AS 1288 Glazing Requirements: Safety Glass Rules

TL;DR: The AS 1288 glazing requirements decide which panes in a building have to be Grade A safety glazing material, and the NCC makes them enforceable by calling the standard up as a referenced document. The high risk zones are the ones people walk into. All glass in a door, every time. Side panels within 300mm of a door where the glass sits below 1200mm. Any pane with its lowest edge under 500mm from the floor. Bathrooms, ensuites, spas and pool enclosures where the glass is under 2m above the floor. Most inspection failures are not exotic: annealed glass in a sidelight, a toughened stamp nobody can read, a bathroom window nobody thought of as a wet area pane, and a shower screen replaced by a handyman. Catch it at take-off, not at fit-off.

Glazing is one of the few parts of a residential build where the wrong product looks completely correct until someone puts a shoulder through it. A sheet of 6mm annealed float and a sheet of 6mm toughened are the same thickness, the same colour and the same price to install. One of them breaks into a handful of long blades. That is the whole reason the AS 1288 glazing requirements exist, and it is why a surveyor will put their head sideways against a door jamb to read a stamp in the corner of a pane.

This is the Australian builder's version of the rule set: what the standard covers, where safety glass is mandatory, the figures worth memorising, and the handful of failures that come up again and again on final inspection.

What AS 1288 actually is, and how the NCC pulls it in

AS 1288 is Glass in buildings: Selection and installation. The current edition is AS 1288:2021, which replaced AS 1288-2006. It does two jobs. The first is structural: how thick a pane has to be for the wind load and span it is carrying. The second is human impact: which locations are risky enough that ordinary annealed glass is not allowed.

The standard on its own is just a document. What makes it binding is the National Construction Code calling it up in the referenced documents schedule (Schedule 4 in NCC 2022). Once the NCC references an edition, that edition is the one you have to build to, and glazing becomes a deemed-to-satisfy matter like a tie-down or a slab thickness. The NCC itself is free to read online once you register at ncc.abcb.gov.au, which is worth doing even if you never open it, because the referenced documents schedule is where you confirm which edition of AS 1288 your state has adopted. States adopt NCC editions on their own timetable and with their own variations, so check the volume and the state appendix rather than trusting a note in a supplier's catalogue.

AS 1288 itself is not free. It comes from Standards Australia, and you either buy it or read it through a subscription. If you build houses, it is one of the three or four standards worth having on hand permanently.

Grade A safety glazing material, and why the stamp matters more than the glass

"Safety glass" is not a precise term. The term AS 1288 uses is Grade A safety glazing material, and it means glass that complies with AS/NZS 2208. In practice that is one of three things:

Toughened (fully tempered) glass, which shatters into small blunt pieces.
Laminated glass, where two or more sheets are bonded with an interlayer so a broken pane holds together in the frame.
Grade A safety organic coated glass, which is annealed glass with a bonded film. It is rare in new residential work and more common in retrofits.

Here is the part that catches builders out. Grade A safety glazing material has to be permanently marked, usually a sandblasted or ceramic stamp in a corner, identifying the maker, the standard and the glass type. A surveyor cannot verify a pane by looking at it. The stamp is the evidence. So a pane that genuinely is toughened, installed with the stamp facing into the cavity, buried under the frame or rotated to the inaccessible side of a fixed window, is an unverifiable pane. On a strict inspection it fails, and the fix is replacement, because you cannot stamp glass after the fact.

Tell your glazier at order stage that every stamp must be visible and readable from inside the room after glazing. It costs nothing and it removes a whole category of argument.

The AS 1288 glazing requirements for doors and side panels

This is the cluster that produces the most rework, so take the three rules separately.

All glazing in a door is Grade A safety glazing material. Not just big panes. A 200mm vision panel in a laundry door, the glass in a bifold stile, a pantry door with a lite in it. Size does not create an exemption, because a door is a thing people push, and a thing that swings back.

Side panels close to a door need safety glass too. The rule builders quote is the 300mm rule: glazing within 300mm of a door, where the glass is less than 1200mm above the floor, has to be Grade A safety glazing material. The logic is that someone reaching for a handle, falling through a doorway or carrying a sheet of ply does not distinguish between the door and the fixed panel beside it.

Measure from the door leaf, not from the opening. The 300mm is horizontal distance to the door, so a narrow sidelight next to an entry door is almost always in. A sidelight separated by a 450mm return wall usually is not, but you should still check the next rule, because full height glass has its own problem.

Entry doors are where this bites hardest, because the specified door is often an aluminium or timber unit with a matched sidelight, and the sidelight is quoted separately by a different supplier. Two suppliers, one rule, nobody owning it.

Glass that can be mistaken for a doorway or an opening

A large, clean, frameless pane of glass with nothing in the middle of it reads to the human eye as a gap. People walk into it. AS 1288 handles this as its own case, separate from the door rules.

