Setting a budget ceiling that is real, and understanding what that number buys in Brisbane this year.
If you have spent an evening searching what it costs to raise a house in Brisbane, you will have found one page saying $20,000 to $60,000 and another saying $45,000 to $90,000, and neither will have told you why they disagree. It is not that one of them is lying. It is that they are pricing different houses and calling it the same job.
A raise is one number if the house is a straightforward timber Queenslander on level ground with a truck able to get down the side. It is a very different number if the house has been extended twice in brick, sits on a fall, has a bathroom hanging off the back, and no access wider than a wheelbarrow. The published ranges are the two ends of that, presented as though they were an estimate.
So this page does what the ranges do not. What actually drives the number on a Brisbane timber house, which costs nobody quotes you, and what to do with the figure once you have it.
The published ranges aren't estimates. They're the two ends of a very wide spread, printed as if they were one.
Construction cost per square metre is knowable, and the gap between what people expect and what things cost is the single most common reason projects die. Establishing the real ceiling first — including the number you'd rather not say out loud — means the design is shaped to fit it, rather than drawn twice and abandoned.
The dread of being quietly out of your depth. Money is the most loaded topic in the whole process, and most clients arrive braced to be judged for having less of it than they think they should. Being met without flinching is disproportionately reassuring.
A budget is set from a renovation show, a neighbour's half-remembered figure, or hope. The first real builder's price arrives eighteen months and thousands of dollars in, and it is double. The project stops there, with nothing to show for it but drawings that can't be built.
I bring the budget conversation forward. It is an uncomfortable twenty minutes that saves months, and it runs both ways. At the site briefing I will tell you the range I think the fee for a project like yours sits in, and ask how that sits with you, before either of us has invested anything. I would far rather hear that the number is wrong at your kitchen table than eighteen months later, when the drawings are done and there is nothing to do with them.
The only figure worth carrying around is a rate per square metre. For architect-designed renovation and extension work in Brisbane the published range currently sits at roughly $5,000 to $7,000 per square metre of new or substantially reworked floor area. Kitchens, bathrooms and anything structural push it up. A simple bedroom addition pulls it down. Two things catch people out. The rate applies to the parts you touch, not the whole house. And the fixed costs — approvals, engineering, service connections, site setup — barely change between a small job and a large one, which is why modest projects feel so disproportionately expensive.
Published figures for the raise on its own run from about $20,000 to about $90,000 depending on which source you read, and for the whole raise-and-build-under exercise from around $280,000 to well past $650,000. That spread is real rather than sloppy. What moves it: whether the house is all timber or has masonry attached, how level the site is, truck and crane access, the state of the existing stumps, whether you are creating a full new storey or a partial one, and how much of the existing house has to be reworked where the new floor meets it. Get a builder to walk the site before you trust any published range.
The predictable ones first. Asbestos in sheeting, eaves linings and vinyl tiles in anything built or altered before the late 1980s. Lead in older paint layers. Rewiring where original cloth or rubber cable survives. Replumbing. Restumping. Termite repair found when a wall opens. And the fact that nothing in a hundred-year-old house is square, so joinery and glazing get made rather than bought. Then the site ones: access on a narrow inner-city block, tree protections, stormwater, and a separate plumbing approval whenever a wet area moves. Individually small. Together they are the reason a contingency is not optional.
Roughly $5,000 to $7,000 per square metre is the figure in circulation for architect-designed work, and it should be treated as this year's figure rather than a constant. Brisbane is a rising market — forecasters have put construction cost escalation here at around 7 per cent for 2026, and the reason given is the volume of work committed ahead of 2032. What that means in practice is that a price you get in March is not a price in November, and that a project which stalls for a year does not restart where it stopped. If your budget has no room for escalation, build the smaller thing sooner.
Backwards. Start with the number you can genuinely spend, including the figure you would rather not say out loud. Take a contingency off it — at least ten per cent on an old timber house, and more if you can bear it. Then set aside the costs that are not construction. On the split in my guide, design, consultants and authority fees together account for about 15 of every 100 dollars spent. What is left is the builder's number, and that is what the design gets shaped to fit. A brief drawn to a real ceiling gets built. A brief drawn to a hopeful one gets drawn twice and abandoned.
If you would rather start small, the First Sketch Session is two hours at your place. You keep the sketches, and there is no obligation afterwards.