A case workspace that captures every email you CC in, tracks every statutory deadline, drafts your application and evidence bundle, and gets you hearing-ready.
Information, not legal advice. One-off pricing, no subscription.
Why people lose winnable cases
Three real cases from NSW renters, owners and consumers. The facts rarely decide it — the chronology, the bundle and the deadlines do.
Sydney renter
“They came after our bond for $1,100. We came back with a 40-page bundle.”
The agent claimed cleaning issues at exit. The tenant lodged her own bond refund, indexed every entry-condition photo and email, and walked out with $6,500. Most renters fold first — that's the point of the claim.
Lodge your own bond refund first. The agent then has 14 days to apply to NCAT, not the other way around.
Newcastle homeowner
“We won every hearing. The builder's bank account was empty.”
Pool builder no-showed three directions hearings. NCAT awarded the full refund. When it came to enforcement, the company had no assets and the director had moved on to a new ABN. A money order isn't money in the account.
Fair Trading or Building Commission NSW is a mandatory first step for building disputes. The 6-year window under HBA s18E doesn't stop the clock on insolvency.
Wollongong consumer
“The tradie took the deposit and went quiet. Now what?”
Half the kitchen demo'd, $4,800 down, calls unreturned. Members come down hard on dodgy tradies — once you can find them, prove service, and frame the claim as an Australian Consumer Law major failure.
3 months from the breach to apply. Winning the order is the easy part — enforcement runs through the Local Court.
Stories paraphrased from public reports. Information, not legal advice.
How NCAT Tracker works
You stay in control the whole way. We handle the bookkeeping, deadline maths and paperwork drafting — so you can focus on the facts of your case.
Add the dispute. We work out which NCAT list it belongs to, which form, the fee, and the Fair Trading step (if any) you need first.
You get a unique address. CC or forward every email with the agent, builder or dealer. The original .eml lands in your timeline, full headers preserved for evidence.
The 14-day bond dispute, 30-day rent-increase window, 6-year HBA major-defect cutoff, 28-day appeal — tracked from the dates you give us. Push and email reminders.
Drafted application form, orders sought in NCAT-valid wording, an indexed evidence bundle as a paginated PDF, and a hearing-day checklist on your phone.
Three ways to take a dispute to NCAT. How they stack up.
Solicitor cost estimates from Contracts Specialist NCAT cost commentary; varies with case complexity. NCAT’s default is that each party bears their own costs (s60 CAT Act 2013), so winners rarely recover legal spend. Sometimes a solicitor is still the right call — high-value building defects, a Supreme Court appeal, or anything outside NCAT’s $500,000 home-building cap.
Information, not legal advice.
Cheaper than half an hour with a solicitor.
The basics, before a hearing is even scheduled.
What most people need.
Everything in Starter, plus
All the way through.
Everything in Hearing-Ready, plus
One-off, incl. GST. Subscriptions are the wrong shape for a one-shot dispute. If your case settles before the hearing, the workspace stays open for 90 days.
Need more? Plans for property managers, strata managers and building consultants — Contact us
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Information, not legal advice
We don't replace a solicitor. We make self-rep tractable.
No subscription
One-off per case. Refundable within 14 days.
As heard in the wild
We didn't ask our customers to write these. They're from people running their own cases, on Whirlpool, Reddit and Yahoo Finance.
“Cleaning 'issues' are common bond claims, mostly they're a load of crap... Real estate agents use a common technique to overwhelm tenants with a seemingly impossible list of believable, relatively minor issues, so most people just give up.”
“Winning at NCAT is the easy part, but actually getting the money out of the tradie is a lot harder.”
“Aussie renter wins $6,500 after estate agent's $1,100 cleaning request held to ransom.”
“NCAT does not have a punitive power therefore some agents continue to act in problematic ways.”
NCAT Tracker is not a law firm. These quotes are public commentary about NCAT, not endorsements of our product.
Questions
No. We provide legal information to help you represent yourself at the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal. We are not lawyers and we do not give legal advice.
For advice on your specific circumstances, contact LawAccess NSW on 1300 888 529 (Mon-Fri, 9-5), Legal Aid NSW, your local Community Legal Centre, or a solicitor.
For most home-building disputes, yes. NCAT's Home Building application asks you to confirm you contacted NSW Fair Trading first, and the Home Building Act (Part 3A) supports that triage step.
For tenancy, residential and consumer disputes you generally don't need to go through Fair Trading first — you can apply to NCAT directly. We flag the right path for your case in the triage.
Some NCAT deadlines are strict and missing them usually ends your case — for example the 14-day window to dispute a bond claim, or the 28-day window to lodge an internal appeal. Extensions are not automatic; the Tribunal weighs length, reason, prospects, and prejudice.
We surface every statutory deadline for your matter and remind you before each one, so nothing quietly expires while you're heads-down on something else.
Each case gets its own inbound address. When you CC or forward an email to it — a repair request, a notice, a quote — we parse the message and add it to your case timeline.
We keep the raw .eml with full headers and DKIM/SPF/DMARC verdicts, so the evidentiary chain holds up if the other side disputes that something was sent or received.
NCAT's preparing-for-hearing guidance asks for an indexed, paginated, chronological bundle with three copies on the day (one for the Member, one for the other side, one for you). That's what Members expect.
NCAT Tracker produces exactly that bundle from the documents and emails already in your case — table of contents, page numbers, consistent ordering, ready to print.
Usually not. NCAT's Consumer & Commercial Division defaults to no legal representation — you generally need the Tribunal's leave to be represented, and around 85% of applicants self-represent.
For high-value home-building matters (typically above $30,000) paid advice often pays for itself. For a $3,000 bond dispute it almost never does. The triage tells you honestly which side of that line your matter sits on.
Currently, tenancy and residential proceedings are around $62 standard or $16 concession. General applications are around $127 standard, $254 for corporations, or $32 concession.
These are the figures on the 1 July 2025 schedule, CPI-indexed each year — always verify on ncat.nsw.gov.au before lodging. Concessions cover pensioners, Legal Aid grantees, CLC clients, full-time students and inmates. Hardship waivers exist.
An NCAT money order doesn't move money on its own. If the other side doesn't pay voluntarily, you register the order at the Local Court (for amounts under $100,000) and enforce it — typically a garnishee order against wages or bank accounts, or a writ for levy of property.
It's a separate process from NCAT, and the Tribunal won't do it for you. We walk you through each step, including the forms and fees.
Usually no. NCAT's default rule (s60 of the CAT Act) is that each party bears their own costs. Costs can be awarded against the other side if the amount in dispute is over $30,000, or if they behaved unreasonably during the proceedings (Rule 38).
Self-reps can usually claim disbursements — filing fees, expert reports, service costs — but not the value of their own time. Set expectations accordingly when you decide what to spend.
In Supabase's Sydney region (ap-southeast-2). Your case data does not leave Australia. We follow the Australian Privacy Principles.
Raw emails are content-hashed and stored once. We don't sell, share or repurpose your case data — it exists to run your case and nothing else. You can export everything and delete your account whenever you want.
Can't find your question? Try the free triage.
Information, not legal advice. Fee amounts current as at 1 July 2025 — verify at ncat.nsw.gov.au before lodging.
Free guide
28 pages. Every statutory deadline. The forms NCAT actually accepts. The bundle layout Members expect. Written for self-represented tenants in NSW.
Information, not legal advice.
Free PDF. We'll email it to the address below.
Every deadline tracked. Every email captured. An evidence bundle the Member can actually read. Built for the day you sit across from them.
Information, not legal advice. One-off pricing, no subscription.
