Every so often a school business manager rings us after reading something about defibrillator laws and wants to know whether their school is now non-compliant.
Almost always, what they’ve read is about South Australia. In South Australia, schools are named in legislation and must have a defibrillator. In Queensland, no school is legally required to have one, and there’s nothing in front of the Queensland Parliament that would change that.
That’s the short answer. The longer answer is more useful, because “not required” and “not warranted” aren’t the same thing, and a school is one of the sites where the gap between those two is widest.
What Queensland actually requires
There is no Queensland AED Act. We re-checked the Bills register before writing this and found nothing addressing public-access defibrillation. The foundation piece covers this ground: do Queensland commercial buildings need an AED in 2026.
What applies to a Queensland school is the same thing that applies to any workplace. The Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (Qld) sets the primary duty to ensure health and safety so far as is reasonably practicable. Regulation 42 of the WHS Regulation 2011 sets the operational first aid duty: provide first aid equipment and make sure workers can access it, provide first aid facilities where appropriate, and make sure enough people are trained.
The practical detail sits in WorkSafe Queensland’s First aid in the workplace Code of Practice 2021. On defibrillators, the Code takes the same position as the model code it’s adapted from: you should consider providing an AED where there’s a risk of electrocution to workers, where ambulance arrival would be delayed, or where large numbers of members of the public are present.
Consider. Not install. Failing to provide a defibrillator isn’t an offence in Queensland. Failing to discharge the broader first aid duty could be, but that’s a fact-based argument built on your own risk assessment, not a specific AED rule.
For state schools, the Department of Education’s Managing first aid in the workplace procedure sits on top of that, and it does mention defibrillators. It lists automated external defibrillators, alongside adrenaline auto-injectors, among the equipment considerations when a school works through its first aid controls, and points to a separate AED information sheet. What it doesn’t do is mandate one for every school. Provision comes out of the site’s own risk assessment, which is exactly how the WHS framework is designed to work. If you’re relying on that procedure for a decision, pull the current version from the department rather than a summary, ours included.
Non-state schools sit outside the department’s procedures entirely. They carry the same WHS Act duty and make the same call independently.
What South Australia does, and why the contrast is worth knowing
South Australia’s Automated External Defibrillators (Public Access) Act 2022 has been in force since 1 January 2026, and it names schools directly as designated facilities. That means at least one defibrillator, regardless of the school’s size, with the floor-area scaling that applies to commercial buildings not coming into it. It also brings mandatory registration with SA Ambulance, mandatory signage, and a maintenance duty where failure to maintain is itself an offence.
Queensland has none of that. No mandate, no registration requirement, no signage rule, no penalties.
The reason to hold both facts in your head is that supplier marketing has become sloppy about it. If you see a Queensland school being told it has a compliance obligation with a 2026 deadline, that’s South Australian law being sold interstate. Push back.
The risk assessment a school should actually run
Strip out the legal framing and look at the site the way a WHS assessment would.
Who’s on the grounds. A school’s cardiac risk isn’t really the students. Sudden cardiac arrest in children is rare, though it does happen, and it’s the reason some schools with high-level sport programs act first. The realistic risk sits with the adults. Teachers and support staff, many of them in the age brackets where cardiac events start showing up. Groundskeepers and maintenance staff doing physical work. Parents and grandparents at assemblies, athletics carnivals, fetes and school concerts. Visiting officials and volunteers.
How many of them, and when. This is where the Code’s “large numbers of members of the public” trigger stops being theoretical. A primary school on a Tuesday morning is a modest workplace. The same site on carnival day, or during a Saturday sport fixture, or at a fete, has hundreds of adults on it. Many Queensland schools also hire out halls and ovals to community groups outside hours, which puts unfamiliar adults on site when the fewest staff are around.
How long help would take. In Brisbane, Townsville or the Gold Coast, ambulance response is generally quick. Across regional and remote Queensland it is not, and the delay trigger in the Code applies permanently rather than occasionally. We’ve worked through that reasoning at length in regional Queensland and ambulance delay. A school an hour from the nearest ambulance station is in a different conversation from one in Chermside.
