Structural engineers will for the first time have a national method for designing cross-laminated timber floors, walls, and stairs, under a 46-page draft industry standard now out for comment. That is according to FWPA Standard D02, published on Tuesday, which Forest and Wood Products Australia has written to form the basis of a future CLT section inside the 2010 edition of AS 1720.1, the national timber design standard.
It comes after the architect behind New South Wales’s first mass timber social housing urged Australia to adopt nationally accessible guidelines and publicly available testing, having delivered a Glebe project backed by The King’s Trust Australia where every element leaned on Performance Solutions built from British Standards and overseas precedents.
“The NCC offers innovation pathways, but little practical guidance,” wrote Noura Thaha, the GroupGSA project lead on the Glebe redevelopment, adding that no dedicated Australian standard covers CLT in Class 2 apartments. Every penetration, junction, and interface at Cowper Street had to be modelled before fabrication, on towers whose floors rose in as little as a fortnight.
FWPA has put the draft through independent technical review, and set out two routes into the building code in its procedures manual, one through Standards Australia and one as a code-referenced document. Andrew Dunn, chief executive of the Australian Timber Development Association, told FTMA’s National Conference in May that a mid-rise framing standard would publish as an FWPA Industry Standard, calling the Standards Australia process too slow for the 2028 code window.
“Our goal is to have future industry standards incorporated into the Building Code,” Boris Iskra, FWPA’s National Codes and Standards Manager, said when the association’s first industry drafts went out for comment in 2024. FWPA has committed to at least two industry-owned standards a year under the program he leads, and has since published grading rules for recycled hardwood, an exterior cladding standard, and a fastener test method.
Comment on both drafts closes on 29 September, and FWPA has put out a second covering Category C and D fasteners, an alternative to AS 1649:2025 that runs alongside its Category A and B standard. T01, published this year, is written for manufacturers, testing laboratories, engineers, and certifiers, and the new part extends the same test methods to the remaining fastener categories.
Under the draft, limit state methods run alongside the AS/NZS 1170 series, with a capacity factor of 0.85 applied to CLT design capacities. Vibration then governs the floor plate, and the draft allows a 10 per cent increase on the vibration-controlled span where superimposed dead load runs to more than twice the panel’s self-weight.
Any span bought that way still has to stay under 8 metres, and the floor underneath it cannot carry a concrete topping. Designers also cannot use CLT where average moisture content across a 12-month period would exceed 20 per cent, a ceiling the draft says rules out exterior conditions altogether.
A Limitations clause holds the draft to structural elements, with durability, robustness, and connections addressed only insofar as they bear on element design. In fire, the committee sends structural adequacy to a test under AS 1530.4, or to calculation on the residual section using char models.
