Updates have been made to the heating, ventilation, and moisture ingress and drainage standards that allow for a more tailored approach to meeting the intent of the standards.

If your rental property already meets the existing standards, you will not need to do any extra work to comply with the standards.

You can read details of the changes on our changes to the healthy homes standards information page. 

Tenancy Services website content and PDF documents have been updated to include the changes. This is all available in our healthy homes section of the website.

 Summary of the changes

 Heating standard

The most significant change is a new heating formula, that applies for modern homes (dwellings) and relevant apartments. This reflects how these types of properties are better at retaining heat.

The heating assessment tool has been updated and can now calculate the required minimum heating capacity using both the new and original formulas.

An extended compliance timeframe (grace period) for the heating standard has been introduced. This is for properties that meet the criteria for and use the new heating formula.

Find out whether this applies to your property using our compliance timeframes decision tool.

 Other updates to the heating standard include:

• additional ways to comply with the heating standard
• extra allowances for existing heaters in situations where acceptable heating was installed prior to 1 July 2019.

Ventilation standard

Certain mechanical ventilation systems that continuously extracts air from kitchens and bathrooms to the outdoors now comply.

Moisture ingress and drainage standard

The changes clarify that landlords are not required to install alternative moisture barriers where it is not reasonably practicable to install a polythene barrier.

Read more about the healthy homes standards

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