Product safety recalls: the recall process and the two-day injury report

Two duties that are easy to confuse

Australian product safety law contains two separate two-day clocks, and a business can breach one without breaching the other.

The first is the mandatory injury report. If you become aware that a consumer good or product-related service you supply caused, or may have caused, a death, serious injury or serious illness, you must report it to the ACCC within two days. That duty applies whether or not you recall anything.

The second is the recall notification. If you take a voluntary recall action, section 128 of the Australian Consumer Law requires you to tell the Commonwealth Minister within two days of taking that action. That duty applies whether or not anyone has been hurt.

Suppliers frequently assume a single notification satisfies both. It does not. A product that has injured someone and is then recalled triggers both obligations, on separate forms, with separate content requirements. Our product safety recall obligation record and the recall readiness tool walk through both.

Both duties sit alongside the standing requirement to comply with mandatory safety standards and bans and, for goods containing button or coin batteries, the button battery standards.

When a mandatory injury report is triggered

You must submit a report within two days of becoming aware that a consumer good or product-related service you supply caused, or may have caused, a death, serious injury or serious illness.

The ACCC's product safety guidance sets out the threshold precisely. An injury or illness is serious where it is acute — meaning it is severe and arose suddenly, rather than gradual or pre-existing — and where it requires medical or surgical treatment by, or under the supervision of, a nurse or medical practitioner, even if that treatment was not actually received (ACCC Product Safety, checked August 2026).

Four features of the duty catch suppliers out:

• Foreseeable misuse counts. The obligation is engaged even where the product was used in a way you did not intend, provided that use was foreseeable.
• "May have caused" is enough. You do not need to have established causation. Waiting for a conclusive investigation before reporting is the wrong sequence.
• Everyone in the supply chain is captured. Manufacturers, importers, distributors and retailers each hold the duty in their own right.
• Weekends do not stop the clock, but they can move the deadline. If the day the report is due falls on a weekend or public holiday, the deadline moves to the next business day.

Two points reduce the internal resistance that often delays reporting: mandatory reports are confidential, and the ACCC states expressly that a report is not an admission of liability.

Notifying the Minister of a voluntary recall

Section 128 of the Australian Consumer Law requires a supplier who takes a voluntary recall action to notify the Commonwealth Minister within two days of taking that action.

The ACCC's guidance states plainly: "You are required under s128 of the Australian Consumer Law to tell us of the recall", and the notice must be lodged within two days of taking a recall action. If the first day falls on a weekend that day still counts as day one; if the second day falls on a weekend or public holiday, the form must be sent by the end of the next business day (ACCC Product Safety, checked August 2026).

The notice must address, among other things:

• where the goods contain a defect, are dangerous or have a dangerous characteristic, why they are defective or dangerous
• whether foreseeable use or misuse of the goods is dangerous
• whether the goods comply with any applicable safety standard
• whether an interim or permanent ban applies
• any deaths, serious injuries or serious illnesses associated with the goods

A separate ten-day duty applies where the recalled goods were supplied outside Australia: the supplier must notify overseas recipients and provide a copy of that notice to the ACCC.

After lodgement the ACCC assesses the notice for compliance and for whether the recall strategy is suitable, contacts the supplier about any changes needed, publishes the recall notice on the Product Safety Australia website, and may promote it to increase consumer awareness.

The recall process step by step

The ACCC frames a recall as an eight-step sequence, and the notification sits at step two rather than at the end.

1. Determine whether a recall is needed. Assess whether the safety issue warrants a recall action at all.
2. Notify the ACCC within two days of taking a recall action.
3. Identify the affected products. Name, model, serial numbers, batch numbers, production dates and manufacturer, together with a clear description of the defect.
4. Prepare for the recall. Build the recall plan, and stop sale, manufacture, import and advertising of the product.
5. Select the remedy. Repair, replacement, refund or cancellation, aligned to Australian Consumer Law remedies. Plan how you will handle second-hand goods that contain the recalled component.
6. Communicate the strategy. Multiple channels, early and often, to consumers and to everyone in the supply chain.
7. Track and report. Monitor uptake and adjust where the recall is not reaching people.
8. Finalise the recall. Close out on the basis of risk reduction, not on the basis of elapsed time.

The ACCC's supplier checklist for conducting a recall sets out each step in operational detail. The ACCC's updated recall guidelines cover the full arc: stopping supply, informing the relevant authorities, warning consumers of the hazard, and offering a repair, replacement or refund.

What consumers must be told

Recall communications must make the hazard, the affected products and the remedy unmistakable, and must reach the people who actually hold the product.

The ACCC's position is that effective recalls require clear and direct communication, often across multiple channels. In practice that means a recall advertisement deployed through the channels your customers actually use — social media, email, in-store notices, your website and, where the product was sold through third parties, the retailers who sold it.

Two related legal exposures sit alongside the recall itself:

• Remedies. A recall does not displace the statutory remedies. Where the goods are not of acceptable quality, the consumer's rights under the consumer guarantees continue to apply, and a major failure gives the consumer the choice of remedy.
• Recall messaging. Downplaying the hazard, overstating the rarity of the fault, or describing a mandatory recall as a "voluntary quality programme" can itself be misleading conduct. See our explainer on sections 18 and 29 of the ACL.

Progress reporting and closing the recall

A recall is not finished when the notice is published. The ACCC expects a progress report one month after publication and then at agreed intervals.

The checklist directs suppliers to submit a recall progress report one month after the recall is published and then at agreed times, tracking how many affected products have been remedied. Suppliers must continue providing the remedy until the products are accounted for, then formally notify the ACCC when the recall concludes.

Two practical consequences follow. First, you need a data structure at the outset that can report response rates — units supplied, units remedied, units unaccounted for — because retrofitting that at month one is painful. Second, a low response rate is not a reason to close the recall; it is a reason to change the communication strategy.

Penalties and enforcement focus

Failing to make a required mandatory report may be prosecuted as a criminal offence or attract a pecuniary penalty, and supplying goods that do not comply with a mandatory safety standard or ban attracts the top tier of Australian Consumer Law penalties.

For conduct on or after 28 March 2026, the maximum pecuniary penalty for a corporation for most ACL contraventions — including supplying consumer goods or product-related services that do not comply with safety standards or that are banned — is the greater of $100,000,000, three times the value of the reasonably attributable benefit obtained, or 30% of adjusted turnover during the breach turnover period. For an individual the maximum is $2,500,000 (ACCC fines and penalties, checked August 2026). Model your own exposure with the penalty estimator rather than working from a remembered figure — the corporate maximum changed in 2026.

Enforcement attention is not evenly distributed. Among the ACCC's compliance and enforcement priorities for 2026-27 is consumer product safety for young children, with a focus on compliance with the button battery, infant sleep and toppling furniture mandatory standards. Suppliers in those categories should assume their standards compliance, incident reporting and recall readiness will be tested.

This article is a reference summary and not legal advice. Confirm current requirements with the ACCC before acting on a specific incident.