Termite damage and insurance in Cairns - read this before you need to.
Your home insurance does not cover termite damage. It never has. What catches Cairns owners out is the second half of that sentence - a termite-eaten post can also cost you a cyclone claim you thought was watertight.
It is not fine print. It is a general exclusion.
Effectively never. Every mainstream Australian home building policy carries an exclusion for damage caused by termites, vermin, insects or gradual deterioration, and it sits in the general exclusions rather than buried in an endorsement. The reasoning insurers give is that termite damage is not a sudden, accidental, unforeseen event - it is a slow process that a reasonable owner is expected to prevent through maintenance and inspection. Whether that is fair is beside the point on claim day. If a Cairns home has structural timber eaten out by Coptotermes or Mastotermes, the owner pays for the repair, not the insurer. The number of Cairns homeowners who discover this at the worst possible moment is the reason this page exists.
Read your own Product Disclosure Statement rather than taking our word for it. Search the PDF for ‘termites’, ‘vermin’ and ‘gradual’. You will find all three, usually within a page of each other, usually in a list alongside rust, mould, wear and tear and rising damp. That grouping tells you exactly how the industry classifies it: not as a disaster, as a maintenance failure.
What might actually be claimable.
The consequences sometimes are, even though the termite damage itself is not. The classic example is a ceiling collapse: if a termite-weakened ceiling batten lets go and the falling plaster wrecks your furniture, the timber is excluded but the resulting damage to contents can be claimable as a sudden event under some policies. Similarly, if termite damage causes a water pipe to fail and the escaping water floods a room, the water damage may be covered while the timber is not. These are narrow, argued-line-by-line outcomes and depend entirely on your PDS wording. Do not build a plan around them - treat them as a lucky partial recovery, not a strategy.
How termites can sink a cyclone claim.
Yes, and in a cyclone region this is the part that catches people. Home policies carry a general maintenance condition requiring the insured to keep the building in sound repair. If a Cairns home loses a verandah roof in a cyclone and the assessor finds the post that failed was hollowed out by termites, the insurer can reasonably argue the loss was caused or materially contributed to by pre-existing, undetected, unmaintained termite damage rather than by the wind. You are then arguing causation with an assessor holding photographs of galleries inside your post. An annual AS 3660.2 inspection report is the single cheapest document that shuts that argument down.
This matters more here than almost anywhere else in the country because of where we sit. Cairns is in wind region C under AS 1170.2, which means every structural connection on your home was engineered on the assumption the timber holding it would still be timber. A tie-down bolt through a bearer is only as good as the bearer. Mastotermes will hollow that bearer while leaving a two-millimetre veneer of intact surface timber that looks perfect from the outside and passes a casual glance from a torch. The engineering assumes solid section; the termite has quietly removed the section; the cyclone finds out first.
So the value of an inspection record in Cairns is not only that it finds termites. It is that it proves, year by year, dated and in writing, that you did the reasonable thing. When an assessor is looking for a reason to reduce a wind claim, a folder of AS 3660.2 reports is the difference between a conversation and an argument. Detail on what that inspection covers is at AS 3660 termite inspections in Cairns.
What you actually pay when nobody else will.
Minor and caught early - a couple of skirtings, an architrave, a door jamb, a bearer end - is $2,000 to $8,000 including the treatment. Moderate structural work where wall frames, a bearer run or roof battens need replacing typically lands between $15,000 and $45,000 because it involves stripping linings, propping, a builder, and often a chippy and a sparky. Severe Mastotermes damage on an older Cairns home where the frame is compromised across multiple walls has no upper bound worth quoting - we have seen assessments beyond $80,000, and at that point demolition sometimes wins on numbers. Every dollar of that is yours.
