Methodology

Three water damage numbers that are quoted everywhere and sourced nowhere

This site was built in one day, and a fair amount of that day was spent trying to find Australian numbers that turned out not to exist. Three of them are worth writing down, because all three are quoted confidently across this market and none of them survives being checked.

1. “The average cost of water damage restoration in Australia”

There is no Australian survey of restoration invoices in the public domain. Not from an industry body, not from an insurer, not from a regulator. What exists is a large number of pages giving a range.

The most honest of them is a direct competitor in this space, which describes its figures in its own words as estimates synthesised from public market data using AI research — with no sample size and no sources. Credit where it is due: that footnote tells you exactly what you are reading. The problem is that everyone else’s figures are produced the same way and do not say so.

What does exist is rate cards. Two Australian restoration companies publish theirs openly, which in this market is rare enough to be remarkable:

All from QLD Flood Restoration, read on 20 September 2026. Reztor Restoration separately publishes a standard water damage call-out of $198 including the first hour on site.

Those are nine real numbers with a name and a date attached, and they are enough to build an actual estimate: pick the equipment count, pick the days, multiply. The cost page does exactly that and shows every line it adds, which means anyone can check the arithmetic against the source in two clicks.

That is not the same thing as an average, and it is better. An average hides the two variables that decide the bill — how many machines and how many days — behind a single figure that cannot be interrogated.

2. “A claim raises your premium by X%”

Pick a number. You will find a page asserting it.

There is no published Australian dataset of home insurance premium movements following a water damage claim. Insurers do not publish it, and it would not be a single number if they did, because insurers weight claims history differently from one another. That is the entire basis on which the comparison market operates.

What is documented, and worth knowing:

• Australian applications ask about claims over a recent period — commonly five years — and they ask about claims at the property as well as claims by the applicant. Buy a house with a claims history and you have inherited it.
• The question is usually about claims made, not claims paid. A declined claim is not automatically neutral.
• Non-renewal is a separate risk from repricing. Renewal is an offer of a new contract and an insurer is not obliged to make one.

So the premium page on this site has no percentage on it. What it has instead is the arithmetic that actually decides the question: what the drying costs, against what your excess is. On the published rates above, one room of wet carpet dried over the three-day minimum is a few thousand dollars at most. Most of a house for a week is not. The excess is the interesting number in the first case and noise in the second, and neither conclusion requires knowing anything about premiums.

3. The South Australian building indemnity threshold

This one was never invented. It moved, and it has a condition attached that most summaries leave out.

When this post was first written on 20 September 2026, the current figure could not be read from the primary source: the South Australian legislation register answers automated requests with a Cloudflare challenge. So this site published no South Australian number at all, anywhere, for two days.

On 22 September the Building Work Contractors Act 1995 and the Building Work Contractors Regulations 2026 were read from the register’s own copies. Two provisions decide it:

So an article that gives $12,000 was right when it was written and is wrong for a contract signed today. And an article that gives $20,000 and stops there has left out the condition that matters most after a water event: the scheme only reaches domestic building work that needs development approval. A reinstatement that needs none is outside it at any price.

The practical answer did not change. Ask to see the certificate before you pay a deposit — section 34 of the Act says the contractor must not start work the scheme applies to until a policy is in force and you have been given a certificate. The Adelaide page sets out the rest: what the policy covers, the $250,000 floor on its limit, and the 90 days it must give you to claim.

A fourth one, smaller

hipages publishes state-by-state hourly rates for mould removal in the low thirties of dollars an hour. On another page, the same publisher gives carpet cleaning at $40 to $60 an hour.

Those two cannot describe the same labour market. Mould remediation is not cheaper per hour than carpet cleaning anywhere in Australia.

So the mould hourly figures are not reproduced on this site, while the whole-home range, the inspection cost and the air test cost from the same page are — because nothing else on that page contradicts them. Where a publisher’s own figures disagree with each other, the answer is to publish neither, not to pick whichever one supports the point you were making.

Why any of this matters

Because the whole value of a cost page is that a reader can act on it, and a number they cannot check is a number they cannot act on. The test is simple: can you get from the figure to the source in two clicks, and does the source have a date on it?

Everything on this site either passes that test or is not published. The methodology page is the full list, including the things that were left out and why.

All notes · Does insurance cover it · What it costs