In Victoria, the Professional Engineers Registration Act 2019 requires persons providing professional engineering services in one of five areas (civil, structural, mechanical, electrical and fire safety) to be registered, unless they are working under the direct supervision of a registered professional engineer or are applying a prescriptive standard only.  Most Transport Engineers fall into the Civil Engineering category, depending on the work they are doing, although this is not entirely clear.

Examples of areas for which registration and endorsement are not required include chemical or process engineering, software engineering and metallurgical engineering.

Registration fees are about $627 every 3 years.

The legislation is currently being reviewed, and ITE-ANZ made a submission on 25 July 2025.  A copy of our submission is here: ITE-ANZ Submission PE Registration Review – 2025.

ITE-ANZ undertook a survey of our subscribers to assess whether Transport Engineers believe we should be registered or not.  There was no strong consensus with 47% saying “yes”, 29% saying “no” and 24% opting for “maybe”.

The main thrust of our submission was to call for Transport Engineers to be a separate area of engineering for the purpose of the legislation.  We did not commit either way to whether Transport Engineers should need to be registered, but we called for the legislation to be more explicit about which types of engineers need to be registered, even though we acknowledge there will be some grey areas.  A significant number of people practising in the transport field are not qualified engineers and (we presume) would not be undertaking engineering services and would therefore not be required to be registered under the Act.