Where glazing could be mistaken for an unimpeded path of travel, the standard requires it to be either Grade A safety glazing material, or made visible. Making it visible means a transom, a rail, a mullion or a permanent contrasting marking at a height where someone approaching will see it. The standard specifies the height band and the minimum visibility of that marking, and this is one to read out of the clause rather than from memory, because a band at the wrong height is the same as no band at all.

In new residential work the practical answer is almost always just to specify safety glass and stop thinking about it. Markings and applied films are a renovation and commercial fit-out answer, where the glass is already in. If you are relying on a decal, remember that it has to be permanent. A removable sticker is not compliance, it is a promise.

Low level glazing: the 500mm rule and the annealed glass table

Any pane with its lowest edge less than 500mm above the finished floor is treated as a human impact zone, because that is the knee and shin band. A bedroom window with a 300mm sill, a stairwell window, a full height feature window in a living area, highlights above a low bench. All in scope.

AS 1288 does not simply ban annealed glass here. It gives a table of maximum pane area against nominal thickness, so small annealed panes are permitted. What matters for a modern house is that the areas the table allows are small. Once you are into contemporary window sizes, the table has run out and the answer is Grade A safety glazing material. Do not try to reconstruct that table from memory or from a forum post. Open it, read the thickness row, and compare against the pane size on your window schedule.

Two practical notes. Finished floor level means finished, so a 500mm sill measured off the slab can become a 480mm sill once 20mm of tile and bed goes down, and that moves the pane into scope. And glazing beside stairs and landings has the same low level exposure plus a fall risk, which is why stair geometry and glazing get looked at together on inspection. If you are still setting out the flight, our stair calculator will give you the rise and going before you commit to the wall openings beside it.

Bathrooms, ensuites, spas and pools: the 2 metre rule

This is the most commonly missed clause in residential glazing, and it is missed for an understandable reason. Everyone knows the shower screen has to be safety glass. Fewer people apply the rule to the ordinary window in the same room.

Glazing in a bathroom, ensuite, spa or swimming pool enclosure with its lowest edge less than 2m above the finished floor has to be Grade A safety glazing material. Two metres is high. It takes in essentially every window in a standard 2.4m or 2.55m ceiling bathroom, including an obscure glass highlight above the vanity and a frosted awning window over the bath.

The reason is wet feet on hard tiles. A slip in a bathroom ends with a hand or a head going somewhere unplanned, and the room is small enough that the somewhere is usually a wall.

Watch three cases:

Renovations. An existing bathroom window left in place during a bathroom refit is now glazing in a bathroom, and the clause applies to the work you are doing.
Laundries and powder rooms. These are not bathrooms, so the 2m rule does not automatically follow, but the low level and door rules still do.
Pool fence glazing. Glass pool fencing carries both the AS 1288 selection rules and the barrier requirements, which are a separate conversation.

Shower screens and bath enclosures

All glazing in a shower screen or bath enclosure is Grade A safety glazing material, framed, semi frameless or frameless. There is no small panel exemption and no fixed panel exemption.

Toughened is the trade default here. Frameless screens are typically 10mm toughened rather than 6mm, which is a structural choice about deflection and hardware rather than a safety glazing one, so confirm the thickness against the hardware manufacturer's requirements as well as AS 1288.

The trap on renovations is the pane that came with the house. A screen replaced at some point by an owner or an unlicensed handyman can easily be annealed, and it will look identical to a compliant one. If you are touching a bathroom and the existing screen has no readable stamp, price its replacement in the quote rather than discovering it at handover.

Barriers, balustrades and the load case

Glass balustrades sit in two rule sets at once. The NCC decides when you need a barrier at all and how high it has to be. AS 1170.1 sets the load the barrier has to resist. AS 1288 decides what the glass itself can be.

The glass rules turn on whether there is a continuous top rail. A fully framed or top railed glass balustrade behaves differently after a pane breaks than a frameless panel where the glass is the only thing between a person and the drop. The standard treats those as different cases, and a frameless panel acting as the sole barrier generally has to be laminated so that a broken panel still holds people back. Confirm the exact case you are building against the clause, because this is an area where the 2021 edition tightened the post breakage thinking, and a detail copied off an older job may not hold.

The heights, the load figures and the common stair and landing cases are a topic in their own right, and we have gone through them in detail in balustrade height requirements Australia.

Overhead and sloping glazing

Glass above people has a fall out problem on top of an impact problem. Sloping overhead glazing, skylights, glazed pergola roofs and atrium glazing are covered separately in AS 1288, and the answer is usually laminated glass so a failure stays in the opening, or toughened glass with screening underneath so nothing lands on anybody.

