Eleven Minutes: What Our Response-Time Data Says About Hiring Tradies

The median time between a homeowner posting a job on Service.com.au and the first response arriving is 11.2 minutes. Not hours. Not "we'll get back to you within two business days." Eleven minutes, measured across hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Price gets all the attention in tradie content, ours included. But when your hot water system dies on a Friday night, the question that actually matters isn't "what's the median hourly rate," it's "how fast can someone real respond?" Our platform happens to measure exactly that, at scale, across a decade. Here's what the data shows.

Speed is the trust signal nobody talks about

A fast response tells you several things at once. The business is active, it's monitoring its inbox, it has capacity or at least the professionalism to say so, and it wants the work. Slow or absent responses are how homeowners end up chasing three different recommendations over a fortnight for a job that takes an afternoon.

That 11.2-minute median is also a behavioural finding about the trades themselves: the businesses winning work on the platform treat job notifications the way the rest of us treat text messages. The platform has sent millions of notifications for work to tradies over the years, and the ones who respond inside the first hour are consistently the ones who win the job. Speed compounds.

For homeowners, the practical takeaway runs the other direction. If you've posted a clear job with photos and heard nothing in a day, the problem usually isn't the market, it's the post. Vague descriptions get triaged last. Which is, candidly, part of why we built an AI assistant to help people describe jobs properly in the first place.

Spring is peak season, not summer

Across the dataset, October and November are consistently the busiest months for job postings. Not January. Not the post-Christmas burst people assume.

The pattern makes sense once you see it. Spring is when Australians look at the garden after winter, when pre-summer maintenance gets real, and when "we should fix that before Christmas" enters the household conversation. Demand then stays elevated into early summer before easing.

Two practical reads:

If you're a homeowner: book in winter. June through August is when response times are sharpest, schedules are more flexible, and you're not competing with every other household's pre-Christmas list. The worst time to need a landscaper urgently is the first week of November.

If you're a tradie: spring demand is predictable, which means winter is when listing profiles, reviews, and response habits should get sharpened. The businesses that arrive at October with a Recommended badge and a fast-response track record harvest the peak. The ones who start optimising in October are too late.

The most-requested trade isn't plumbing

Handyman work is the number one most-requested trade category on Service.com.au, ahead of cleaning in second place and plumbing in third, with carpentry and electrical rounding out the top five.

That surprised us when we first ran the numbers, and it shouldn't have. Most household jobs aren't emergencies and don't map neatly to a licensed trade. They're the shelf that needs mounting, the door that won't close, the gutter that needs clearing. The licensed trades dominate the conversation about tradies; the unlicensed ones dominate the actual demand.

It also explains a pattern in our pricing data: the widest price spreads occur in trades without licensing barriers, because anyone with a ute and an ABN can enter. Cleaning rates vary 75% between Perth and Adelaide. Electrical rates vary about 30% nationwide. Licensing compresses markets.

What we're doing with this

Response time, seasonality, and demand mix are all heading into the Australian Tradie Pricing Index alongside the rate tables, updated quarterly, with sample sizes and methodology attached. Pricing tells you what a job costs. This data tells you when to post it, what to expect afterwards, and how to read the silence if quotes don't come. Both halves matter, and from here we'll be publishing both.