How to Actually Deal With a Noisy Neighbour in an Apartment Building

What this guide covers

• The five-step sequence that resolves most apartment noise disputes without involving by-laws, the committee or a tribunal.
• What to say at the door, the wording for the first written note, and how to make a request that gets agreed to.
• The evidence that matters when escalation is unavoidable: dates, times, durations, a log, and (where lawful) recordings.
• The difference between "annoying" noise and "actionable" noise, and why this distinction is the hinge of every complaint.
• When to involve the committee, the building manager, the strata manager, the police and the tribunal, in that order.

Noise is the most common dispute in Australian apartments, and the one most often handled badly by everyone involved. The reason is structural: residents wait too long to raise it, then escalate too quickly when they do; committees defer it to the strata manager, who has no authority to resolve it; and the affected party often expects an outcome the rules cannot deliver.

This is the working sequence. It resolves most cases in a fortnight. The cases that need formal escalation are a small minority, and they go better when the early steps were done properly.

Step one: the doorstep conversation

The single highest-value action, and the one almost everyone skips.

Walk upstairs. Knock. When the door opens, do not begin with "you." Begin with "I."

A version that works:

The script matters. The features that make it work:

• It is in person. A face is harder to dismiss than a note.
• It opens with a non-conflict greeting. The first 20 seconds are about a relationship, not a complaint.
• It uses "I hear" rather than "you make." The first frames a problem to solve; the second frames a fight to win.
• It asks a question. The neighbour is invited to participate, not respond to a demand.
• It offers a possible solution (rugs) without insisting.

About 60 to 70 per cent of apartment noise complaints stop here. The neighbour did not know they were being heard, or did not realise it was at the level you were experiencing. Concrete floors transmit footfall surprisingly well, and most residents have no acoustic intuition for how their floor feels in the apartment below.

The conversations that do not resolve at the door tend to fall into two categories: the neighbour is dismissive, or the noise is intentional (a tenant running a home business with equipment, an occupant playing music at volume, a regular party schedule). Both are useful information for the next step.

Step two: the written follow-up

If the doorstep conversation does not produce a change within a week or two, write a short note. The letter is for two purposes: a reminder, and a record.

A working template:

Slide it under their door or pop it in their letterbox. Keep a copy or a photo of the note before you deliver it, with the date.

The structure to notice:

• It references the prior conversation. This establishes that a conciliatory approach was tried first.
• It quantifies the problem. "Loud sometimes" is dismissible. "Seven of the last ten nights" is not.
• It proposes specific solutions. Specificity makes agreement easier.
• It offers contribution. A small financial gesture removes the "you're imposing a cost on me" objection.
• It asks for a response. A unilateral demand is easier to ignore than a request that expects a reply.

Step three: the noise log

Whether or not the written note works, start a noise log from day one. The log is the evidence base for every step that follows.

A useful log entry contains:

• Date.
• Start time, end time, duration.
• Type of noise (footsteps, music, voices, banging, machinery).
• Subjective intensity (1 to 5).
• Where you were and what activity it interrupted (sleeping, working, watching TV).
• Any third-party witness (housemate, partner, visitor).

A log kept for two to three weeks produces a picture nobody can dismiss. Two patterns it surfaces consistently:

• The noise is more frequent than you think. People remember the worst nights and forget the mediocre ones. Most logs show daily occurrences where the complainant had assumed three or four times a week.
• The noise has a pattern. Sundays and Thursdays. After 11 PM. Mostly around 2 AM. Patterns make solutions easier to identify and easier to ask for.

If you intend to escalate, the log is also the evidence the committee, the building manager, the strata manager or the tribunal will look at first. Without a log, every escalation begins on the back foot.

Step four: the building's internal channels

If the resident-to-resident sequence has been tried and has not worked over two to four weeks, the next move is to involve the building, not yet the legal process.

The order, roughly:

1. The building manager or caretaker (if there is one). Often able to have a quiet word that lands differently coming from a building representative than from a fellow resident. The conversation should be private and informal.
2. The strata committee. A short, calm email to the chair or secretary, attaching the noise log and the written note already sent, asking for the committee's assistance. The committee can issue an informal request, a reminder of the relevant by-law, or in some cases a formal notice.
3. The strata manager. The strata manager is usually instructed by the committee at this point, not approached directly. They can issue a formal warning letter, a notice to comply with the by-law (in NSW), or the state-equivalent step.

What none of these parties can do is impose a behaviour change. They can write letters, set rules, and escalate to tribunals. They cannot make the neighbour move a piece of furniture or take their shoes off indoors. The willingness of the neighbour to cooperate, ideally surfaced in step one, remains the hinge.

