What to Pay Tradies in Queensland

Marco runs Reef Coast Mechanical, an eight-person plumbing and gasfitting outfit out of Cairns. Last September he lost two solid second-year apprentices and a third-year tradie inside six weeks — all three walked across the road to a competitor who was paying $4 an hour more and a $250 weekly site allowance for the resort jobs up at Palm Cove. Marco wasn't underpaying; he was paying the award plus a fair margin. But he was paying 2022 rates in a 2024 market, and he hadn't told anyone what he was offering in his job ads, so the candidates who might have stuck around never even applied. By the time he'd reworked his rates and reposted, he was three months behind on a hotel fit-out and burning subcontractor money to catch up.

Marco's story is the one we hear most often from Queensland employers right now. Wages have shifted hard in the last 24 months across every trade we cover, and the businesses still quoting 2022 numbers — or worse, hiding pay behind "competitive salary" in their ads — are the ones losing good people. This guide walks through what you should actually be paying in Queensland in 2025, what the award floors look like, the on-costs you can't ignore, and why we make every employer on our platform disclose pay upfront.

What QLD tradies are actually earning in 2025

Let's get the headline numbers out of the way. These are the ranges we're seeing across active job postings, recruiter conversations, and what candidates tell us they're walking out the door for. They're not award minimums — they're market rates. Award minimums come later in this piece.

Electricians

A fully qualified A-grade electrician in South East Queensland is currently sitting between $42 and $55 an hour on a PAYG basis for commercial and industrial work. Domestic and service-focused sparkies tend to land in the $38–$48 range. Up in the mining-adjacent regions — Mackay, Gladstone, Rockhampton — you'll need to be at $50+ to be competitive, and shutdown or specialist HV work routinely commands $65–$90 an hour as day-rate labour hire. Leading hands and supervisors typically add another $5–$10 on top of base. If you want to see what live rates look like for specific roles, our electrician jobs board is a useful benchmark.

Plumbers and gasfitters

Licensed plumbers sit in a similar band to sparkies — $40 to $52 an hour for general work, with gasfitting and Type A appliance work pushing higher. Drainers with the right tickets are scarce and can command $48+. Backflow and thermostatic mixing valve endorsements are worth real money. Service plumbers on a van with after-hours expectations need to be at the top of the band or you'll lose them to the bigger franchised outfits.

Carpenters and chippies

Formwork carpenters on commercial sites in Brisbane are at $45–$58 an hour right now, driven hard by the Olympics-related infrastructure pipeline. Residential framing and finishing carpenters are more like $38–$48. Shopfitters with their own kit are in a category of their own and often work as subbies rather than PAYG.

Welders and boilermakers

Coded welders — particularly anyone with current 6G or pressure ticket qualifications — are in genuine short supply. $45 to $60 an hour is the going PAYG rate, and FIFO or shutdown rates push well past $75. General fabrication boilermakers without coded tickets are $38–$48.

Mining and resources roles

This is where the numbers get spicy. Mine fitters in the Bowen Basin are routinely on packages worth $140,000 to $180,000 including allowances, with experienced operators on similar money. Haul truck operators with current dump truck tickets and a clean record can clear $130k on the right roster. We've broken out a couple of these markets specifically — have a look at mine fitter jobs in Mackay and haul truck operator listings to see what the majors and the mid-tier contractors are currently advertising.

Award floors: the legal minimum you must pay

Whatever the market is doing, you cannot pay below the relevant Modern Award. For most Queensland trades businesses, the awards in play are the Electrical, Electronic and Communications Contracting Award, the Plumbing and Fire Sprinklers Award, the Building and Construction General On-site Award, and the Manufacturing and Associated Industries Award for fabrication and engineering work. Mining sites are typically covered by the Black Coal Mining Industry Award or the Mining Industry Award, depending on the commodity.

As of the 1 July 2024 annual wage review, a Level 5 electrician under the Electrical Award has a minimum weekly rate of $1,069.10, which works out to around $28.13 an hour ordinary time. A Level 3 plumber sits at similar money. These are floors, not ceilings, and you'll notice they're a long way below the market rates I quoted above — that's because nobody competent works for award minimum in the current market. But you still need to know the floor, because that's the number that drives overtime multipliers, penalty rates, leave loading and redundancy calculations.

The Fair Work Ombudsman publishes the current pay guides for every award, and they're updated each July. If you're not checking them annually, you're exposed. Underpayment claims now carry serious civil penalties and there's nothing more painful than discovering a payroll error stretching back four years across six staff.

The on-costs that catch employers out

The headline hourly rate is maybe 65–70% of what a tradie actually costs you. When you're pricing jobs or working out whether you can afford to hire, you need to be modelling the full burden.

