguments about which of three categories something belongs in. Naming the category early is what stops a broken thing becoming a broken relationship.
| What happened | How it shows up on a sit | What usually decides who wears the cost |
|---|---|---|
| Accidental damage | A dropped glass on a tiled floor in Semaphore, a cracked induction cooktop, a stain on a rug, a chipped benchtop. Ordinary care was taken and it happened anyway. | Whether the owner holds accidental damage cover, the size of the excess, and what the two of you agreed beforehand. Very often the excess is larger than the item. |
| Negligence | A bath left running, a gate left unlatched, a dog let off lead against clear instructions, a heater left on beside a curtain. | Whether reasonable care was taken. That is a legal question, not a platform question, and it is the category where a sitter is most likely to be asked to contribute. |
| Wear, failure and age | A fourteen year old hot water system that gives up in week two, a fridge seal that finally fails, a fence panel down after a storm in Wagga Wagga. | Nothing the sitter did. It is a maintenance or insurance matter for the owner, and the arrival photographs are what prove it. |
Those labels are practical, not a legal test. Where the line falls in a real case depends on the facts and on the law of the state the house sits in, which is a question for a solicitor rather than for a blog or a marketplace. What the three categories do is give two people a shared vocabulary at the moment they most need one.
Australian Consumer Law reaches a sitting business, and largely not a free exchange
Consumer Protection WA, in a Commissioner's blog on house sitting published 9 April 2025, tells homeowners to use a registered business so their rights are protected under the Australian Consumer Law, and says businesses providing house or pet sitting services must meet consumer guarantees, meaning you should expect the sitter to look after your home and pets with due care and skill. The ACCC states the same guarantee in general terms: service providers must carry out all services using an acceptable level of care and skill, and must take reasonable steps to avoid causing loss or damage.
Read the first word of that again. Businesses. A non-monetary house sit is not a business supplying a service to a consumer. Nobody is paid for the sit, no invoice is issued, and on Sitterly there is no per-booking commission either. So the consumer guarantee route a homeowner would use against a paid sitting company is generally not available against a private individual who sat for free, and by the same token there is no statutory service standard hanging over that sitter's head.
What remains is the ordinary expectation of taking reasonable care, and whatever the two of you agreed. That is not a hole so much as a different set of rules, and it is why a written agreement does more work on a non-monetary sit than on a paid one. Our guide to what belongs in an Australian house sitting agreement sets out the clauses that decide who wears what.
The excess often costs more than the thing that broke
Homeowners tend to assume insurance quietly absorbs a breakage. Often it does not, and the reasons are published. ASIC's Moneysmart states that most contents insurance does not include cover for accidental damage, and that it may be worth adding if you want cover for mishaps such as staining a couch or smashing a vase. It also explains that contents insurance responds to defined or insured events, and that the excess is the amount you pay when you make a claim.
Put hypothetical numbers to it, because the arithmetic is the point rather than the figures. Say a replacement cooktop and installation in Toowoomba comes to fourteen hundred dollars. With no accidental damage cover on the policy, there is no claim to make at all. With that cover and a one thousand dollar excess, the claim is worth four hundred dollars and may lift next year's premium. That is why a cracked cooktop almost always ends up as a conversation between two people rather than an insurance claim, and why the conversation goes far better when both of them already knew the numbers.
One more exclusion is worth both sides knowing. Consumer Protection WA warns that many policies carry exclusions for deliberate damage and theft caused by people lawfully invited onto your property, sitters and their guests included, and tells homeowners to ask their insurer whether cover can be modified for someone living in the home. An insurer treats an accident and a deliberate act very differently. Our guide to home insurance with a house sitter staying sets out the questions a homeowner should put to their insurer, and pet sitting insurance in Australia covers what a sitter can and cannot buy.
Public liability, the product a paid sitter would look at, is described by business.gov.au as covering you if someone dies, gets injured or has their property damaged because of your negligence. It is a commercial product built for a business, it is priced for one, and most people sitting in exchange for accommodation do not hold it.
A pet getting sick is not the same as a pet being harmed
Animals get sick on their own schedule. A cat with a urinary blockage, a dog that bloats overnight, an older animal whose kidneys were already failing quietly: none of those are created by the person minding them, and the standard a sitter is held to is not prevention. It is noticing, and acting.
Australian animal welfare law attaches a duty of care to whoever has the animal at the time. Queensland's guidance on who counts as a person in charge covers anyone who has custody of the animal, including care or control of it, and every state and territory runs its own version of that duty. So for the dates of the sit, a sitter in Ipswich or Ingleburn carries a real obligation to get an unwell animal help. What does not transfer is the decision. The Australian Veterinary Association's contextualised care policy describes veterinarians respecting owners' legal role as decision makers providing consent, so the clinic will look for the owner, not for the person holding the lead.
Which makes the owner's preparation the thing that decides how this goes. The RSPCA's guidance on leaving a cat while you travel says to make sure the animal will have access to veterinary care while you are away, to provide your veterinarian's contact details to the carer, and that the animal's health and wellbeing should be checked daily. Give the sitter the regular clinic, the after hours clinic, a spending limit and a backup person who can decide, and most of the panic is gone before it starts. Our guide to who authorises and pays an emergency vet bill goes through each of those.
