Burst pipe water damage in an Australian home

If you have arrived here at 3am with a tap you cannot turn off, the order is: stop the water, kill the power to anything wet, photograph everything, then read the rest.

Stopping it

1. The isolating valve. Under the sink, behind the toilet, on the wall behind the washing machine. A small tap on the supply line. Quarter turn, clockwise.
2. The mains tap. At the water meter, usually in the front garden near the boundary, sometimes in a recessed box in the footpath. This stops the whole property.
3. The power. If water is near outlets, a switchboard, or ceiling downlights, turn those circuits off at the board. A wet ceiling with downlights in it is the most dangerous situation in a domestic water event, and it is also the one people stand directly underneath while taking photographs.

What the regulation says, in full

Four verbs, and they were chosen to be comprehensive. Bursting covers the catastrophic failure. Leaking covers the slow one. Discharging covers an appliance letting go. Overflowing covers a cistern or a blocked fixture. And fixed apparatus, fixed tanks or fixed pipes used to hold or carry liquid of any kind reaches a great deal further than most people assume:

• Copper and PEX supply lines in walls and under floors
• Braided flexible hoses to taps, toilets and dishwashers
• Toilet cisterns and their inlet valves
• Hot water units and their relief lines
• Dishwasher and washing machine connections while connected
• Fixed waste pipes and traps
• Rainwater tanks and their plumbing, where fixed
• Air conditioning condensate lines

Note what the wording does not say. It says nothing about the age of the pipe, nothing about how long it had been installed, and nothing about whether it was maintained.

And then the split

Here is the shape of almost every Australian burst-pipe claim. A $40 braided hose perishes and sprays for six hours. The insurer pays for the drying, the damaged cabinetry and the flooring — a job that on published rates might run to several thousand dollars — and declines the $40 hose, because the hose failed from wear.

The householder, reasonably enough, experiences that as the claim being partly declined. It is not. It is reg 19(1)(a)(vi) and reg 19(2)(b) operating exactly as drafted: you are insured against the consequences of a failure, not against components reaching the end of their lives.

When it has been leaking for months

The hard version of this claim is the one where nobody knew. A waste connection behind a vanity, a shower membrane that has been failing for a year, a slab leak. The escape of water is still a listed event. But now reg 19(2)(b) has a lot more to work with, and most policies carry an express gradual-damage exclusion as well.

What decides it is the plumber’s characterisation of what failed and when. There is a genuine legal distinction between deterioration being the cause of the loss and deterioration being the condition of the component that caused it, and it is decided on evidence rather than argument. Get the evidence on the day.

See the covered and not covered page for how this plays out across eighteen scenarios.

What it costs, in two parts

The plumber

hipages publishes Australian plumber rates of $80 to $200 per hour, with call-out fees of $150 to $250, in a cost guide last updated 24 July 2026. Sydney is quoted at $80 to $200 an hour and Melbourne at $80 to $160. Those are hipages’ figures, reproduced with the date read, not ours.

The drying

Separate trade, separate invoice, and usually the larger number. On the published rate card this site reproduces, a two-room job dried over four days comes to $1,913 excluding GST:

The cost page has the calculator and the full rate card, including HEPA filtration and carpet relay.

What happens, and when

The drying finishes long before the claim does. That is normal and it is why the restoration invoice and the claim decision are separate events.

Common questions