Toughened glass can also fail spontaneously years later from nickel sulphide inclusions, which is why heat soaked toughened glass is specified for overhead work in some situations. If you are detailing a glazed roof, get the glazier's written selection against the clause rather than accepting "it's toughened, it's fine".

Openable windows and fall protection: NCC, not AS 1288

This one is not in AS 1288 at all, and that is exactly why it gets missed. It is an NCC requirement sitting right beside the glazing provisions.

Where a bedroom window opening is more than 2m above the surface beneath, and the lowest part of the openable portion is less than 1.7m above the floor, the opening has to be protected. Either restrict the opening so a 125mm sphere cannot pass through it, or fit a screen or device capable of resisting an outward horizontal action of 250N. A flyscreen does not qualify. Insect mesh in an aluminium frame is not a fall protection device, and that substitution is a regular inspection failure.

Volume One has a broader version of this for apartments and other classes, so if you are working on a Class 2 building check the provision for that volume rather than assuming the house rule.

What actually fails inspection

From what surveyors and glaziers report, the failures cluster into a short list:

Annealed glass in a sidelight within 300mm of an entry door, usually because the door and the sidelight came from different suppliers.
Stamps you cannot read, either glazed in facing the wrong way or hidden behind the frame.
A bathroom window treated as a window instead of as glazing under 2m in a wet area.
An oversized low level pane in annealed glass, where someone assumed the thickness alone made it compliant.
A full height panel beside a door with no transom, no marking and no safety glass.
A retained shower screen in a renovation with no evidence of what it is.
Flyscreens doing the job of a fall protection screen on a first floor bedroom window.

Every one of those is cheap to avoid at order stage and expensive to fix at practical completion, because the fix is new glass and sometimes new frames.

The paper trail that makes it go away

The builder carries the NCC obligation even though the glazier selects and installs the glass. So the defence is documentary, and it is three things.

Get a written glazing compliance statement from the glazier referencing AS 1288 and the glass type for each location on the window schedule. Photograph every stamp after glazing and before the frames get painted or the architraves go on. Keep both against the job rather than in an inbox, because the request for them turns up at occupancy certificate stage and sometimes years later in a defects claim. That is the same discipline we have written about in construction document management.

Price it properly as well. Toughened carries a premium over annealed and laminated more again, and the difference across a whole house of windows is real money. Get the glazier's rate per square metre by glass type at quote stage and carry safety glass in the take-off for every location the rules touch, rather than treating it as a variation later. If you are rebuilding your quoting process around that sort of detail, we have compared the options for construction estimating software.

Wind load: the other half of glass selection

Human impact gets the attention, but AS 1288 also sets glass thickness for wind load, and that interacts with your site's wind classification. A large fixed pane that works at N2 may need to be thicker, smaller or differently framed at N3 or N4, and in cyclonic areas the glazing has debris impact requirements layered on top.

The practical consequence is that a window schedule is not portable between sites. The same elevation on a sheltered suburban block and an exposed coastal one can carry different glass. We have set out what the classifications mean and what changes on site in wind ratings explained, N1 to C4.

Frequently asked questions

Does every window in the house need safety glass?
No. The requirement is location based, not blanket. A window with a 1m sill in a bedroom, well clear of a door, is not automatically in a human impact zone. Doors, panels near doors, anything with its lowest edge under 500mm, wet areas under 2m and barriers are the zones that trigger it. Work through the window schedule location by location.

The bathroom window is 1.6m off the floor. Can I use annealed glass?
No. The bathroom, ensuite, spa and pool clause runs to 2m above the finished floor, so a 1.6m sill is comfortably inside it. This is the single most common miss we hear about, because the pane is nowhere near the shower.

The glass is toughened but the stamp ended up hidden in the frame. Is that a fail?
Treat it as one until the surveyor says otherwise. The stamp is how compliance is verified, and an unreadable stamp leaves nothing to verify. Some surveyors will accept a glazier's compliance certificate plus delivery documentation for the specific pane, but you are asking for a favour at that point. Specify readable stamps at order stage instead.

Can toughened glass be cut or drilled on site?
No. Toughened glass is cut, drilled and edge worked before it goes through the furnace. Any work on it afterwards will shatter it. If a hole for a shower screen fitting or a pet door was missed, the pane is remade. This is also why site measure accuracy matters more for toughened than for annealed.

If the glass is wrong, is that on me or the glazier?
Commercially it depends on your contract and what you specified. From the NCC's point of view, the building work has to comply, and you are the one holding the building permit. That is why the written compliance statement and the stamp photos are worth more than a verbal assurance. They convert a dispute into a document.

Does AS 1288 apply to a shed or a carport?
If it is glazed and it is building work under the NCC, the selection rules apply. A Class 10a shed with a glazed personnel door still has glass in a door. The wind load side of the standard applies as well, and sheds are often on more exposed parts of a site than the house.