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 Insurers do not publish it, and it would not be a single number if they did, because insurers weight claims history differently from one another.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 is not wrong so much as expired, and it is the most consequential of the three because somebody could act on it this week.

South Australia repealed the Building Work Contractors Regulations 2011 on 1 September 2026, by Schedule 3 of the Building Work Contractors Regulations 2026. That much is on the South Australian legislation register, and the 2026 regulations carry an expiry of 1 September 2037.

The current building indemnity insurance threshold sits inside a document that could not be retrieved from the primary source on the build day. So this site publishes no South Australian dollar figure — not on the Adelaide page, not in the comparison table on the city hub, and not in the machine-readable summary for AI crawlers.

Almost every article currently online about South Australian building indemnity insurance was written against the 2011 regulations. If you are signing a reinstatement contract in Adelaide, the number you find by searching is very likely to be against an instrument that no longer exists.

The practical answer does not depend on knowing the threshold. Ask to see the certificate before you pay a deposit, whatever the quoted value, and ask which regulations the contractor is working under. Every state scheme in this country requires the cover to exist before the contractor takes money, so the question is never premature.

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