Sydney Water Tap in®

When you develop or subdivide land, your council or certifier tells you if you need us to give you a Section 73 Compliance Certificate. Your application fee covers:

• a full assessment of your application and building plans by a technical expert
• an experienced case manager who’ll look after your application from start to finish
• a Section 73 Compliance Certificate and building plan approval once any required work is completed.

Sydney Water Developer Direct will email you a Notice of Requirements within 14 days of getting your application. If you don’t need to construct any works, you’ll receive your Section 73 Compliance Certificate at the same time. A copy of your application information will be available in your dashboard.

You must apply if you’d like to disconnect from a drinking water or wastewater service.

If you need building approval from a council or certifier, you also need our approval. So before you apply for connections to a new development – even building a swimming pool or adding a home extension – make sure we’ve checked and approved your building plan. This ensures your project doesn’t damage our infrastructure or prevent us from working on it, and that your building is protected if we need to work on our infrastructure in the future.

If you're building or excavation works will affect our pipes, we’ll put you in touch with a water servicing coordinator who can further assess this for you.

We provide diagrams and prints as PDFs so you can locate our pipes, the private wastewater pipes on your property and your point of connection to our wastewater system. You can order:

• wastewater service diagrams (find out what symbols mean and what they do with our Help with your sewer diagram (383KB) fact sheet)
• service location prints 
• asset construction drawings 
• supply system diagrams.

Your plumber will need to make an application to us when they want to connect to our water, wastewater and stormwater pipes. 

It's useful to know the application requirements before you apply. Connecting to our systems (291KB) can tell you more about our services and our requirements for connection, and Your responsibilities when connected to our services (358KB) can tell you about your rights and obligations once you're connected.

You need to apply if you want to upsize or downsize your existing drinking water service or recycled water service.

Apply to boost the pressure of your drinking water service or pump to a wastewater outlet or gravity wastewater system. Maybe you’re in a low-pressure area, or need to serve fire services or header tanks for multi-storey buildings.

You’ll need approval if your project requires you to raise or lower any Sydney Water asset. Assets includes maintenance structures for drinking water, recycled water or wastewater.

You need to apply for a meter at least 2 weeks before you start building so you can have water on site from day one. You can choose to: 

• ask us to install the meter – we’ll install it within 10 working days once we approve your application
• tell us that you or your plumber will install the meter – you’ll also need to apply for a connection approval letter. 

If your business discharges trade wastewater, we need to assess the operational, environmental and safety risks. That’s why you must apply for our written approval. We’ll assess the outcome of your application within 21 days and let you know what you need to do. All trade wastewater applications need an inspection. We’ll arrange an inspection soon after you’ve started trading.

Find out more about requirements for commercial trade wastewater, industrial trade wastewater and pre-treatment equipment.