How long can a spill legally sit on a shopping centre floor?

The "20 minute rule" turns up everywhere in Australian retail property. In facility management contracts, in toolbox talks, in the working assumptions of people who run centres for a living.

There is no legal time limit. No Australian statute as of August 2026 says a spill becomes unlawful at 20 minutes or an hour or any other point on the clock. What decides a claim is whether you had a reasonable system of inspection and cleaning, whether you were running it on the day and whether you can prove both. The third one is where centres come unstuck.

This piece covers what the law actually asks of an occupier, where the 20 minute figure came from and what we are seeing shift across the market as claims get harder to defend.

One disclosure before we start. icetana builds AI hazard detection that watches centre floors between cleaning rounds, so we have a commercial interest in this subject. Everything below is sourced, and none of it depends on buying anything.

What you are actually being judged on

Two duties run at the same time, and neither of them gives you a number.

Under your state's Civil Liability Act, as an occupier you owe a duty of care to everyone on the premises. Fail it and you are exposed to a public liability claim. Separately, the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (and Victoria's OHS Act 2004) requires you to eliminate or minimise risk so far as is reasonably practicable. That one is enforced by the state regulator rather than a court, and it applies whether or not anyone has been hurt.

Both judge your system. Not your response time.

Where the 20 minutes came from

The figure comes from Strong v Woolworths [2012] HCA 5, where the High Court accepted that a sidewalk sales area next to a food court required inspection at intervals no greater than 20 minutes.

That was a finding about one area, on one set of facts, with that area's risk profile and foot traffic. It was never a universal standard. The occupier lost because the area had gone unchecked for about four and a half hours, not because it blew a statutory deadline.

Our advice is to stop treating 20 minutes as a pass mark and set intervals zone by zone instead. Food court and food retail spill more often, so they need tighter cycles. Back of house corridors and quiet retail wings do not. Then write down why you chose each interval. A documented reason is worth far more in a claim than a number you inherited from someone else's case.

The floor the courts are starting to set

If Strong set the tight end of the range, more recent decisions have started to mark the loose end. In a 2023 ACT Court of Appeal judgment, a large national retailer defended a slip claim on the strength of a "clean as you go" approach, where staff watch for hazards while going about their normal duties. That approach was accepted at first instance. On appeal the court took a firmer line, holding that an operator of that scale ought to have a system that specifically required floor inspection no less than every hour, as a priority task.

Two principles from that judgment travel well beyond the facts of the case. Lower risk areas can reasonably be inspected less often than a food court, but there is a floor, and relying on staff to notice hazards while doing other work sits below it. And the court put real weight on the absence of evidence that the system was reasonable. Where an occupier cannot demonstrate its system works, a court finds it easier to conclude that it does not.

The numbers that do exist are in your own contract

There is a reason the 20 minute rule feels real to anyone running a centre. Response times genuinely are written down. Just not in legislation. They are in the service agreement with your facility management provider.

One Australian FM company runs five minutes for a food court hazard and 20 minutes everywhere else in common areas. Those figures are fairly standard across the industry, though they move site by site with whatever the contract was scoped to cover.

Be clear about what an SLA is. It is a commercial commitment between you and your provider, not a legal deadline. Miss it and you have a contract conversation, not automatically a breach of duty. It cuts the other way too, and this is what we would flag to anyone about to sign one: a plaintiff's lawyer will hold you to the standard you set for yourself. Write five minutes into the contract and you have told a court what reasonable care looks like at your site. Set those numbers deliberately.

The one part that is close to absolute

Once a spill is actually known about, the clock changes character. Cone it or barrier it immediately, then clean. A delay after you knew is very hard to defend to a regulator, an insurer or a jury.

Constructive knowledge counts too. "Nobody told us" fails if a reasonable system would have found it. That is the trap in this whole area of law. You are held to what you should have known, not only to what made it into the incident log.

Claims are won and lost on evidence, not on minutes

When a claim lands, three questions decide it. Was there a documented cleaning schedule? Do the logs show it was followed that day, in that zone? And what does the CCTV show about when the spill appeared, against when someone attended it?

A centre that can prove a 20 minute cycle was running usually defends the claim even when somebody falls. A centre that cannot prove when it last inspected usually pays. The floor condition matters less than the paper trail.

Which leaves a gap no roster can close. A 20 minute inspection cycle means a spill sits for 10 minutes on average, and 19 on a bad day, with nobody watching the floor in between. Your rosters prove you had a reasonable system. They do not prove the floor was clear.

Closing the gap between rounds

That last point is the one we have spent the most time on. icetana's AI hazard detection runs on the cameras a centre already has and watches the floor continuously, so the time between rounds stops being a blind spot.

It reads the floor surface itself rather than inferring a hazard from cues like a warning cone, which is what stops shadows and tile patterns from firing constant false alerts. It picks up liquid spills and wet patches, dropped food or packaging in a walkway and cables run across the floor. When something appears, Relay Agent pushes the event straight to cleaning or duty staff, with average detection of five seconds.

The compliance benefit is the part worth pausing on. Every detection and every response is timestamped automatically, so you end up with a record of what appeared, when it appeared and how quickly your team got there. Average slip and fall payouts in Australia run between $40,000 and $100,000, so a defensible log is worth real money before you count the injuries you avoid.

Keep your inspection rounds. They are your legal baseline and no technology replaces them. Add continuous detection on top and you cover the minutes the roster never could.

Want to see what it picks up on your own cameras? Book a free demo.

Sources

• Strong v Woolworths Limited [2012] HCA 5, High Court of Australia
• Buljat v Coles Supermarkets Australia Pty Ltd (No 2) [2023] ACTCA 12, ACT Court of Appeal, on appeal from [2022] ACTSC 47
• Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW) and the equivalent Act in each state and territory
• The Civil Liability Act of the relevant state or territory, for example the Civil Liability Act 2002 (NSW)

This article is general information, not legal advice. Get advice on your own obligations from your insurer or lawyer.