Step five: formal action

If the issue is not resolved through internal channels, the path differs by state:

• NSW: A breach of by-law notice from the owners corporation, followed if needed by an application to NCAT (the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal). Police can attend for noise that meets the threshold under the Protection of the Environment Operations (Noise Control) Regulation.
• Victoria: A breach of owners corporation rules notice, followed if needed by an application to VCAT. Council and EPA Victoria both have roles for environmental noise.
• Queensland: A breach of by-laws notice from the body corporate, followed by the BCCM dispute resolution process. Police can attend for noise complaints under the Police Powers Act.
• WA, SA, Tasmania, ACT, NT: Each has its own scheme rules and tribunal or court structure. The pattern is similar: written notice from the body corporate, then formal proceedings.

Police are an option for noise that is happening right now and is breaching the relevant local regulation, particularly late at night. The police role is to ask the noise to stop. They will not generally pursue prosecution for ordinary residential noise; the value of the call is the immediate intervention and the contemporaneous record on the police log.

"Annoying" vs "actionable" noise

The most common reason a formal complaint fails is that the noise, while disturbing, is not unreasonable in the legal sense.

Actionable noise in nearly all Australian jurisdictions has three components:

• It is unreasonable in volume, duration or time of day.
• It interferes with the quiet enjoyment of another lot.
• The party causing it has had reasonable opportunity to address it and has not.

Things that are usually actionable: amplified music after 10 PM (earlier on Sundays in some states), regular parties, machinery noise outside hours, ongoing dog barking, repeated banging that wakes other residents at night.

Things that are usually not actionable: occasional baby crying, ordinary footsteps during the day, a vacuum cleaner at 11 AM, an isolated party once a year, a renovation during permitted hours, normal voices behind a wall.

The actionable column is much shorter than people expect, and committees deal with a steady stream of complaints about noise in the second category. The framing that gets a useful response from the committee is not "this is too loud" but "this is unreasonable in volume or time, and I have evidence it has continued after a reasonable request to address it."

The main noise complaints post covers the jurisdictional detail and what tribunals have decided in recent cases. This post is the playbook for getting there.

A note on tenants vs owners

Most rented apartments have a clause in the lease requiring the tenant to comply with the building's by-laws or rules. A complaint to the landlord (via the property manager) is often more effective than a complaint to the tenant, because the landlord has direct contractual leverage that no other party in the building has.

A short email to the property manager with the noise log attached, and a request that they remind the tenant of their lease obligations, produces a result more often than not. The threat in the background is that an unaddressed by-law breach can become a tribunal matter, with the tenant named, which is the landlord's commercial problem to manage.

Acoustic problems vs behaviour problems

Some noise is a building problem rather than a neighbour problem. Hard floors above carpeted ones, removed acoustic underlay during a renovation, exposed plumbing risers in a wall cavity, a poorly-sealed door to a corridor. The fix is acoustic, not behavioural.

The signal is that the noise is constant rather than tied to a specific behaviour. Footsteps every time anyone walks anywhere upstairs is acoustic. Footsteps at 2 AM most nights but not others is behavioural.

For acoustic issues:

• In NSW, AS 1276 governs flooring acoustic performance. Most by-laws require approval for hard-floor installations and a minimum acoustic rating, which a renovator should have complied with. If they did not, the by-law breach is the lever.
• In other states, the relevant standard varies. The committee should know what its building's by-laws or rules require.
• An acoustic report from a licensed consultant is usually $1,500 to $3,000. It is the document that turns a "he said, she said" floor dispute into a tribunal-grade case.

The cases that will not resolve

A small fraction of noise disputes will not resolve through any of the above. The neighbour is unwilling to engage, the by-law breach is contested, the tribunal process drags on for months, and the affected party eventually moves out.

This is the worst outcome the building can produce, and it tends to happen when steps one through three were skipped. A building that takes early resident-to-resident contact seriously, and that backs it up with a committee culture of intervening early when it does not work, has fewer of these cases than one that defers everything to the strata manager.

Two legal systems, not one: by-laws and environmental noise

Apartment noise sits in two places at once. The scheme’s by-laws or rules deal with quiet enjoyment and specific behaviours (hard floors, parties, pets, renovation hours). The state’s environment-protection law deals with offensive or unreasonable noise as a public-law problem. Using the wrong system is why so many complaints die.

In New South Wales the by-law path is a written section 146 notice to comply under the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015, then NCAT if the conduct continues. The environmental path is the Protection of the Environment Operations Act 1997 and the Protection of the Environment Operations (Noise Control) Regulation 2017. Police commonly use the Regulation for amplified music and musical instruments in the night-time restricted period (generally after midnight on Friday and Saturday, and after 10 pm on other days — check the current Regulation, because the hours are prescribed). They can direct the noise to stop. They do not rewrite the by-laws and they do not order carpet.

