It is also far narrower than most people believe. The scheme applies only to mapped land, only to certain buildings, only on your own land, and it is loaded with exclusions covering heritage, Aboriginal places, riparian buffers, steep ground and specific ecological communities that are common across Sydney. Clearing that falls outside the Code is not protected by it, and that can be an offence under other legislation.
This guide sets out what the 10/50 Code actually permits, verified against the Code itself.
Where does the 10/50 scheme come from?
The scheme was introduced on 1 August 2014, following the 2013 NSW bushfires that destroyed more than two hundred homes, including fires in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.
The rules sit in the 10/50 Vegetation Clearing Code of Practice for New South Wales, prepared by the NSW Rural Fire Service in accordance with Section 100Q of the Rural Fires Act 1997, and developed in partnership with the state planning and environment agencies. The scheme was reviewed after concerns that some landholders were using it to clear vegetation for reasons other than bushfire protection, and it has been amended since.
The most important thing to understand: it is not an approval
This is the point that catches people out.
The Code is explicit that it does not provide an approval. What it does is remove the offence: a person is not guilty of an offence for clearing vegetation that is carried out in accordance with the Code. Clearing that is not carried out in accordance with the Code may constitute an offence under another Act or instrument, and may be enforced by whichever authority that instrument sits under.
In practical terms, there is no permit to show anyone, no file number, and nothing council has signed. If someone questions the work afterwards, your position rests entirely on whether what you did complied with the Code on the day you did it.
That is why the Code tells landowners to keep a copy of their mapping search result. It is the only contemporaneous evidence that the entitlement applied.
Is your land in the entitlement area?
Clearing under the Code may only be undertaken on land parcels that contain land mapped as 10/50 vegetation clearing entitlement land, and the land must be mapped as such on the day the clearing is undertaken.
The RFS publishes an online assessment tool that lets a landowner self-assess whether their land falls inside the entitlement area. The Code puts the responsibility squarely on the landowner to confirm this on the day, not before, and not based on a neighbour’s result.
Where the online tool and a mapped layer held by another government authority disagree, the Code says the version on the online tool is the one that applies.
Which buildings does it apply to?
The Code applies to vegetation adjacent to the external walls of two kinds of building.
The first is a building containing habitable rooms that comprises, or is part of, residential accommodation or a high-risk facility. Residential accommodation covers a broad list, including dwelling houses, dual occupancies, semi-detached and attached dwellings, multi-dwelling housing, residential flat buildings, secondary dwellings, boarding houses, group homes, seniors housing and shop-top housing, as well as tourist and visitor accommodation, caravans in caravan parks and manufactured homes in manufactured home estates. A high-risk facility means a childcare centre, a school or a hospital.
The second is a building that comprises, or is part of, a farm shed. Farm sheds have their own tight definition: the land must be zoned RU1 Primary Production, RU2 Rural Landscape or RU4 Primary Production Small Lots, the shed must have a floor area of more than fifty square metres, and it must be used by a primary producer substantially for a primary production purpose. That rules out almost every suburban Sydney block.
Two conditions apply to both. There must be lawful authority under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 for the use of the rooms as habitable rooms, or for the farm shed’s use. And the Code does not provide clearing around associated adjoining buildings that do not contain habitable rooms. A detached garage, a studio with no approval, or an external storeroom at a school does not bring the entitlement with it.
What counts as an external wall?
For residential accommodation and high-risk facilities, external walls means the external walls of the building containing habitable rooms, and include permanent fixed structures attached to the building such as decks, verandahs, pergolas and garages. Decks and verandahs are elevated platforms, enclosed or otherwise.
External walls do not include paved or concreted areas. They also exclude decks and verandahs that were built as exempt development under the exempt and complying development codes, because those are required to be built from non-combustible material.
So the ten metres is measured from the house wall, or from an attached deck, but not from the edge of your paving.
What exactly can be cleared?
