Indicative prices
Published ranges, and an honest account of what moves a job from one end of them to the other.
Most damp contractors will not put a price on a page, which is understandable — the range is genuinely wide — and unhelpful if you are trying to work out whether to worry. Rising Damp Adelaide publishes ranges instead. They are ranges, not quotes, and a fixed price follows an assessment.
| Work | Indicative range | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| On-site assessment and written diagnosis | Free | Arranged through us. You get the cause in writing before anyone quotes a repair. |
| Independent damp report for a purchase or dispute | $400 – $700 | A standalone technical report. Worth it inside a cooling-off period or where two parties disagree. |
| Correcting ground and paving levels | $900 – $3,500 | Cutting back paths, garden beds and paving that bridge the damp course. Frequently the whole fix, and always the first thing to check. |
| Chemical damp course injection | $180 – $260 per metre | Installing a new damp course into a wall that never had one, or replacing one that has failed. Bluestone costs more per metre than brick because the joints are wider. |
| Repointing in lime mortar | $120 – $220 per square metre | Raking out failed joints and repointing in a lime mix that lets the wall breathe. Cement pointing on old stone traps water and accelerates the damage. |
| Salt-retardant render and internal replaster | $90 – $180 per square metre | Removing salt-contaminated plaster and replacing it. Done too early it simply fails again, so it belongs at the end of the job, not the start. |
| Full treatment, typical bluestone cottage frontage | $6,000 – $18,000 | Injection, drainage and levels, repointing and replaster together. The range is wide because access and the amount of stone repair vary enormously. |
Prices are indicative ranges only. A fixed quote follows an on-site assessment.
Bluestone costs more per metre to inject than brick because the mortar joints are wider and more irregular, so there are more holes and more resin. A brick bungalow in Prospect and a bluestone villa in Unley are different jobs at the same length of wall.
This is the one people do not expect. Cutting off the water is often the cheaper half. Removing salt-contaminated plaster and render, and repointing joints that have lost their strength, is where a job grows.
If a path or garden bed bridges the course, that work comes first. Sometimes it is the entire fix and the job is at the bottom of the range. Sometimes it means taking up and relaying paving, and it is not.
A wall you can stand at is quick. A party wall, a boundary wall with no side access, or a two-storey North Adelaide terrace frontage is not, and the price reflects the time rather than the materials.
A listed property can restrict the method and lengthen the timeline. Worth establishing before a quote is accepted rather than after.
The cheapest possible outcome is discovering the wall is wet because of a failed shower or a cracked downpipe. It happens often enough that ruling it out is part of every assessment.
We do not quote an assessment fee for Adelaide, because the assessments arranged through this site are free to you and because South Australian rates for standalone technical reports differ from the eastern states. Where a formal written report is needed for a purchase or a dispute, the range in the table above is what to expect, and you will be told the figure before anything is booked.
On this particular defect the cheapest quote is frequently the most expensive outcome, and not because of workmanship. It is because injecting a damp course without correcting the ground levels produces a wall that is still bridged, and replastering before the masonry has given up its salt produces a finish that fails within a year. Both look like savings on the day. Read what a quote excludes at least as carefully as what it includes.
Tell us what the wall is doing. We will arrange someone to meter it and put the cause in writing.