Superannuation is now 11.5% and rising to 12% on 1 July 2025. On a $55/hour tradie working a 38-hour week, that's $240 a week before you've factored in anything else.

Annual leave is four weeks plus 17.5% leave loading for most awards, which adds roughly 9.5% to your effective hourly cost. Personal/carer's leave is another 10 days a year. Public holidays in Queensland — there are typically 10–11 of them depending on the region — are paid days you're not getting production from.

WorkCover premiums in Queensland vary by industry classification. Plumbing and electrical contracting typically attract premiums of 1.5–3% of wages; structural steel and roofing can be 4–6%; underground mining contracting is higher again. The WorkSafe Queensland website has the current industry rate tables and they're worth pulling up before you finalise your labour cost model.

Allowances are the silent killer. The Electrical Award alone has tool allowance, licence allowance, leading hand allowance, travel allowance, meal allowance, height allowance, dirty work allowance, confined space allowance and first aid allowance. Most of these are small individually — $15 to $40 a week — but they add up, and missing them is a common underpayment trigger. The Plumbing Award has its own set, including a substantial licence allowance for fully licensed plumbers that you absolutely cannot forget to pay.

Vehicles, phones, fuel and PPE are the obvious ones, but don't forget training and ticket renewal costs — Construction Induction, EWP, working at heights, confined space, first aid, test and tag refresher courses. Across a team of ten that's easily $8,000–$12,000 a year if you're keeping everyone current.

A reasonable rule of thumb in Queensland trades right now: your fully burdened hourly cost is about 1.55 to 1.75 times the base hourly rate you're quoting in the job ad. A $50/hour sparky is really costing you closer to $82/hour by the time everything's loaded in.

Apprentice pay: it's not as cheap as it looks

Apprentice wages start low — a first-year adult apprentice on the Electrical Award is on something like $20/hour — but the on-costs are proportionally larger because you're investing in training time, supervision, TAFE block-release coverage, and the productivity gap during their early years. The Australian Government's apprentice jobs incentives can offset some of this, and the Australian Apprenticeships site has the current employer incentive structure laid out clearly.

What you should be paying above the award depends on the year and the trade. Third and fourth-year sparkies in particular are in high demand right now — they're nearly productive, they're cheap relative to a qualified tradie, and they're a flight risk. Adding $3–$5 above the award rate for a strong third-year is usually money well spent, and you'll see this reflected in current listings for year-3 electrical apprentice roles.

Day-rate and labour hire: a different conversation

If you're hiring on a labour-hire basis rather than PAYG, the numbers look very different. Day rates in Queensland mining and major construction are routinely $850–$1,400 a day for skilled tradies, and that's before super and any travel/accommodation top-ups. The day-rate and labour-hire jobs market moves faster than PAYG and tends to set the ceiling that PAYG employers eventually have to chase. If you're losing staff to labour hire, the answer is usually some combination of better base rate, retention bonuses, and clearer career progression — not matching the day rate, which usually doesn't make commercial sense for a small business.

When to disclose pay in a job ad — and why we mandate it

Here's the part where I get on the soapbox. Every employer ad on All Trades QLD must include a pay range. Not "competitive salary." Not "above award." A real range, with a real top and bottom number.

We do this for three reasons. First, candidate behaviour has changed. Research from across the Australian recruitment market consistently shows that ads without pay get 40–60% fewer quality applications. Tradies have options — they're not going to spend their lunch break applying for something that might pay less than they're already on. Second, it saves everyone time. If you're offering $45/hour and the candidate needs $52, neither of you wants to do a phone screen to find that out. Third, it forces employers to do the work I've just walked you through — to actually know what they're paying and why.

The pushback we sometimes get is "but our competitors will see what we pay." Yes, they will. They already know, because they're talking to the same candidates you are, and those candidates tell each other what they're earning. Pay transparency isn't a competitive disadvantage — opacity is.

When you're ready to post a job on ATQ, you'll be prompted for a pay range as part of the listing. Make it accurate, make it reflect what you're genuinely willing to pay for the right person, and review it against the market every six months at minimum. Our pricing and features page has more on how the platform works and what's included.

One last thing: pay isn't everything, but it's the entry ticket

Marco at Reef Coast didn't lose his apprentices purely because of the $4/hour gap. He lost them because the competitor was paying market rate and ran a tidier roster and had newer utes and was clearer about progression. Pay got them to apply; the rest of the package got them to stay. If your rates are right, the conversation moves on to all the other things that matter — culture, hours, the quality of the work, whether you actually pay overtime when it's owed. If your rates are wrong, none of the rest of it gets a hearing.

Benchmark annually. Build your full-burden cost model. Disclose your pay in every ad. Pay the allowances you owe. Do those four things and you'll spend a lot less time wondering why nobody's applying.