Australian Trades Industry Statistics (2026): Tradies, Demand and Digital

Australia's trades industry is enormous, under strain, and only partly online. As of June 2025 there were 462,939 construction businesses operating in Australia, more than any other industry, and 98.6 per cent of them are small businesses with fewer than 20 employees, according to ABS figures compiled by Master Builders Australia (2025). At the same time, trades are the hardest occupations in the country to fill, apprentice commencements are falling, and surveys keep finding that most trades businesses still lean on word of mouth while customers increasingly hire online.

We put this page together as a single, properly sourced reference for anyone writing about Australian tradies, whether you're a journalist, a researcher, or a trades business owner sizing up your own market. Every number below is linked to its original source with the year attached, and marketplace figures published by companies like hipages and ServiceSeeking are labelled as self-reported. If you work in the trades and want to act on what these numbers imply, our guide to SEO for tradies is the practical companion piece.

Key Statistics at a Glance

1. 462,939 construction businesses operated in Australia as of June 2025, the most of any industry (ABS via Master Builders Australia, 2025).
2. 1.32 million people worked in building and construction as of August 2025, about 9 per cent of all Australian jobs (Master Builders Australia, 2025).
3. Building and construction work done totalled $324.6 billion in the year to June 2025, equivalent to 11.7 per cent of GDP (Master Builders Australia, 2025).
4. 50 per cent of technicians and trades occupations were assessed as being in national shortage on the 2025 Occupation Shortage List (Jobs and Skills Australia, 2025).
5. Employers filled just 54.3 per cent of advertised trade and technical vacancies, well below the 70.2 per cent all-occupation average (Jobs and Skills Australia 2025 OSL Key Findings Report).
6. Trade apprenticeship commencements fell 4.2 per cent to 76,585 in the year to December 2025, the third consecutive annual decline (NCVER, 2025).
7. Just 197,340 new homes commenced construction in the 12 months to March 2026, almost 30 per cent below the 240,000 a year needed to hit the National Housing Accord target (HIA, 2026).
8. The average full-time tradie earned $89,300 in 2025, while self-employed tradies averaged around $142,000 in turnover before expenses (ProTrades Insurance 2025 Earnings Report).
9. 70 per cent of Australian tradies say word of mouth is how they win work, yet 76 per cent also credit their website, and only 17 per cent use SEO (ServiceTitan Australian Tradies Market Report, 2025).
10. hipages self-reports over 100,000 jobs posted monthly, one every 25 seconds, with more than 12 million jobs posted to date (hipages Group, 2025).

How Big Is Australia's Trades Industry

Construction is Australia's biggest industry by business count, and it's dominated by exactly the kind of small operators Orkkid works with every day: sole traders, husband-and-wife outfits, and crews of a handful of people.

• There were 462,939 construction businesses in operation across Australia as of June 2025, and 98.6 per cent of them are small businesses with fewer than 20 employees (ABS Counts of Australian Businesses via Master Builders Australia, 2025).
• The industry employed 1.32 million people as of August 2025, roughly 9 per cent of all jobs in the economy, with 85.3 per cent of those roles full time (Master Builders Australia, 2025).
• The value of building and construction work done reached $324.6 billion in the year ending June 2025, directly equivalent to 11.7 per cent of GDP (Master Builders Australia, 2025).
• Construction businesses paid out $93.9 billion in wages and salaries in 2024-25 (Master Builders Australia, 2025).
• On the residential side, hipages-commissioned research by L.E.K. estimated Australian households spend more than $73 billion a year on trades, across roughly 70 million paid residential jobs annually. This is a marketplace-commissioned estimate from 2018, so treat it as indicative rather than official (hipages, EY Sweeney and L.E.K. research, 2018).

The practical takeaway: with nearly half a million businesses competing and almost all of them small, no single tradie brand dominates. Visibility, not size, decides who gets the call.

The Trade Shortage: Demand Keeps Outstripping Supply

Every credible dataset points the same way. Australia does not have enough tradies, and the pipeline is not refilling fast enough.

