About cost categories
A summary of compliance cost categories
When using the Regulatory burden measure, identify the compliance tasks and activities associated with a regulation. There are 9 cost categories. One, some or all of these might relate to the activities you create. The cost categories are the costs that businesses, community organisations or individuals face for a certain activity under a task to be completed.
With the exception of 'purchase cost' and ‘delay cost’, the cost categories are labour activity-based costs. The costs could either be start-up or ongoing. Costs are then further broken down into internal or outsourced costs.
'Purchase cost' includes only outsourced costs and relates to the purchase of a service or product.
‘Delay costs’ are the expenses and loss of income incurred through a lost opportunity caused by an application or approval delay.
'Other' is any other labour activity-based costing.
Opportunity costs
Note: With the exception of delay costs, compliance costs do not include opportunity costs. For our purposes, opportunity cost refers to the value of an alternative action that must be forgone to pursue another action – for example, the potential income forgone on the use of a parcel of land that, by regulation, may not be cleared.
The following tables set out cost categories and examples for each cost segment (business, government and community).