Victoria splits the same way. Owners-corporation rules are enforced with a section 155 notice under the Owners Corporations Act 2006, then VCAT. Unreasonable noise as an environmental issue sits under the Environment Protection Act 2017, with council and EPA Victoria as the usual agencies. Queensland uses by-law contravention notices under section 182 and section 183 of the Body Corporate and Community Management Act 1997, plus police and local-law powers for night noise. Western Australia’s Strata Titles Act 1985 is the scheme-rules path; local government and police handle the rest.

Call the police when the noise is happening now and is loud enough that a reasonable person would not tolerate it at that hour. Use the by-law path when the problem is a pattern: weekly parties, a dog left barking, a renovation that ignores the hours, footsteps that only happen because the underlay was never installed. Do not expect NCAT or VCAT to fine someone for a single Friday night that the police already attended.

Evidence that survives a tribunal, and evidence that does not

A diary that says “loud again” is not evidence. A log that a member can read in five minutes is.

For each event record the date, start and finish times, what the noise was (bass, footsteps, shouting, dog, machinery), where you were when you heard it, and what you did (knocked, noted, called the manager, called police). If police attend, write down the event number. If the building manager speaks to the lot, ask for a one-line confirmation by email the same day.

Recordings are useful and legally sensitive. In several states it is an offence to record a private conversation without consent. A recording of music thudding through a slab is usually a recording of noise, not of a conversation, but do not record voices in the corridor or a conversation at the door. If in doubt, do not record speech. Photographs of a party visible from common property, and a police event number, will carry more weight than a secret phone in the hallway.

An acoustic report is the document that turns a flooring dispute from “they walk heavily” into a number. In NSW, hard-floor installations are commonly controlled by a by-law that requires committee approval and a minimum weighted standardised impact sound pressure level (L’nT,w). AS/ISO 717 and the related field-measurement methods are what the consultant will use; older by-laws still refer to AS 1276. If the renovator never obtained approval, the by-law breach is the lever, not a debate about manners. The floor coverings guide is the state-by-state version.

Keep the log, the notes, the police numbers and the acoustic report in one file. When the strata manager finally issues a notice, that file is the notice. A manager who is handed a feeling will write a weak letter.

Tenants, short stays and the person who has leverage

A tenant’s lease almost always requires compliance with the by-laws. The landlord, through the managing agent, can issue a breach notice under the tenancy legislation. That notice can end the tenancy if the conduct is serious or repeated. The owners corporation cannot end a tenancy. It can make the landlord’s life expensive enough that the landlord does.

Write to the managing agent, not only to the occupant. Attach the log. Quote the by-law. Ask for a written response in seven days. Copy the owners-corporation secretary so the building’s file matches the tenancy file.

Short-stay lots are a different product. The occupant will be gone before a section 146 notice expires. The useful targets are the lot owner and, where the state scheme allows it, restrictions on short-stay use. Victoria’s existing short-stay framework and the 2024 levy are described in the short-term rental post. Do not spend six weeks building a case against a guest who has already checked out.

What a committee can promise, and what it cannot

The committee can issue a notice, instruct the manager, pay for an acoustic report on common property, and apply to the tribunal. It cannot make someone take their shoes off, and it cannot promise that ordinary daytime living will become inaudible. Selling that promise is how committees lose the next election and how complainants end up in a dispute with the building instead of the neighbour.

If the noise is the building — a missing acoustic break, a bare slab above a bedroom, a door closer that slams every hour — treat it as a maintenance item under the duty to keep common property in repair, not as a personality conflict. Section 106 in NSW and section 46 in Victoria are the right headings for a slamming common door. They are the wrong headings for a neighbour who cooks at 7 pm.

Say that out loud at the start. The cases that resolve are the ones where everyone agrees which system they are in.

How UnitBuddy fits

UnitBuddy is the building's own software. For noise complaints, the practical use is the shared record: the noise log, the written notes, the building manager's interventions, the committee's actions, all in one place that the affected party and the committee can both see. A complaint that reaches the strata manager arrives with the evidence already organised, which shortens every step that follows.

For the committee, having every complaint in one timeline surfaces patterns the strata manager would never see: the lot that has produced four complaints in eighteen months, the floor in the building that has acoustic complaints from every unit below, the by-law breach that has been issued and ignored twice. Most noise issues resolve at the relationship layer before they reach a by-law process; the building's records matter most when the relationship layer has been worked and the formal process has to begin.

Further reading

• Noise Complaints in Apartments: What Strata Can and Can't Enforce
• Floor Coverings in Strata: State by State
• Strata Disputes: How to Raise One Properly
• Strata Committee Powers Guide

Keep the scheme file in one place the committee and the manager can both open. Features, pricing, or book a tour.