Do you need a permit to live in a MicroHome?

It’s the first question almost everyone asks — and the answer you’ll often see online (“no permit required!”) is too simple to be useful.

The honest version is shorter than you’d think: sometimes yes, sometimes with conditions, and it depends heavily on your council and your specific situation. Here’s how it actually works.

A registered caravan — not a fixed building

A MicroHome gives you all the comforts of a traditional home, except it’s on wheels and registered as a caravan (Victoria only), even though it’s 3.2m wide. MicroHomes Group has a special arrangement with VicRoads that allows us to register MicroHomes as a caravan. So if your council will allow you to stay in a caravan in your area, you can do the same in a MicroHome.

Outside Victoria we make no registration claim: in most states a home on a registered chassis is treated closer to a caravan than a house, though this varies and a few states treat it differently. Either way, how your council and zone treat it is the thing that decides your case, so it has to be confirmed for your property. Where the caravan classification holds, the building permit a granny flat or home extension needs generally doesn’t apply, but again that depends on your council and is worth checking before you rely on it.

Built as a whole unit, not built on a chassis

This distinction matters more than it sounds, so it’s worth being precise about it.

Plenty of tiny homes are built on a trailer: someone buys a chassis, then frames, clads and lines a structure on top of it, on site or in a yard. What you end up with is a small building that happens to be sitting on wheels.

A MicroHome is manufactured as one complete unit in our Melbourne factory — chassis, floor, walls, roof, services and fit-out engineered together as a single vehicle and finished before it leaves. It arrives complete, it is towed on its own registration, and it never becomes part of your land. Nothing about it is assembled, poured or fixed down at your address.

That’s the whole basis of the difference. A building has to earn its way onto your land through the building approval pathway your council runs. A MicroHome arrives as a registered vehicle and stays one — so the question changes from “can I build here?” to “can I keep a caravan here?” It’s a genuinely different starting point. It’s just not the end of the question.

Where the rules still apply

The classification tells you what the home is. It doesn’t tell you what you’re allowed to do with the land, and that’s the part that catches people out. Councils and planning zones have their own rules about:

• how long you can live in a caravan
• whether it can be your primary residence, or only secondary to a house that’s already approved
• what’s needed to connect water, power and waste — connecting to mains services can need council approval even where the home itself sits outside the building-permit pathway, so confirm that step with your council early

Those rules vary a lot between councils, and they’re the part worth getting right before you commit to anything.

The three situations, honestly

Most people asking this question are in one of three positions, and they are not equally straightforward:

1. A MicroHome in the backyard of an existing approved home, for a family member. Often the most straightforward of the three — though it still depends on your council and zone, and you should confirm it before you order.
2. A MicroHome on vacant land as your only home. This is where it gets genuinely council-specific, and where you need real answers from yours before you spend money.
3. A MicroHome as a short-stay rental. Separate rules again — short-term-rental legislation doesn’t always cover movable dwellings the way it covers houses, so ask your council how it treats them.

We’ve written the long version of all three, plus the exact questions that get a useful answer out of a council, here: Can you legally live in a tiny home full-time in Australia?

We’ll walk you through your property

You don’t have to figure this out alone, and you shouldn’t have to guess. Before you order, we’ll walk you through what matters for your block, your zone and how you plan to use the home — which of the three situations you’re in, what to confirm with your council, and what we’d expect you to hear. And if it looks to us like your plan won’t work where you want it, we’ll tell you then, not after you’ve paid.

That’s the whole point of doing this honestly. A sale that ends in an occupancy you can’t keep is not a sale we want.

• The questions to ask your council, state by state
• How to choose a tiny home builder without getting burned

Before you rely on any of this: council and planning rules change and vary by location. Treat this as a starting point, not legal advice, and confirm the specifics for your property with us and your council. RESOLVED 2026-08-28 (client sign-off) — final legal wording to be reviewed before publishing.