Provider terms: what the law asks of your standard contract

Business & company · AU

For service providers — what Australian Consumer Law means for the terms you offer customers, after the 2023 unfair-contract-terms changes.

If you sell services on your own standard terms, two pieces of law shape what those terms may say:

Consumer guarantees are non-negotiable. Your services must be provided with due care and skill, be fit for any purpose the customer told you about, and be supplied within a reasonable time where none was agreed. A term that pretends to exclude these does not work — the guarantees are automatic. Business customers are covered too when the purchase is under $100,000 including GST or the service is of a kind commonly bought for personal or household use.

Unfair terms are banned, with penalties. Since 9 November 2023, proposing, using or relying on an unfair term in a standard form contract is prohibited. Small-business customers are protected if they have fewer than 100 employees or under $10 million turnover. Terms most at risk are the one-sided ones: unilateral price or scope changes, one-way termination, blanket liability exclusions.

What to do: keep your terms short and balanced; make sure anything one-sided has a genuine business justification and a balancing term; and have a lawyer review your standard contract once rather than defending it later. Reviewing a standard-form contract against the unfair-terms test is lawyer work — this guide tells you what the test cares about, not whether your document passes it.

This is legal information, not legal advice.