It usually starts with one person. The storeroom smells wrong, or a ceiling tile above a desk has bloomed a grey-brown ring since the June rain, and somebody finally puts it in an email. Mould in the workplace tends to arrive as a complaint rather than a discovery — which means that by the time you are reading about it, a record already exists.
What follows is a plain-English summary of where Victorian employers and building occupiers stand, and what a defensible response looks like. It is general information rather than legal advice: duties turn on the specifics of a site, a lease and a workforce.
It Is a Safety Matter, Not Housekeeping
The instinct is to treat visible growth as a cleaning failure — something for the contract cleaners to wipe down on Thursday. That framing is the error, because it files a health risk in the housekeeping queue and produces a cosmetic result.
Mould exposure irritates airways and aggravates existing respiratory conditions, and in a workplace you have no reliable idea who in the room has asthma, is pregnant, or is immunosuppressed. The mechanisms are set out in our complete guide to mould and your health. The operative question is therefore not whether the wall looks clean afterwards, but whether the risk itself has been eliminated or reduced.
What the OHS Act Actually Requires
There is no separate mould regulation to look up. Damp and fungal growth are handled under the general duties that apply to every workplace hazard.
WorkSafe Victoria states that the OHS Act requires all employers to provide and maintain a working environment that is safe and without risks to health, that this duty must be met so far as is reasonably practicable, and that failing to comply is an offence to which penalties apply. The same guidance explains that duty holders must eliminate risks so far as is reasonably practicable and reduce them where elimination is not, and that employers owe the same duty to independent contractors and labour-hire workers for matters within their control.
That last phrase — so far as is reasonably practicable — is what does the work. It does not demand a perfect building. It asks you to weigh the risk against what is genuinely available and feasible, which is why a documented and proportionate response counts for more than an instant one.
Who Holds the Duty in a Leased Building
Most Melbourne businesses do not own their premises, and this is where responsibility gets argued over.
The duty does not rest with the employer alone. WorkSafe’s guidance on general duties explains that occupiers, and those managing or controlling a workplace, must ensure the things they manage or control are safe and without risks to health, so far as is reasonably practicable. In a leased office that can mean the tenant, the building manager and the owner each hold duties over different parts of one problem: the tenant over the fit-out and how the space is used, the owner or manager over the base building, roof and plumbing.
In practice, damp in a commercial building is usually a base-building fault — failed roof flashing, a blocked box gutter, a slab or wall drawing up moisture, or mechanical ventilation that was never properly commissioned. None of that suspends the employer’s duty toward staff while the matter is escalated, and that gap is where businesses most often get into difficulty: waiting on a landlord is not itself a response.
Consultation and the Paper Trail
Once someone has raised it, the position has changed. Employees and health and safety representatives have a formal role in raising health and safety concerns, and bringing them in early is both expected and useful — they know which rooms smell and which staff are affected.
The corollary is uncomfortable. An email about a musty meeting room, left unanswered across a winter, is evidence that the risk was known. Whatever you decide to do, record what was reported, what was investigated, what was found, and what followed.
It also matters who you engage. Wiping a surface with a supermarket spray is not remediation, and the gap between a general cleaner and a certified remediation technician is one of method and containment rather than marketing — a distinction we set out in our comparison of certified and domestic cleaning.
What a Proportionate Response Looks Like
Start with the moisture, not the mould. A patch on a plasterboard wall is telling you where water is arriving, and until that is identified, any treatment is temporary and any assurance to staff is hollow.
From there the sequence is unremarkable: establish the extent of contamination, including what is behind linings and above ceiling tiles; document the position before work starts, which is where air quality testing earns its place in a commercial context, because it converts an argument into a measurement; remediate under containment to the ANSI/IICRC S520 standard so spores are not distributed through the tenancy; correct the water source; then verify. For an employer, the documentation is not bureaucratic overhead — it is the record of having acted reasonably.
Conclusion
Mould in a workplace is rarely a dramatic problem, but it is a duty-bearing one, and the risk of treating it as a cleaning matter is that the paper trail accumulates while the water keeps arriving. Identifying the source and dealing with it under a recognised standard is what a reasonable response looks like — and if you are weighing that up for a site you manage or occupy, you are welcome to talk it through with us.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Is an employer legally responsible for mould in the workplace?
Victorian employers have a duty to provide and maintain a working environment that is safe and without risks to health, so far as is reasonably practicable, and damp or mould falls under that general duty rather than a mould-specific rule. Occupiers and those managing or controlling a workplace hold duties as well, so in leased premises responsibility is usually shared.
Can employees refuse to work in a building with mould?
The OHS Act sets out processes for resolving health and safety issues, and in limited circumstances involving an immediate threat to health or safety those processes include ceasing work. Whether a particular damp or mould problem reaches that threshold depends on the specifics, and WorkSafe Victoria is the appropriate body to ask.
Who pays for mould remediation in a commercial lease — landlord or tenant?
That depends on the lease and on what caused the moisture, so it is a question for your lease and your legal adviser rather than a general rule. Where the cause is a base-building defect such as a roof or plumbing failure, it commonly sits with the owner, while fit-out and usage issues more often sit with the tenant.
Does a workplace need mould testing, or is visible inspection enough?
Visible inspection is enough to establish that you have a problem, but not its extent, which is frequently larger than the visible patch. In a commercial setting, testing and moisture mapping also create the documented before-and-after record that a shared-duty situation tends to require.