Statement disclosure obligations: what Australian businesses must tell customers and staff

Every time someone commits to your business, the law expects them to know what they are agreeing to first. That is what a disclosure statement does: it puts the key facts in front of a customer, employee or prospective franchisee before they sign, pay or hand over their details. Australian businesses do not face one single disclosure law. They face a handful of separate regimes, each with its own trigger, its own timing and its own penalties.

The regimes that touch most small and medium businesses are consumer law, privacy, employment, spam and franchising. This article sets out who each regime applies to, what you must disclose in each situation, and what happens if you do not.

Who these duties apply to

The first question is whether a particular disclosure duty reaches your business at all. The triggers are different for each regime:

Consumer law: The Australian Consumer Law (ACL), which sits in Schedule 2 of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth), applies to any business that supplies goods or services in trade or commerce. There is no turnover threshold. If you sell to consumers, the pricing, warranty and sales rules apply to you.
Privacy: The Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) applies to businesses whose annual turnover in the previous financial year was more than $3 million. Smaller businesses are generally exempt unless they are health service providers, credit providers or handle credit reporting information. Even exempt businesses should follow the Australian Privacy Principles as good practice, because privacy reform is ongoing and the small business exemption may not survive it.
Employment: The Fair Work information statement obligations apply to national system employers, which covers most incorporated businesses and most employers across the states and territories.
Marketing: The Spam Act 2003 (Cth) applies to anyone sending commercial electronic messages, including emails, SMS and social media messages, where there is an Australian connection.
Franchising: The Franchising Code of Conduct binds franchisors and everyone proposing to enter into a franchise agreement, whatever the size of the system.

Consumer sales: put the total price on the table

The most common disclosure duty for a small business is pricing. Section 48 of the ACL contains the single price rule. If you advertise part of the price, for example a "from $49" price that excludes fees and charges, you must also specify the single total price in a prominent way and as a single figure. The rule applies to goods and services of a kind ordinarily acquired for personal, domestic or household use. The practice known as drip pricing, where unavoidable fees appear only on the final checkout screen, is exactly what the rule targets. If a customer can only discover the true cost at the end of the purchase flow, your pricing display is at risk.

Warranties are a second disclosure moment. If you offer a warranty against defects, section 102 of the ACL requires the warranty document to comply with requirements prescribed by the regulations, including its form and content. Giving a consumer a warranty document that does not comply, or telling them the goods carry a warranty when the document is defective, is itself a contravention.

A third moment is unsolicited sales. Door-to-door and telemarketing sales are covered by the ACL's special regime for unsolicited consumer agreements in Part 3-2. The agreement document must contain specific prescribed information about the goods or services and the consumer's rights, and the consumer has a cooling-off right to walk away within a set period. If you sell this way, your contract format is regulated, not just your marketing.

Finally, everything you say in the course of selling is a statement for legal purposes. Section 18 of the ACL prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct, and section 29 prohibits specific false or misleading representations. Your claims about price, features, refunds, delivery times and availability must be accurate and must not omit material information. The same discipline applies to subscriptions and recurring payments: tell customers the billing cycle, the renewal date, the notice period and how to cancel before they sign up, and make sure automatic renewal terms are not buried where nobody reads them.

If you send emails, SMS or other commercial electronic messages, the Spam Act 2003 requires three things for every message: consent, accurate sender identification and a working unsubscribe. Under section 16 of the Act, consent can be express or inferred, but you should be able to show where it came from. Each message must identify the sender accurately, and the unsubscribe facility must work and must be honoured promptly. The same rules apply to a one-person consultancy and a national retailer, and they apply to marketing sent by your staff or an agency on your behalf.

Collecting personal information: notice at the point of collection

If the Privacy Act 1988 applies to you, the disclosure duty has two parts. Australian Privacy Principle 5 requires you to notify individuals at or before the time you collect their personal information, or as soon as practicable afterwards, of matters including who you are, what you are collecting and why, the main consequences of not providing it, how they can access and correct it, and how they can complain. This is the collection notice you see next to a form or at checkout, and it should be tailored to what the form actually collects. Australian Privacy Principle 1 requires you to have a clearly expressed and up-to-date privacy policy covering how you manage personal information.

The policy and the notices must match what your systems actually do. If your website says data is only used to fulfil orders but your CRM and email tools share it with third parties, the disclosure is wrong even if the words look fine. Update your notices whenever you change analytics, marketing or customer management tools.

Hiring staff: the Fair Work information statements

When you take on employees, the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) requires you to give them specific statements prepared by the Fair Work Ombudsman. Under section 125 of the Act, the Fair Work Information Statement must be given before, or as soon as practicable after, the employee starts work. Casual employees must also receive the Casual Employment Information Statement at the start of their employment and again at the six-month and twelve-month marks, although the later milestones do not apply to small business employers. Employees on fixed-term contracts must be given the Fixed Term Contract Information Statement before or as soon as practicable after the contract is entered into.

