What a Decade of Real Quote Data Reveals About Tradie Pricing in Australia

Adelaide plumbers quote a median of $203 per hour. Melbourne plumbers quote $104. Same trade, same country, nearly double the price, and almost nobody publishing cost guides in Australia can tell you that, because almost nobody has the data.

We do. Since 2015, homeowners have submitted hundreds of thousands of quote requests through Service.com.au, spanning 165 trade categories, 7,631 suburbs, and 2,262 postcodes, and the platform has sent out millions of notifications for work to the tradies matched to those jobs. Verified businesses responded with real quotes. That dataset, not surveys or scraped job ads, is the most direct picture available of what Australians actually pay for trade services. We're going to start publishing it.

"It depends" is the wrong answer

Search "how much does a plumber cost in Australia" and you'll get pages saying some version of "it depends on the job, the location, and the complexity." Technically true. Practically useless.

A homeowner asking that question wants a number they can hold against the quote sitting in their inbox. We have those numbers, so here they are.

What the data says

Median hourly rates from the past 12 months (June 2025 to May 2026), drawn from quotes submitted by verified tradies on Service.com.au. Medians, not averages, because one $50,000 renovation quote would wreck an average. Cells with fewer than 30 data points are excluded.

Plumbing

Adelaide is the outlier, and not by a little. The wide P25-P75 spread ($120-$275) suggests a split market, routine maintenance at one end, specialist and emergency work at the other.

Electrical

Electrical pricing is the most uniform trade we measured. $100 to $130 covers every capital. Melbourne is consistently the cheapest market for sparky work, while Perth's upper range runs hottest ($150 at P75), likely a pull from mining-adjacent and industrial work.

Painting

Sydney's $80 figure with P25 and P75 both at $80, the most statistically robust single number in the dataset. Gold Coast painters are the cheapest at $52, which is 35% below Sydney.

Cleaning

Cleaning is the most affordable trade everywhere, and Perth's $40 is the lowest rate for any trade in any city we measured. Adelaide's $70 sits 75% above it, the widest inter-city spread of any trade.

Landscaping

Sydney's vast amount of landscaping data points make it the largest cell in the entire dataset. Melbourne landscapers quote 25% under Sydney.

Building and Construction

Building rates are compressed. Sydney and Melbourne sit within a dollar of each other. Adelaide leads at $90, but with a tight $90-$95 band that reads as a stable, well-established local rate rather than a squeeze.

Three things that surprised us

Adelaide is the most expensive plumbing market in the country, by miles. $203 against Melbourne's $104. Not what most people expect from a city generally considered lower-cost. South Australia's smaller pool of licensed plumbers relative to population, plus a sustained housing construction run, is the most plausible driver.

Cleaning spreads are enormous. Perth at $40, Adelaide at $70. A 75% gap for essentially the same service. Labour markets for unlicensed trades clearly behave very differently from licensed ones.

Spring is peak season, not summer. October and November are consistently our busiest months across the dataset, not January or February. If you want a tradie's full attention, book in winter.

A few more findings worth having on hand. The median time from posting a job to receiving a first quote is 11.2 minutes, measured across hundreds of thousands of jobs. And the most-requested trade in Australia isn't plumbing or electrical, it's handyman work, ahead of cleaning in second place and plumbing in third.

Methodology and caveats

Quoted rates from verified businesses on Service.com.au, June 2025 to May 2026, minimum 30 data points per published cell, with a $20-$500/hr sanity filter applied. Only a subset of quotes carry structured hourly rates; many jobs are quoted fixed-price or negotiated off-platform. Several Sydney cells show very tight interquartile ranges, which suggests platform-default rates are common, so real-world variance is probably wider than those cells imply. Full methodology will ship with the Australian Tradie Pricing Index.

That Index, quarterly updates, every major trade, P25/P75 ranges and sample sizes per city, is what this post previews. The dataset grows every day a homeowner posts a job, which means the picture sharpens every quarter. Watch this space.