What Is Dial Before You Dig (DBYD)?

A single DBYD enquiry can trigger responses from a wide range of registered asset owners, depending on what infrastructure is registered in that location:

• Electricity — underground power cables and, in some areas, substations.
• Gas — transmission and distribution mains, and service pipes to individual properties.
• Water and sewer — potable water mains, sewer mains and property connections.
• Telecommunications — copper, fibre (including NBN infrastructure) and pit-and-pipe networks.
• Other registered assets — some councils, private pipeline operators and other network owners also register infrastructure with the service.

Lodging an enquiry is deliberately simple, since the goal is to make checking the default habit for anyone about to dig, not an obstacle.

• Submit the job location — an address or a plotted area — and the intended dig dates online through the service’s website, or by calling 1100 for phone lodgement.
• Every asset owner registered in that area is notified automatically and responds directly, usually with plans and, where relevant, specific safety advice for working near their assets.
• DBYD advises allowing a couple of business days for standard, non-complex enquiries to be answered, though response times vary by asset owner and location — for urgent or emergency works, contact the relevant asset owner’s emergency line directly rather than waiting on a routine enquiry.
• Keep the enquiry reference number and every asset owner’s response on file for the duration of the job, as evidence a duty-of-care check was actually carried out.

Excavating without checking for underground services isn’t just risky — it can be a breach of work health and safety obligations. Work health and safety regulations across every Australian state and territory, backed by industry codes of practice for protecting underground infrastructure, generally expect anyone carrying out excavation to take reasonable steps to identify buried assets before disturbing the ground.

A DBYD enquiry is the starting point for meeting that duty of care, but it doesn’t discharge it on its own. Most codes of practice also expect a physical check — such as potholing with hand tools or vacuum excavation — to confirm the exact position and depth of a service once its approximate location is known, before mechanical plant gets close to it.

The consequences of getting this wrong are serious on both counts: striking a live gas or electricity asset is genuinely dangerous, and asset owners routinely pursue cost recovery from whoever caused the damage, on top of any outage, delay or safety incident that follows.

The plans returned through DBYD are an essential starting point, but they have real limitations worth understanding before you rely on them alone:

• Plans typically show the approximate horizontal location of registered assets, not their exact depth.
• Only assets belonging to registered asset owners are covered — some private, unregistered or very old infrastructure may not appear in any response.
• Plans can be out of date if an asset owner hasn’t recently updated its own records, particularly on older sites.
• A response showing no plans held for an asset owner means nothing is registered at that location — it is not a guarantee that nothing at all is buried there.

In practice, the list is almost anyone touching the ground: builders pricing footings or civil works, plumbers and electricians running new services, landscapers installing retaining walls or irrigation, surveyors, and homeowners doing their own smaller digging jobs.

For estimators and project managers, it matters at pricing stage too. Before finalising excavation quantities and rates on a civil-heavy tender, confirming a DBYD enquiry has been — or will be — lodged helps flag where unexpected services could turn into costly relocations, delays or variations further into the job.

DBYD is one part of understanding a site before you dig, alongside a few related checks that are easy to confuse with it:

• DBYD vs a physical locate — DBYD tells you what’s registered nearby; a physical locate, such as potholing, vacuum excavation, or a private locator using detection equipment, confirms the exact position and depth on site.
• DBYD vs a title or survey search — a title or survey search shows property boundaries and registered easements; DBYD shows the services themselves, which don’t always sit neatly inside a mapped easement.
• DBYD vs a building or plumbing approval — a building or plumbing approval confirms your proposed work complies with the NCC and local requirements; it doesn’t check for buried services, which is exactly what a DBYD enquiry is for.

Most DBYD-related incidents come down to a small number of avoidable habits rather than genuinely unpredictable circumstances:

• Digging from an old DBYD response instead of lodging a fresh enquiry once the job has moved, or new services have since been installed nearby.
• Treating returned plans as exact and mechanically excavating right up to a marked line without potholing first.
• Not keeping the reference number and every asset owner’s response on file, leaving no evidence a check was carried out if a service is later damaged.
• Assuming a clear result means there’s nothing buried at all, rather than nothing currently registered.