The Code permits a landowner, on their own land, to carry out:
- Removal, destruction by means other than fire, or pruning of any vegetation including trees within ten metres of a qualifying external wall
- Removal, destruction by means other than fire, or pruning of any vegetation except trees within fifty metres of a qualifying external wall
The distances apply whether the building is on the owner’s land or on adjoining land.
Trees have a specific rule. A tree may only be removed where the trunk, meaning any part of the trunk at a height of 1.3 metres above the ground, is within ten metres of the building. A large tree whose canopy reaches the house but whose trunk sits twelve metres away cannot be removed under the Code.
The Code defines a tree as a perennial woody plant three or more metres in height with one or more self-supporting trunks, at least one of which has a circumference of more than 0.3 metres measured 1.3 metres above the ground. It excludes shrubs, meaning small low-growing woody plants with multiple stems, and vines.
What about pruning?
Pruning sits slightly wider than removal.
Any vegetation within fifty metres may be pruned, other than trees more than ten metres from the residence. And irrespective of where the trunk sits, any branches within ten metres of the residence may be pruned.
All pruning under the Code must be carried out in accordance with AS 4373-2007, the Australian Standard for pruning of amenity trees. There is a catch worth knowing: if a tree would require pruning beyond ten metres from the building in order to conform with AS 4373-2007, then the pruning may not be undertaken at all. In other words, the Code does not authorise a bad cut just because the branch is close enough.
If you are unsure how that applies to a particular tree, that is a question for an arborist. Sydney Tree Company provides tree pruning and tree health inspection across Sydney and can assess what the standard would require.
Whose consent do you need?
Clearing under the Code can only be conducted with the landowner’s consent, and the Code is strict about this.
Tenants must obtain the landowner’s approval in writing before any clearing commences. The relevant landowner is the owner at the time the vegetation is removed.
Where a single tree trunk sits across two or more properties, the approval of all landowners is required.
And if you do not have a qualifying building on your own land and are relying on a building on adjoining land to authorise the clearing, you must obtain the written consent of each owner of adjoining land whose building could be used to authorise it. The Code gives the example directly: a tree on your land more than ten metres from your own home, but within ten metres of two neighbours’ homes, can only be removed with written consent from both of those neighbours.
What cannot be cleared, even inside the entitlement area?
This is the longest part of the Code and the part most summaries skip. Several exclusions are highly relevant across Sydney.
Ecological communities and mapped environmental land
Vegetation on land parcels wholly or partly within certain mapped areas is excluded entirely. The list includes coastal wetlands, wetlands mapped under the Biodiversity and Conservation SEPP, littoral rainforest, specified koala habitat, Ramsar wetlands, land within one hundred metres of the coastline or estuaries, records of critically endangered plants, and land mapped as critical habitat.
It also excludes a list of critically endangered ecological communities, and four of them are Sydney communities you may well be standing in: Blue Gum High Forest in the Sydney Basin Bioregion, Cumberland Plain Woodland in the Sydney Basin Bioregion, Shale Sandstone Transition Forest in the Sydney Basin Bioregion, and the Hygrocybeae community of Lane Cove Bushland Park.
If you own a bushland-backed block on the upper North Shore, in the Hills, or around Lane Cove, this is the exclusion most likely to apply to you.
Heritage and Aboriginal cultural heritage
Aboriginal Places are excluded. NSW State heritage and local heritage mapped by councils are excluded. Aboriginal scarred trees, also called culturally modified trees, may not be cleared, and where the online tool indicates a parcel may contain one, the landowner is required to determine whether the trees meet the criteria in the state field manual.
The Code notes that where a land parcel is only partly affected by a local heritage listing, clearing under the Code is excluded from the whole parcel.
Riparian buffers
Clearing of vegetation including trees is not allowed within ten metres of a lake, or of a river two metres or more in width between the highest opposite banks. The distance is measured from the highest bank, or the tidal limit where there is no defined high bank, and the buffer applies to both sides of a river and all the way around a lake.