Put a real property against those numbers. A 1990s lowset home in Edmonton, timber frame on a slab, garden beds against the western wall, no inspection since the owners bought it in 2013. Coptotermes enters through a slab penetration behind the bathroom, works up the frame, and is found in 2026 when a tiler pushes a screwdriver through what should have been a stud. Wall frame across two rooms, one bearer, the bathroom rebuild that follows: about $38,000. Insurer contribution: nil.
Against that, thirteen years of annual AS 3660.2 inspections at $235 to $380 each comes to roughly $4,000. A Termidor SC retrofit barrier at $1,500 to $5,000 renewed once across those thirteen years adds maybe another $6,000. Call the whole prevention program $10,000 over thirteen years, against a $38,000 repair that the inspections would very likely have caught at the $2,000-to-$8,000 stage. That is the entire argument, and it is arithmetic rather than sales. Bands are on the pricing guide, options on barrier types, and the treatment side of it on termite control.
Warranties are not insurance - know which one you have.
Not from your home insurer, but from two other places. First, a properly installed barrier from a QBCC-licensed installer usually carries a product and workmanship warranty from the installer and the manufacturer - that is a contractual remedy against the company, not an insurance claim, and it requires you to have kept the annual inspection current. Second, some baiting systems, Sentricon among them, are sold with a manufacturer-backed damage warranty tied to unbroken monitoring. Read what is actually being promised, because the words ‘guarantee’, ‘warranty’ and ‘insurance’ get used loosely in our trade and they mean three different things. The one constant is that every one of those remedies dies the moment your annual inspection lapses.
- Insurance - a third party pays out on a defined event. Termite damage is not one of those events. Full stop.
- Manufacturer warranty - the product maker stands behind the product performing as certified, conditional on correct install and maintained inspections.
- Installer workmanship warranty - the company that did the work stands behind the work. Worth exactly as much as the company’s solvency in ten years.
- Timber damage warranty - offered by some baiting systems on an unbroken monitoring contract. Read the cap, the exclusions and what counts as a lapse.
Keep every one of these in one folder with the durable notice photograph from the meter box, the AS 3660.1 install certificate, and every annual report. That folder is the asset. It is also what a buyer’s conveyancer will ask for the day you sell, which is covered on pre-purchase inspections.
Insurance questions Cairns owners ask us.
Can I buy termite insurance separately?
Not as a retail product in Australia in any meaningful form. What is marketed as termite insurance is almost always a manufacturer or installer timber-damage warranty attached to a monitored baiting or barrier system. That is a contract with a pest company, not a policy with an insurer, and the difference matters when you try to claim on it.
My builder installed a barrier - am I covered for 50 years?
The physical barrier is certified to a 50-year design life; your warranty is not the same thing. Builder and manufacturer warranties on a new Cairns home are conditional on the annual inspection being maintained from handover and on nobody bridging the barrier with later landscaping, a pergola post or a re-laid driveway. Miss two annuals and you have a barrier with no backing.
The previous owner had termites and did not disclose it. What now?
That is a conveyancing and legal question rather than an insurance one, and it will turn on what your own pre-purchase AS 4349.3 report said and whether the vendor made a specific representation. It is also the reason we push independent pre-purchase inspections so hard - a buyer relying on the vendor’s report has no direct recourse to the inspector. One practical avenue most owners never think of: a building records search with Cairns Regional Council. Approval documents for the property, including any lodged by a private certifier, end up in Council’s records, and past structural repair or re-stumping approvals can tell you a good deal about what happened to a house before you owned it.
Does a landlord policy treat termites differently?
No. Landlord policies carry the same vermin and gradual-deterioration exclusions on the building. What a landlord does gain is a tax position - inspections and treatments on an income-producing property are generally deductible, and capital repairs are treated differently again. Talk to your accountant, not to us, about which side of that line your job falls on.
Service areas across the Cairns region.
Start the paper trail before you need it.
Annual AS 3660.2 inspection with a dated written report you can hand an assessor, a conveyancer or a buyer. $235 to $380 for most Cairns homes. QBCC-licensed termite management, AEPMA member.