What else is on site. Manual arts workshops, ag plots, pool plant rooms, kitchen and maintenance areas all involve electrical work. That’s the Code’s first trigger, and it applies to your staff and contractors even if it never touches a student. The same logic runs through construction and electrical trades in Queensland.
Run those four questions honestly and most Queensland schools of any size land in the same place: not required, clearly sensible.
The Queensland registration quirk that matters more at a school
Register the device with Queensland Ambulance Service. It’s free, voluntary, and done through the Queensland Government online form.
But understand exactly what QAS registration buys you, because Queensland works differently from the southern states. In the QAS register’s own words:
“Your AED location details will only notify the EMD if the suspected cardiac arrest occurs at your business or property. It will not generate an alert for calls from nearby businesses or properties.”
So it’s property-scoped. It helps the emergency medical dispatcher direct a caller who’s standing on your site. It does not alert nearby responders or point passers-by to your device the way GoodSAM does in New South Wales and Victoria. We’ve unpacked the difference in QAS registry vs GoodSAM.
For a school, that limitation cuts a specific way. Your device is genuinely useful to the people on your grounds, and effectively invisible to the street. If part of your reasoning for installing one is community benefit, either accept that it only works when the community is on your site, or consider an externally mounted, publicly reachable cabinet so it’s actually available at 8pm on a Sunday.
Placement, in a building designed to be locked
Schools get placement wrong more than most sites, and it’s usually a security instinct rather than carelessness.
The failure mode is a defibrillator in the sick bay or the front office, behind a door that’s locked outside hours and staffed by someone who may not be there when it’s needed. If your school’s biggest crowds are at weekend sport and evening events, a device that’s only reachable during office hours is solving the wrong version of the problem.
A few things that hold up in practice:
- Put it somewhere central and unlocked during school hours, with clear signage that everyone including relief staff can find without asking.
- If the oval and hall get community use, seriously consider a second unit, or an external cabinet near the main sporting area.
- Outdoor and semi-outdoor mounting in Queensland means heat and humidity. Specify a cabinet rated IP55 or above and keep it out of direct sun. That’s best practice, not a Queensland regulation.
- Mount at 1.2 to 1.4 metres, brief it into staff induction, and mark it on the site emergency plan.
- Give one person the job of watching pad and battery expiry. In a school, that’s usually the business manager or the WHS officer, and it needs to be written into the role rather than remembered by an individual.
Funding, honestly
Queensland has no dedicated government AED grant program. Not for schools, not for anyone.
The programs that come up in searches are mostly aimed at sporting clubs rather than schools. Active Clubs provides $2,500 to sport and active recreation organisations for equipment, but it’s a club program and AEDs aren’t explicitly named in its categories anyway, so eligibility would need confirming with the department. The Alpha Sport Heart Starter grant and Project Defib are similarly club-oriented rather than school-oriented. We covered those routes for clubs in AED funding for Queensland sporting clubs.
For a school, the realistic funding routes are the ones schools already use: the P&C, a local business sponsorship, a community bank grant round, or the school’s own capital budget. A defibrillator is an unusually easy fundraising ask. Parents understand it immediately in a way they don’t understand a shade sail.
Some schools split the cost with the sporting club that uses the oval on weekends. If the device serves both, that’s a fair arrangement, as long as one party owns the maintenance and everyone knows who.
The short version
No Queensland school has to have a defibrillator. South Australian schools do, and that difference is real rather than a technicality.
But the WHS duty is the same one that already has you running first aid training, keeping kits stocked and writing emergency plans. The Code’s triggers are met at a great many Queensland schools, particularly on carnival and community-use days, and particularly outside the metro ambulance footprint. The device is a modest one-off cost against a decision that only ever gets tested once.
If you’d like help sizing it for your site, working out whether one unit or two makes sense, and setting up a maintenance routine that survives staff turnover, we install and maintain AEDs across Queensland with servicing built in. Start at our Queensland AED page.