The definitions are broad. “Lake” includes wetlands, lagoons, saltmarsh and any collection of still water. “River” includes any watercourse, perennial or intermittent, natural or artificially modified, and any tributary or branch.
Mangroves and saltmarsh
Mangroves and coastal saltmarsh may not be cleared under the Code at all, and they are not mapped in the online tool.
Land under a legal obligation to retain vegetation
Clearing cannot be inconsistent with a conservation agreement, a biobanking agreement, a property management plan, a condition of development consent requiring vegetation to be retained for conservation purposes, an instrument under Section 88B of the Conveyancing Act 1919 doing the same, any relevant court order, or any stop work, interim protection or remediation order.
A development consent condition requiring tree retention is common on newer Sydney estates and easy to forget about a decade later.
Steep ground and soil
The Code imposes conditions aimed at erosion and landslip, and they are conditions, not advice.
There is to be no disturbance of the soil. Vegetation must not be removed below the soil surface. All topsoil must remain on the surface, protective ground cover must be retained, and graders, ploughs, bulldozers and other heavy machinery designed to break the soil surface may not be used.
On slopes greater than eighteen degrees, tree removal is not permitted except in accordance with conditions identified in a geotechnical engineer’s assessment report prepared for that purpose. Pruning on those slopes is permitted only where at least seventy-five per cent of the original canopy cover is retained, again subject to the same exception.
The Code also makes clear that complying with these conditions does not absolve the landowner from responsibility for landslip and erosion. A party who suffers from a landslip caused by work on your land can still pursue it.
Three other things the Code does not protect you from
Harm to wildlife. Landowners clearing under the scheme are not exempt from prosecution under the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974 for harm to protected fauna, or from the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1979. Hollows in old trees are the obvious risk.
Dumping. The Code does not authorise anything it does not expressly provide for, and it names dumping of vegetative waste specifically. Dumping waste vegetation is illegal.
Herbicide misuse. Only herbicides registered by the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority may be used, strictly in accordance with the label, and not in a way that harms non-target plants, people, property or waterways.
How the 10/50 scheme sits alongside council rules
The 10/50 Code operates independently of your council’s tree controls, and most Sydney council development control plans acknowledge it.
Where a property is not in the entitlement area, or where the proposed work falls outside what the Code permits, the normal council pathway applies. That means checking whether the tree is protected, whether an exemption applies, and whether a permit or a development application is required. Our guide to council approval for tree removal in Sydney sets out how that process works, and the council-specific guides cover Ku-ring-gai, Hornsby Shire and others in detail.
Bushfire hazard reduction work authorised under the Rural Fires Act 1997 is a separate pathway again, and councils treat it separately from both the 10/50 Code and their own permit system.
On a bushfire-interface property, all three can be relevant to the same tree, which is a good argument for having someone work out which applies before anything is cut.
Before you clear anything under 10/50
A short checklist drawn from the Code itself:
- Run the RFS online tool on the day, and keep the result
- Confirm the building qualifies, and that the rooms have lawful authority as habitable rooms
- Measure from the external wall, including attached decks and verandahs, not from paving
- For trees, check the trunk position at 1.3 metres above ground, not the canopy
- Get written consent from every landowner whose consent the Code requires
- Check the exclusions: ecological communities, heritage, Aboriginal places, riparian buffers, consent conditions
- Check the slope
- Have pruning specified to AS 4373-2007, and confirm it can be done within ten metres
- Plan for lawful disposal
Get the trees assessed before you rely on the entitlement
The 10/50 Code rewards precision. The difference between clearing that is protected and clearing that is an offence can come down to where a trunk sits at 1.3 metres, or whether a parcel is partly within a mapped ecological community.
Sydney Tree Company provides tree removal, pruning, tree health inspection and stump grinding across the Sydney metropolitan area and regional Sydney, assists with council tree preservation paperwork, and works throughout the areas we serve.
Call 0431 732 265 to arrange a free quote and an on-site assessment.