Priority notices and caveats between exchange and settlement: what each Australian state offers and when to lodge

Five Australian jurisdictions offer priority notices: New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia for 60 days, extendable once to 90, and Tasmania for 90 days. Western Australia, the ACT and the Northern Territory have none, so a caveat is the protective instrument there. MatterFirst calculates and diarises those dates, citing the governing statute on the matter.

The gap nobody owns

Between the moment a contract becomes binding and the moment a transfer is registered, your client holds an equitable interest in land and nothing on the title says so. A search of the folio shows the vendor as registered proprietor, no notification of your transaction, and no warning to anyone else dealing with that land.

That gap is usually short and uneventful. The problem is what it allows: a second contract over the same land, a mortgage registered before your transfer reaches the registry, a caveat lodged by a creditor of the vendor, or a dealing lodged by someone who should not be dealing at all. Each of those registers ahead of you if it arrives first, because Torrens priority runs on registration, not on who signed first.

Two instruments close the gap, and they are not interchangeable. A priority notice reserves your place in the queue for a fixed number of days. A caveat asserts an interest and stays until it is removed. Knowing which one your jurisdiction offers, and which the facts call for, is the whole question.

What a priority notice actually does

A priority notice is a short-lived notation on the folio naming the instruments you intend to lodge and the order you intend to lodge them in. While it is current, the registry will not register competing dealings over that land. When your instruments are lodged in the stated order, they are registered. If the clock runs out first, the notice lapses and anything queued behind it proceeds.

It is a priority-reservation tool, not a claim of interest. You do not need a caveatable interest to lodge one, and the registry is not asked to assess the merits of your transaction. In Victoria the Registrar is expressly not required to notify anyone that a priority notice has been recorded, under section 91D(3) of the Transfer of Land Act 1958.

The limit that matters most: a priority notice does not stop a caveat. Victoria puts it in the Act, at section 91F, which says an instrument capable of being recorded is not affected by a priority notice and may be lodged and recorded at any time, giving caveats, warrants, statutory charges and notifications as the examples. Queensland publishes the same carve-out in Titles Queensland's Land Title Practice Manual, Part 23, which lists a caveat among the instruments a current priority notice does not prevent, along with an instrument lodged before the notice was deposited, an instrument the applicant has consented to on a Form 18, and a transfer or release by a mortgagee whose interest was already registered.

So a priority notice protects you against the ordinary registrable dealing that beats you to the registry. It does not protect you against someone asserting a competing interest.

The periods, jurisdiction by jurisdiction

Sources: Land Services SA, the Transfer of Land Act 1958, Titles Queensland's Land Title Practice Manual Part 23, the Recorder of Titles' Office Circular No. 5/2021, the NSW Land Registry Services Registrar General's Guidelines, and PEXA's service charter for lodgement availability.

A few points the table compresses.

Victoria is the cleanest to state because the numbers are in the Act. Section 91C gives a recorded priority notice 60 days of priority from the date of lodgement. Section 91FA allows one application for extension, which must be made before expiry or withdrawal, and takes the period to 90 days from the original lodgement date. The extension is not an additional 90 days.

Queensland runs the same arithmetic but expresses it as a lapse date: the notice lapses 60 days after deposit if no extension request has been deposited, or 90 days after deposit if one has, and only one extension request may be deposited.

South Australia publishes 60 calendar days from lodgement with one extension of 30 calendar days. Land Services SA notes that priority notices are not mandatory and that most are lodged through SAILIS or an Electronic Lodgment Network Operator.

Tasmania is the outlier worth remembering, because it starts at 90. The Recorder's circular records that the 60-day prescribed period was removed from section 52 of the Land Titles Act 1980 and extended to 90 days in the Land Titles Regulations, effective 1 January 2022, and that a notice takes effect when lodged and expires at midnight on the last day of the period. I could not find a published extension mechanism for Tasmania, so treat 90 days as the whole of your protection.

Western Australia, the ACT and the Northern Territory have no priority notice regime that their registries publish. PEXA's service charter lists all eight jurisdictions as active for conveyancing transactions but marks priority notice, and its withdrawal and extension, as available in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria only. In those three jurisdictions a caveat does this work, lodged under the Transfer of Land Act 1893 (WA), the Land Titles Act 1925 (ACT) and the Land Title Act 2000 (NT).

Priority notice or caveat

The two instruments answer different questions, so the choice is usually determined by the facts rather than by preference.

A priority notice fits the ordinary matter where the transaction is agreed, the parties are cooperative and the only risk is a timing accident. It needs no interest in the land, it does not put the vendor on the defensive, and it expires by itself when the transfer registers.

A caveat fits the matter that has gone wrong, or looks like it might. It requires a caveatable interest, and a purchaser under a binding contract generally has one. It does not run down a clock, so it survives where a priority notice would have lapsed.

The cost of getting it wrong runs both ways. Lodging a caveat without reasonable cause exposes the caveator to a compensation claim, and lodging a priority notice unreasonably carries its own exposure: in Queensland an affected person may apply to the Supreme Court for compensation for loss caused by an unreasonable deposit.