• On the 2025 Occupation Shortage List, 50 per cent of technicians and trades occupations were assessed as being in national shortage, the highest of any occupation group (Jobs and Skills Australia, 2025).
• Employers managed to fill only 54.3 per cent of advertised vacancies for trade and technical (Skill Level 3) roles, against a national average fill rate of 70.2 per cent (Jobs and Skills Australia 2025 OSL Key Findings Report).
• Just 197,340 new homes commenced construction in the 12 months to March 2026, almost 30 per cent below the 240,000 annual rate needed to reach the government's 1.2 million homes target. The HIA estimates real demand is closer to 250,000 homes a year (HIA, 2026).
• The apprenticeship pipeline is shrinking: trade commencements fell 4.2 per cent (down 3,390 to 76,585) in the 12 months to 31 December 2025, the third consecutive annual decline (NCVER Apprentices and Trainees, December quarter 2025).
• Training is heavily concentrated in the building trades: construction, automotive and engineering, and electrotechnology and telecommunications trades together account for around 82 per cent of all trade contracts in-training (NCVER, 2025).
• Master Builders notes construction employment actually declined 2.1 per cent over the year to August 2025, even as the workload targets grew (Master Builders Australia, 2025).

For homeowners this means longer waits and higher quotes. For trades businesses it means demand is rarely the problem. Being the business the customer finds first is.

What Tradies Earn

Earnings data for tradies comes from a mix of official labour statistics and private surveys, so figures vary by methodology. The most recent consolidated analysis comes from ProTrades Insurance, which combined ABS Labour Force Survey data, salary platforms, and its own policyholder declarations from more than 2,100 tradies.

• The average full-time tradie earned $89,300 in 2025, up 4.8 per cent year on year, while self-employed tradies averaged around $142,000 in turnover before expenses (ProTrades Insurance, 2025).
• The top-earning trades in that analysis were electricians ($96,000 employed, $168,000 self-employed turnover) and plumbers ($94,500 employed, $176,000 self-employed turnover), with air-conditioning and refrigeration techs close behind at $92,400 and $165,000 (ProTrades Insurance, 2025).
• Western Australia was the highest-paying state at an average of $98,900, ahead of the Northern Territory ($95,500) and the ACT ($93,200) (ProTrades Insurance, 2025).
• Rates have been climbing fast. ServiceSeeking's self-reported platform data shows arborists lifted hourly rates 56.9 per cent between 2022/23 and 2023/24, from about $60 to over $93 an hour, with labourers up 35.7 per cent, landscapers up 25.5 per cent, demolition companies up 20.7 per cent and builders up 20.6 per cent (ServiceSeeking, 2024).

It is no accident that the highest earners, electricians and plumbers, are also among the most searched-for trades online. If that's you, our pages for plumbers, electricians and HVAC businesses show what winning that search demand looks like in practice.

How Customers Actually Find Tradies

The tension at the heart of the industry: tradies believe in word of mouth, and customers increasingly behave digitally.

• In ServiceTitan's 2025 survey of 1,025 Australian tradies and trade executives, 70 per cent named word of mouth as a way they win work. But 76 per cent also credited their website, and 29 per cent use Google Ads (ServiceTitan Australian Tradies Market Report, 2025).
• On the customer side, hipages-commissioned research found 50 per cent of Australians said they were more likely to hire tradies online than five years earlier, while 47 per cent still rely on personal networks for recommendations (hipages and EY Sweeney, 2018).
• The same research found 77 per cent of Australians want to see recommendations of a tradie before hiring them, and 43 per cent complain that tradies are never available when needed (hipages and EY Sweeney, 2018).
• Marketplaces have scaled on that shift. hipages self-reports over 100,000 jobs posted monthly on average, one every 25 seconds, and more than 12 million jobs posted to date, with over 5 million Australians having posted a job and about 33,000 subscribed tradie members (hipages Group Quick Facts, 2025).
• hipages also sizes the addressable trade market across Australia and New Zealand at $175.6 billion across roughly 382,000 trade businesses, and reported FY25 revenue of $83.1 million, up 10 per cent (hipages Group, 2025; hipages Annual Report 2025). These are the company's own published figures.

Notice the arithmetic here. Word of mouth still matters, but it now travels through Google, reviews and recommendation platforms. A recommendation that can't be verified online increasingly dies before it converts.

The Digital Gap: Where Trades Businesses Fall Behind Online

The demand is online. Much of the industry isn't, and that gap is the single biggest free opportunity in Australian trades marketing.

• Only 17 per cent of Australian tradies use SEO to win work, and just 24 per cent use email marketing, despite 76 per cent acknowledging their website brings them business (ServiceTitan, 2025).
• 43 per cent of trades businesses still run on pen and paper or basic software, pointing to low digital maturity across operations as well as marketing (ServiceTitan, 2025).
• Admin quietly eats revenue: tradies surveyed by EY Sweeney spent an average of 14 hours a week on quoting and admin, and one in four had passed up work because of it, worth an estimated $120,000 a year in missed jobs for some trades (hipages and EY Sweeney, 2018).
• Meanwhile the supply of competitors keeps growing. With 462,939 construction businesses and only a fraction investing in search visibility (Master Builders Australia, 2025; ServiceTitan, 2025), the tradies who do rank locally capture outsized demand.