The worst case is the one nobody says out loud. An animal can die during a sit, of something already there or something nobody could have seen coming, and the sitter is left holding grief that is not theirs and a phone call they do not know how to make. Make it early, and make it factual: what you saw, when you saw it, what you did, and who you rang. A sitter who acted promptly and wrote it down stands somewhere completely different from one who waited to see whether it improved overnight.
Do not wait for a reply before you act
If an animal is in obvious distress, ring the vet first and the owner second. A written authority and a spending limit exist so that nobody has to choose between the animal and the owner's permission at eleven at night.
The conversation to have before the owner leaves
Five questions, asked out loud at the handover, remove almost every version of this problem. They take ten minutes, and they are far easier to ask before anything has happened than afterwards.
| Ask this | Why it matters | What a good answer sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| What is already broken, marked or temperamental? | A pre-existing chip is the single most common thing to get blamed on a sitter | A walk through on arrival, photographed, sent in the message thread the same day |
| Do you have accidental damage cover, and what is the excess? | It decides whether a claim exists at all, before anyone argues about fault | A figure the owner has actually looked up in the policy, not a guess |
| What do you want me to do if I break something? | The worst part of a breakage is not knowing whether to say anything | Tell me the same day and we will sort it out, agreed in writing before the sit starts |
| Which vet, what spending limit, and who decides if I cannot reach you? | An unwell animal will not wait for a time zone | A named clinic, a named after hours clinic, a dollar figure and a backup person who has said yes |
| What is my limit on the house itself? | A helpful sitter with a spanner can turn a leak into a flood | Ring the plumber we use, do not attempt the repair, here is the number |
Put the answers in the message thread rather than leaving them in a phone call. On Sitterly that thread is where the arrangement lives, and how Sitterly works explains what the platform does and does not do around it. Sitterly supports the connection. Homeowners and sitters remain responsible for their own arrangements, which is precisely why the record the two of you make together is the protection you have.
Photograph on arrival, not on departure
Ten minutes of photographs on the first afternoon, including everything already scratched, stained or cracked, settles nearly every later disagreement about what was there before. Send them to the owner the same day so the date sits on the record.
If the money cannot be agreed, this is where it goes
Start with each other, in writing, on the day. Most breakages are settled by a sitter offering something before being asked and an owner accepting less than the full cost, and that outcome is far more likely when both sides already knew the excess and the policy position.
- Raise it the same day, with photographs, in the platform message thread rather than by text, so the record carries a date.
- Offer rather than wait to be asked, and put a figure on it. A partial contribution offered on day one lands very differently from a full one negotiated in week three.
- Keep every quote, invoice and message. If it does end up somewhere formal, that record is the case.
- Theft or deliberate damage is a police matter, not a marketplace one. Report it to the police first.
Know what a platform can and cannot do before you lean on it. Sitterly provides a Report function and can act on conduct that breaches its community guidelines, which is a conduct process rather than a compensation process. Sitterly is not a party to your arrangement, holds no funds for the sit, provides no insurance and does not mediate financial disputes. No Australian house sitting platform does that work either.
The ACCC says it does not resolve individual complaints and points consumers to their state or territory consumer protection agency, sometimes called consumer affairs or fair trading, which can provide information about your rights and options and may help negotiate a resolution between you and a business. Note that last word again. Where the other side is a private individual rather than a business, that path narrows, and the next step is your own solicitor or a community legal centre in your state.
One question this article does not answer
Whether a live in sitter acquires any occupancy or tenancy right under state residential tenancy law is a separate legal question and outside what this article covers. Take it to your state or territory fair trading or consumer affairs agency, or to your own solicitor.
Common questions about house sitter liability in Australia
- Am I liable if I break something while house sitting?
- No rule makes a sitter automatically liable. In practice it depends on whether reasonable care was taken, what the homeowner's policy covers and what excess applies, and what the two of you agreed before the sit. Where a sitter is paid and operating as a business, consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law also require services to be carried out with an acceptable level of care and skill. For a specific situation, get your own legal advice.
- What happens if a pet gets sick or dies while I am sitting?
- Contact the vet immediately and the owner as soon as you can, then write down what you observed, when, what you did and who you rang. Illness and sudden death are not automatically anybody's fault. Australian animal welfare law asks a person in charge to get an unwell animal help rather than to guarantee an outcome, and the owner remains the vet's client and the decision maker.
- Does the homeowner's insurance cover damage a house sitter causes?
- Only their insurer can answer that. Moneysmart notes most contents insurance does not include accidental damage unless it is added, and Consumer Protection WA warns that many policies exclude deliberate damage and theft by people lawfully invited onto the property. The homeowner should ask before travelling, and get the answer in writing.
- Should a house sitter pay for a broken appliance?
- Sometimes, and it is far easier when it was agreed in advance. Ask at the handover what the owner wants to happen if something breaks, find out the excess, and write the answer down. An offer made on the day usually settles it without anyone needing to work out who was strictly at fault.
- Does Sitterly cover damage or step in if there is a dispute?
- No. Sitterly does not provide insurance, hold funds for the sit, supervise sits or mediate financial disputes. Sitterly supports the connection, and homeowners and sitters remain responsible for their own arrangements. A Report function exists for conduct issues.
Create a sitter profile
Homeowners pick the sitter who asks the awkward questions first, because that is the person who has clearly done this before. Create a sitter profile, say what you are comfortable looking after, and open your next handover with the five questions above.
