How much does it cost to flip a house in Australia?

How much does it cost to flip a house in Australia? The honest answer is that the purchase price is barely half the story. By the time you have paid stamp duty, renovated, carried the place for six months and sold it, the costs the listing never mentions can add up to more than the reno itself. Get them wrong and a deal that looked like a $200,000 win quietly becomes a $40,000 one.

So this is the full cost stack, bucket by bucket, with real 2026 ranges and a worked example at the end you can copy onto your own deal. This is general information, not financial advice, but it will tell you what to budget for before you make an offer instead of after you have signed.

Purchase costs: stamp duty, legals and inspections

The purchase costs are the ones you can nail down before you buy, which makes them the easiest to model and the least excusable to miss.

Stamp duty is the big one. It is charged on a marginal scale, not a flat percentage, and it climbs faster than the price. Under the current Revenue NSW schedule, duty on a purchase between $372,000 and $1.24M is $11,152 plus $4.50 for every $100 over $372,000, so a $700,000 buy attracts roughly $25,900 before any surcharge. Every state has its own table, and as an investor you generally miss the owner-occupier and first-home concessions, so budget the full amount. Work out the exact figure for your state with the stamp duty calculator before you set a maximum offer, because this single line can swing a deal by tens of thousands.

Legals and conveyancing. A conveyancer or solicitor handles the contract, searches and settlement. Across Australia that typically runs $1,200 to $3,500 including disbursements, depending on state and complexity.

Building and pest inspection. Non-negotiable on a flip, because the whole game is buying a problem you can fix, not one you can't. A combined building and pest report on a standard house usually costs $400 to $800, more on a large or prestige property. It is the cheapest insurance you will ever buy against a structural surprise that eats your margin.

Renovation costs by scope

The reno is the cost people fixate on, and the one that varies most with what you are actually doing. The useful way to think about it is cost per square metre by scope, not a single lump.

Working from the Archicentre Australia CostGuide (2026), a renovation of an existing home runs roughly $1,600 to $3,900 per square metre, and extensions or new construction sit higher again at about $2,700 to $5,100 per square metre. Where you land inside that band is about scope:

• Cosmetic (paint, floors, a kitchen and bathroom refresh, landscaping) sits at the bottom of the range and is where most first flips should live.
• Full cosmetic plus (new kitchen and bathrooms, re-wire or re-plumb sections, some reconfiguration) is the middle.
• Structural (moving walls, extending, re-roofing, underpinning) is the top, and it is where budgets and timelines blow out.

Two rules save flippers here. First, the money concentrates in the wet areas: kitchens and bathrooms carry most of the cost and most of the value, so that is where scope creep hurts. Second, hold a contingency — 10% at an absolute minimum, 15% to 20% on anything built before 1980, because that is where you find the surprises behind the plaster. Price your own scope properly with the renovation cost calculator rather than trusting a per-square-metre figure in your head, and if you want the rates broken down by scope and city, I have written up renovation cost per square metre in Australia separately.

Holding costs: the money the calendar spends for you

Holding costs are the ones flippers underestimate by the widest margin, because they don't arrive as a single invoice. They tick away every day you own the place, and a flip that drags an extra three months can lose more to holding than it ever spent on paint.

Over a typical six-month hold you are carrying loan interest on both the purchase and the reno drawdowns, council rates, water, building insurance, land tax where it applies, and utilities while the trades are in. On an outer-metro deal that commonly totals $20,000 to $30,000 across six months, and it scales straight up with your timeline and your loan size. The trap is that these costs are invisible on the surveyor's or builder's quote, so they never make it into the back-of-the-envelope sum. They should. Model them properly with the holding cost calculator, and if you want the full walkthrough, I have broken down what six months of holding really costs separately.

Selling costs

You made money when you bought, but you hand a chunk of it back when you sell.

The agent's commission is the biggest slice. An Australian selling agent typically takes around 2% to 2.5% of the sale price, more in regional markets. On a $950,000 resale that is roughly $21,000. Add a marketing and styling spend (commonly $3,000 to $8,000 for photography, portals and a stylist that makes the renovated result actually sell), and the vendor's conveyancing to close it out. All up, budget $25,000 or more on a deal in that price band.

There is one more cost that belongs here even though it is not a "selling" cost in the usual sense: tax. A genuine flip is almost always taxed as ordinary income at your marginal rate, not as a capital gain with the 50% discount. That is the single most expensive line beginners leave out. Model it before you buy — I have written about how the ATO treats flips on revenue account so the after-tax number doesn't ambush you.

The all-in cost to flip a house in Australia: a worked example

Here is the whole stack on one illustrative deal: a $700,000 outer-metro house, a cosmetic-plus reno, six months start to finish, sold for $950,000. Every figure is indicative and your own numbers will move them, but the shape is what matters.

Sell at $950,000 and the pre-tax profit is about $78,500. That looks fine until the tax: as ordinary income at a 37% marginal rate, roughly $29,000 goes to the ATO, leaving about $49,000 in the pocket on a deal that turned over nearly a million dollars. Notice what did the damage — not the reno, but the $80,000-plus of stamp duty, holding and selling costs the purchase price never showed. That is why the buy price is everything: the only reliable place to widen this margin is to pay less at the front, not to spend more at the back.

Run your own version of this table before you offer. The flip ROI calculator turns these buckets into a live number, a full sample analysis shows the same maths on a real listing, and for the whole stack worked end to end on one deal, my house flip case study walks through a $520k cosmetic flip line by line. If you are new to the whole process, the complete guide to flipping a house in Australia puts the costs in the context of the deal as a whole. Know the real cost to flip a house in Australia before you sign, and the surprises stop being expensive ones.

This is general information only and not financial, tax or legal advice. Stamp duty, renovation, holding and selling costs change and vary by state, site and timeline, and tax treatment depends on your circumstances. Figures here are indicative ranges from sources current at the time of writing. Confirm current costs for your own deal and get professional advice before you commit.

---