A practical guide to automating SIA licence checks: what to check, how often, how to handle expiries, and how to stop unlicensed officers being rostered.
Category: Compliance · Published: 2026-10-07
Checking an SIA licence once at recruitment isn't enough. Licences expire, and the SIA can suspend or revoke them, so a licence that was valid on someone's first day may not be valid on tonight's shift. This guide covers what to check, how often, and how to take the manual work out of it.
Front-line SIA licences are issued for a fixed term (three years for most front-line roles) and must be renewed before they expire. The SIA can also suspend or revoke a licence at any time. A licence that was active when an officer started can lapse or be withdrawn months later without anyone in the office noticing.
Deploying someone without a valid licence for licensable activity is an offence under the Private Security Industry Act 2001, and it puts ACS approval and client contracts at risk. The practical goal is simple: nobody goes on a regulated shift without a currently valid licence for that role.
Each time a licence is checked, confirm:
At a minimum: at recruitment, on a regular schedule such as monthly, and before each rota is published. Automated checks are better still, because they pick up a status change in the gaps between those points.
Expiry dates are predictable, so plan for them. The SIA advises applying to renew up to four months before a licence expires. Reminders that start months ahead, and repeat as the date gets closer, give the officer and the office time to act.
The manual version of this process fails because it depends on someone remembering. The automated version removes the remembering:
The public register is the right tool for a one-off: a new starter, a subcontractor's officer, or a spot check on site. Pulcify's free SIA licence checker looks up the same public data and explains the result in plain English.
What doesn't scale is checking a whole workforce by hand. Nobody re-checks forty officers every week, which is exactly when a lapsed licence slips through.
Yes. The SIA publishes a public register of licence holders that can be searched by licence number. Pulcify's free SIA licence checker looks up the same public data and explains what the status means.
At recruitment, on a regular schedule and before rotas go out, at a minimum. Automated checks close the gaps between those points.
They can't legally carry out licensable work until a new licence is issued, so they have to come off regulated shifts. Tracking expiry dates centrally and alerting early avoids the gap.
Yes. Pulcify verifies SIA licences against the public register, sends alerts before expiry, keeps an audit-ready log and stops unlicensed officers being scheduled onto regulated shifts. It's included in every plan, including Free.
Pulcify turns the checks described above into an automated workflow: licence and vetting status tracked per operative, expiry alerts before anything lapses, and audit-ready evidence packs generated on demand.
Start the Free plan (up to 20 employees, 2 sites and 2 admin accounts, no credit card), see pricing or book a demo.