The sequencing rule is simple. Lodge the priority notice when the transaction is on foot and you know your lodgement window. Reach for the caveat when the window is about to close and the transfer is not ready, or when the vendor's conduct suggests the register needs a claim on it rather than a reservation.

Three dates, not one

The failure mode in a priority notice is not lodging it. It is forgetting that it is a timer. A file that uses one needs three dates carried on it:

1. The lodgement date. Everything counts from here, and in Victoria the Act counts from the date the notice was lodged, not from the extension.
2. The extension cut-off. The application must be made before the notice expires. Miss it and there is no retrospective fix, only a fresh notice if your jurisdiction allows one, and a gap while you lodge it.
3. The expiry date. The day your protection ends and anything queued behind you proceeds. This should drive a decision, not a notification after the fact.

Most systems will hold these as tasks if someone types them in. The question worth asking of any system is whether it calculates them from the governing rule and shows where the rule comes from, because a hand-entered date is only as good as the person who entered it on the day they were busiest.

How MatterFirst handles this

MatterFirst is a legal practice management platform for Australian law firms, built by North Cape Technology, a Melbourne software company.

It does not lodge a priority notice. Lodgement happens in an Electronic Lodgment Network or a registry portal, and PEXA and InfoTrack are both listed as coming soon in MatterFirst's integration catalogue rather than connectable today. The four you can connect yourself are Xero, Stripe, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, with a documented REST API and webhooks for everything else.

What MatterFirst does own is the part that goes wrong on files: the dates and the decisions attached to them. Its obligations and limitation date rules calculate key dates and cite the governing statute on the matter, in the same form as a limitation rule citing the Limitation Act 1969 (NSW) s 14(1), so the reason a date exists is readable by whoever picks up the file. Key dates sync to the calendar. Matters can be recorded in all eight Australian jurisdictions, so a Tasmanian file carries Tasmanian periods and a WA file is not quietly given a notice type that does not exist there.

From there, automations run trigger, condition and action rules over those dates, and generating a document can be a step in the workflow, so the extension application or the caveat instruction letter is produced as part of the sequence rather than remembered separately. Document generation is deterministic by default, built from merge fields, matter data projections and clause library entries, with AI used only where a section genuinely calls for synthesis, which is the right default for an instrument that has to say exactly what the registry expects. The client portal carries progress back to the client, and trust accounting includes a compliance review workflow covering New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia. Those four, not all eight.

Data and AI processing are hosted in the AWS region the firm chooses, Sydney by default for Australian firms, which is set out on the security page. Pricing is from $199 per month per workspace, with users included, on the pricing page.

MatterFirst suits Australian firms of roughly two to twenty fee earners doing property and general practice work that need onshore hosting, state-based trust accounting and date rules they can audit. It suits you less if your conveyancing depends on launching PEXA workspaces from within the matter today, or if your trust compliance obligations sit in SA, TAS, ACT or NT.

Where the systems sit

"Not published" means I could not find the claim on the vendor's own public pages when I checked, not that the product lacks the capability. Verified this session: LEAP's conveyancing page says you can create a PEXA workspace directly from a matter in LEAP using existing matter information, through its InfoTrack integration, and that its settlement adjustments are available for every state and territory. Actionstep's PEXA integration page marks priority notices as available only in VIC, NSW and QLD through the Konekta add-on, which is free plus a PEXA subscription. Clio's own press release records trust accounting certification from the Law Society of New South Wales. Smokeball's Australian integration page did not resolve when I checked it, so its cells are left unstated rather than guessed.

Ask any vendor to demonstrate this on a live file rather than answer it in a meeting. The evaluation checklist has the questions worth putting to all of them.

FAQ

Does a priority notice stop a caveat? No. In Victoria, section 91F of the Transfer of Land Act 1958 says an instrument capable of being recorded is not affected by a priority notice and may be lodged and recorded at any time, and gives caveats as an example. Queensland's practice manual lists a caveat among the instruments a current priority notice does not prevent.

How long does a priority notice last in Victoria? Sixty days from the date of lodgement under section 91C. One extension may be applied for before expiry, which takes the period to 90 days from the original lodgement date, not 90 additional days.

Can I lodge a priority notice in Western Australia? Not as far as Landgate and PEXA publish. PEXA's service charter lists priority notices as available in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria only, while listing WA as active for other dealings. In WA the protective instrument is a caveat under the Transfer of Land Act 1893.

Should I lodge a caveat or a priority notice for a purchaser? A priority notice if the transaction is on foot and the only risk is a competing dealing beating you to the registry. A caveat if the matter is in dispute, settlement is being delayed, or your priority notice is about to lapse with no transfer ready to lodge. A purchaser under a binding contract generally has a caveatable interest, and lodging without reasonable cause carries a compensation exposure.

Does MatterFirst connect to PEXA? Not today. PEXA and InfoTrack are both listed as coming soon. The integrations you can connect yourself are Xero, Stripe, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, plus a documented REST API with webhooks.

Does MatterFirst handle Tasmanian trust accounting? Matters can be recorded in all eight Australian jurisdictions, but the trust accounting compliance review workflow covers New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia only. A Tasmanian firm should test that specifically before committing.