Put the two ServiceTitan numbers side by side. Seventy per cent of tradies rely on word of mouth, and 17 per cent invest in SEO. In a market where half the trades are in shortage and customers are hiring online, that 17 per cent is competing for page one against almost nobody. That is precisely the gap SEO is built to exploit, and it's why trade businesses tend to see faster local SEO results than crowded white-collar industries.

Methodology and Sources

This roundup was compiled in 2026 from publicly available Australian sources. We prioritised, in order: official statistics (ABS data as published, and as compiled by Master Builders Australia), government bodies (Jobs and Skills Australia, NCVER), industry associations (Master Builders Australia, HIA), and finally company-published data (hipages Group, ServiceSeeking, ServiceTitan, ProTrades Insurance), which we label as self-reported or survey-based wherever it appears.

Notes on interpretation:

• ABS business counts cover the Construction division, which includes builders and construction trade services but not every business a consumer would call a "tradie" (for example, some cleaning or landscaping operators sit in other divisions).
• Marketplace figures from hipages and ServiceSeeking describe activity on those platforms and are published by the companies themselves. They are useful directional indicators, not audited market statistics.
• Survey findings (ServiceTitan 2025, n=1,025; EY Sweeney 2018, n=518 consumers and 500 tradies) reflect the samples surveyed, and the 2018 consumer research predates the post-COVID acceleration in online hiring, so it likely understates today's digital behaviour.
• Earnings figures blend ABS labour data with private salary sources and insurer declarations, so they should be read as indicative ranges.

Primary sources: Master Builders Australia, Jobs and Skills Australia, NCVER, HIA, hipages Group, ServiceSeeking, ServiceTitan, ProTrades Insurance.

FAQ

How many trade businesses are there in Australia?

There were 462,939 construction businesses operating in Australia as of June 2025, according to ABS counts compiled by Master Builders Australia (2025). That makes construction the country's largest industry by number of businesses, and 98.6 per cent of them employ fewer than 20 people. hipages separately estimates around 382,000 trade businesses across Australia and New Zealand in its own addressable-market figures.

Is there really a tradie shortage in Australia?

Yes, and it's measurable. Jobs and Skills Australia's 2025 Occupation Shortage List assessed 50 per cent of technicians and trades occupations as being in national shortage, and employers filled only 54.3 per cent of advertised trade vacancies against a 70.2 per cent national average. Meanwhile NCVER data (2025) shows trade apprenticeship commencements have fallen three years running.

How much does the average tradie earn in Australia?

The ProTrades Insurance 2025 Earnings Report, which combines ABS Labour Force data with salary platforms and insurer declarations, puts the average full-time tradie at $89,300 a year, with self-employed tradies averaging about $142,000 in turnover before expenses. Electricians and plumbers top the table, which matches the shortage data from Jobs and Skills Australia.

Do tradies still get most of their work from word of mouth?

Word of mouth remains the most-cited channel: 70 per cent of tradies named it in ServiceTitan's 2025 Australian Tradies Market Report. But the same survey found 76 per cent credit their website with winning work, and hipages-commissioned research found half of Australians are more likely to hire tradies online than they were five years earlier. In practice, word of mouth now gets checked online before it becomes a booked job. Our tradie SEO guide covers how to capture that behaviour.

What share of tradies invest in SEO?

Just 17 per cent, according to ServiceTitan (2025), against 29 per cent using Google Ads and 70 per cent relying on word of mouth. Given half of all trade occupations are in shortage and demand is chronically unmet, that low adoption is why local trades SEO remains one of the least contested channels in Australian small-business marketing.

Cite These Statistics

You're welcome to use any statistic on this page in your own articles, reports or presentations. Please credit Orkkid with a link to this page as the compiling source, and cite the original data owner (ABS, Master Builders Australia, Jobs and Skills Australia, NCVER, HIA, hipages, ServiceSeeking, ServiceTitan or ProTrades Insurance) for the underlying figure. If you'd like the full dataset behind any section, or a comment on what the numbers mean for trades marketing, get in touch through our SEO services page.

For more research and guides like this, browse the rest of our SEO articles.