The Coalition has said that in government it would repeal the union-related procurement rules attached to Commonwealth-funded building work and bring back a national construction industry watchdog, winding back the arrangements that followed the abolition of the Australian Building and Construction Commission in 2023. If you run a four-person crew out of Dandenong or a two-truck plumbing outfit on the Central Coast, the honest answer to "what does that mean for me" is: not much this month, and a fair bit if you ever tender for government work. What it does not touch is the number that decides whether your jobs make money. That number comes from construction award pay rates, and those move every July regardless of who holds the Treasury benches.
Worth keeping the two apart, because they get talked about as one thing.
What an industrial relations change actually touches
Procurement rules sit on top of the award. They are conditions of tender, not conditions of employment. If you sub onto a Commonwealth-funded school, hospital or social housing job, that is where you feel them: prequalification paperwork, enterprise agreement coverage, right of entry, who is allowed through the gate and on what notice.
For private residential work, which is most small builders in this country, the practical effect of a watchdog existing or not existing is close to zero on a Tuesday morning. The place it reaches you second-hand is flow-down clauses. A head contractor who has to comply passes the obligation to subs in the contract, and you inherit it whether or not you read that schedule. If you are signing onto government-funded work, read the industrial relations schedule before you price the job, not after.
Construction award pay rates are a floor, not your charge-out rate
Most on-site building work falls under the Building and Construction General On-site Award 2020 (MA000020). Plumbing, electrical and some mechanical trades have their own awards, so a mixed crew can sit across two or three instruments at once.
The Fair Work Commission runs an annual wage review, and increases generally apply from the first full pay period on or after 1 July. The base rate is the smallest part of the picture. On top of it sit the industry allowance, tool allowance, fares and travel patterns allowance, site allowances where they apply, follow-the-job loading for daily hire, 25 per cent casual loading, overtime and RDO arrangements.
Get the current figure from the Fair Work Ombudsman's Pay and Conditions Tool, not from a rate you typed into a spreadsheet two winters ago. In our experience the gap between an award base rate and the real cost of an hour on site is where small builders quietly lose margin, and nobody finds it until the job is closed out.
Build the on-cost into the quote, not into the apology
Take a nominal $40 an hour as pure arithmetic. Superannuation at 12 per cent, the rate since 1 July 2025, adds $4.80. Then layer on workers compensation premium, which is set state by state and loaded by trade classification. Then payroll tax if your wages clear your state threshold. Then annual leave, public holidays and personal leave, which mean you are paying for roughly 46 to 48 productive weeks out of 52, not 52 out of 52.
Then the time nobody bills: travel between jobs, site meetings, waiting on an inspection, going back for a defect. An all-up cost of an hour commonly lands well north of the award figure before you have added a cent of margin. GST at 10 per cent goes on top of the lot for the client, and is not yours.
That is a pricing model, not a guess, and it belongs in your template rather than in your head. Good construction estimating software lets you set a labour rate once with the on-costs baked in, so a July award increase is one edit instead of forty.
Three admin habits that survive any change of government
Date your rates. Every labour rate in your estimating template gets a "checked on" date beside it. An undated rate is a rate nobody will question until it is wrong.
Re-price in July, not job by job. Put a recurring reminder in the first week of July to re-check award rates, super and your workers comp renewal in one sitting. Quotes you issue in August then carry the current year, and a quote with a 30-day validity window will not be honoured at last year's labour cost.
Say what you priced to. Name the basis on the quote: the award your labour rate is built from and the standard the work is priced to, such as AS 1684 for timber framing. When a variation conversation starts, you have two anchors instead of a memory. Keeping those documents attached to the job rather than scattered across email is what decent construction project management software is for.
Political settings on procurement will keep swinging. Award rates go up in July either way, and the builder who re-prices on time is the one still making money in March.
If you want somewhere to hold your rates, your quotes and your job docs without a spreadsheet, the Built Simple app is free to download on iOS and Android, with all 45 calculators on the free tier and no signup needed to use them.