These are timing duties as much as content duties. The statements are published by the Fair Work Ombudsman, so your obligation is to hand the correct version over on time, not to draft it. Attaching the statements to the employment contract and recording the date they were given is the practical way to prove compliance.

Franchising: the disclosure document and the 14-day rule

A new Franchising Code of Conduct in the Competition and Consumer (Industry Codes-Franchising) Regulations 2024 commenced on 1 April 2025 and applies to agreements entered into, renewed, extended or transferred from that date. A franchisor must prepare a disclosure document in the form set out in the code and give a prospective franchisee the disclosure document, a copy of the code and the franchise agreement in the form in which it will be executed.

The code then imposes a 14-day consideration period. The franchisor must not execute the agreement before the end of the 14 days after the documents are given, and the period restarts if the agreement is changed or earnings information is provided. The franchisor must also receive a written statement from the prospective franchisee confirming they have received, read and had a reasonable opportunity to understand the disclosure document. One change from the old code is worth noting: the separate Key Facts Sheet has been deleted, so the disclosure document now carries the full weight of the pre-contract disclosure.

What happens if you get disclosure wrong

The consequences differ by regime, but the exposure is real and the figures are large:

ACL: Contraventions of the unfair practices provisions of the ACL, including the single price rule, can attract civil penalties for a corporation of the greater of $100 million, three times the benefit obtained, or 30% of adjusted turnover, and up to $2.5 million for an individual. Misleading or deceptive conduct itself carries no civil penalty, but the ACCC can seek injunctions, damages and other orders. A non-compliant warranty document carries penalties of up to $50,000 for a company and $10,000 for an individual.
Privacy: Serious or repeated interference with privacy is a civil penalty provision. The maximum for a body corporate is the greatest of $50 million, three times the benefit, or 30% of adjusted turnover, and $2.5 million for an individual. Other interferences with privacy carry penalties of up to 2,000 penalty units, which is $660,000 at the current rate.
Fair Work: Failing to give the required statements contravenes the National Employment Standards, which is a civil remedy provision. Penalties are set in penalty units, and companies are liable for five times the amount that applies to an individual. The Fair Work Ombudsman can also issue compliance notices and infringement notices.
Spam: The ACMA can seek civil penalties of up to 100 penalty units per contravention for a first-time corporate offender, rising to 500 penalty units if the offender has a prior record. The regulator has secured penalties running into the millions of dollars against repeat offenders.
Franchising: Contraventions of the code carry civil penalties of up to 600 penalty units per contravention, which is about $198,000 at the current rate.

One Commonwealth penalty unit is currently worth $330, so the penalty unit figures above translate directly into dollars.

A practical disclosure checklist

Run through this list whenever you introduce a new product, price, form or agreement:

Map the moments: List every point where a customer, employee or franchisee commits to something, such as checkout, a subscription, a form, an offer of employment or a franchise agreement.
Write short notices: Draft a two or three sentence micro-disclosure for each moment that states the price, the term, the renewal, the fees and how to cancel, and link to the full terms.
Align the long documents: Make sure your privacy policy, terms and conditions and contracts say the same thing as your short notices, word for word on the key points.
Keep evidence: Store timestamped copies of the version of terms each customer saw, record marketing consent with its date and source, and archive superseded policies.
Train the team: Give sales and support staff scripts that mirror your disclosures, and tell them to escalate rather than improvise.
Review regularly: Any change to pricing, features, third-party tools or marketing should trigger a review of the related disclosures.

When to bring in a lawyer

Disclosure duties are spread across several statutes, and the cost of getting them wrong is high enough that specialist input is often justified. A lawyer is most useful where the regime is prescriptive: drafting a franchisor's disclosure document and managing the 14-day timetable, preparing agreements for unsolicited sales, reviewing subscription and auto-renewal terms against the unfair contract terms regime, and building a privacy policy and collection notices that match your actual systems. A lawyer can also keep you across the ongoing reform of the Privacy Act 1988, which may remove the small business exemption and add new obligations over the next few years.

Disclosure is about timing, not paperwork

Look at the duties again and one pattern emerges: in every regime, the statement must reach the person before they commit, and it must be prominent enough that they could reasonably be expected to see it. Courts and regulators ask where the disclosure sat in the transaction, not just whether a document existed somewhere. The obligation most often missed in practice is the Fair Work Information Statement, because it is a fixed day-one duty that has nothing to do with drafting and everything to do with a busy onboarding morning. This week, write down every moment a customer, employee or franchisee commits to something and check what they were told before that moment. Whatever gaps you find, close them before the next transaction.