What Construction Salaries Actually Look Like Right Now

Every year we ask the same question of the people who build Australia's homes: what are you actually paid, and what would make you leave?

This year 370 residential construction professionals answered. It is the largest data set we have gathered in the four years we have run this survey, and the picture it paints is not the one most people expect.

Here is what the numbers say, and what they mean for you.

Salary is no longer the reason people leave

This is the headline finding, and it caught us slightly off guard.

In 2025, higher base salary was the strongest motivator for considering a new role. More than half of respondents (53.1%) picked it.

In 2026, that figure collapsed to 34.9%. Salary is now the third most common reason people would move.

What overtook it:

• Better workplace culture rose from 34.6% to 48.8%

• More support from management rose from 27.1% to 44.2%

  
  

Read that again, because it changes how you should think about your next move. The single biggest driver of people leaving residential construction jobs right now is not money. It is the experience of being managed badly.

If you have been telling yourself you would stay if the pay were better, it is worth asking whether pay is really the problem.

And working from home is not the answer either

There is a lot of noise about flexibility. The data does not support it.

• Only 6.4% said work from home days would motivate a move

• Only 10.7% said flexible working hours would

• 81% of respondents are full time, office based

  
  

Residential construction remains an overwhelmingly in-person industry, and the people in it are largely fine with that. What they want is not to be at home. It is to be supported when they are at work.

The benefits have quietly disappeared

This was the sharpest shift in the entire survey, and almost nobody is talking about it.

76.7% of respondents now receive no additional benefits at all. Last year that figure was 57.9%.

Compared with 2025, access to the standard extras has fallen off a cliff:

Benefit	2025	2026
Company vehicle	17.5%	5.9%
Laptop or iPad	14.7%	6.7%
Bonus scheme	15.4%	9.4%
Mobile phone or allowance	12.7%	4.6%
Fuel card	10.6%	4.6%

If you are comparing two offers on base salary alone, you are potentially comparing them wrong. A $5,000 difference in base means very little next to a vehicle, a fuel card and a bonus scheme, and those things are now rare enough to be worth naming explicitly in a negotiation.

So, am I underpaid?

Here is where it gets useful. These are base salary averages, excluding super, drawn from the 2026 survey.

Customer Service Officer

Experience	Average
2 to 5 years	$70k
5 to 10 years	$82k
10 to 15 years	$116k
15+ years	$84k

Office Administrator

Experience	Average
2 to 5 years	$60k
5 to 10 years	$84k
10 to 15 years	$90k
15+ years	$96k

Colour Consultant / Interior Designer

Experience	Average
2 to 5 years	$70k
5 to 10 years	$90k
10 to 15 years	$96k

Supervisor

Experience	Average
2 to 5 years	$124k
5 to 10 years	$122k
10 to 15 years	$126k
15+ years	$132k

Construction Manager

Experience	Average
5 to 10 years	$140k
10 to 15 years	$164k
15+ years	$155k

Look closely at those curves. They are not straight lines.

The Supervisor with five to ten years of experience earns, on average, slightly less than the one with two to five. The Customer Service Officer with fifteen years earns considerably less than the one with ten to fifteen. The Construction Manager peaks between ten and fifteen years and then comes back down.

Why experience stops paying

That flattening is the most important thing in this report, and it is the thing candidates most often misread as a personal failing.

It is not. It is structural. Here is what tends to be happening:

You were benchmarked on the day you were hired, and never since. Your salary reflects the market as it was when you signed. Annual increases of two or three percent do not track a market that has moved faster than that. The longer you stay, the further behind you drift. The single biggest pay rise available to most people in this industry is the one they get by moving.

You are being paid for the years, not the scope. Fifteen years of doing the same job is not the same as fifteen years of taking on more. If your responsibilities have not widened, the market will not pay you more for having repeated the role for longer.

You are at the ceiling of your title. Every role has a top. A Supervisor at $132k is near the top of what a Supervisor earns. The next increase is not a raise, it is a different job, and it usually has Manager in the title.

How to benchmark yourself honestly

Three questions, in this order.

1. Where do you sit in your band? Find your role and your experience bracket above. Are you above or below the average? Below is not automatically a problem, but it is information you did not have yesterday.

2. What are you actually being paid in total? Add the vehicle, the fuel card, the phone, the bonus. Given that 76.7% of the industry now receives none of these, having any of them is worth more than it used to be. If you have none of them and your base is at the average, you are effectively below the average.

3. Has your scope grown? If you are doing more than you were hired to do and your title and salary have not moved, that is the conversation to have, and it is a stronger one than "I would like more money."

What to expect when you negotiate

A few honest expectations, based on what we see across more than 60 builders.

Bring the number, not the feeling. "I have looked at the 2026 benchmarks and I am sitting below the average for my experience" is a conversation. "I feel underpaid" is a complaint. Employers respond very differently to the two.

Ask about the whole package. Benefits have been stripped out across the industry, which means there is often more room to move on a vehicle or a bonus than on base. Some builders would rather give you a fuel card than reset your salary band.

Understand that culture is the real currency now. If nearly half the industry would move for better culture and management support, then a builder who offers those things knows it is valuable. Ask what management support actually looks like day to day. The answer tells you a great deal.

Do not use an offer as a threat. Counter-offers accepted under pressure have a poor survival rate. If you are looking, look because something is genuinely wrong, not to extract a raise.

Where the money is moving

For what it is worth, the survey showed the strongest salary growth in Office Administration, Carpentry, Customer Service, Contract Administration, Drafting, Estimating, and site-based leadership.

That is not an accident. Those are the core delivery functions: the roles that keep documentation accurate, estimates tight, sites coordinated and customers looked after. Builders are feeling the cost of getting those roles wrong, and they are paying to get them right.

Some senior leadership salaries, by contrast, stayed flat or softened slightly.

If you are in a delivery role and you have not tested the market in three years, you are the person this data is about.

The full 2026 Salary Survey and Benefits Report is available to download free. It covers 40+ roles across Business Support, Corporate Services, Operations, Construction and Maintenance, and Management, broken down by years of experience.

Download the 2026 Salary Survey

If you want to know where you sit and what a realistic next move looks like, that is a conversation we are happy to have, confidentially and with no obligation. Get in touch.

All figures are base salary and exclude superannuation. Source: McKinnel Associates 2026 Salary Survey, 370 respondents, 92% New South Wales, 95.5% residential project homes.