Material prices eased slightly this year. Labour did not. If the finishing quotes you are receiving are above last year's, here is what is behind it — and how to tell a realistic number from an optimistic one.
A builder comparing this year's finishing quotes against a two-year-old benchmark will conclude that contractors have got greedy. The more useful reading is that the labour side of a finishing package has repriced, for reasons that are structural rather than opportunistic.
What has changed on the labour side
- A national shortfall of trained construction workers, already counted in the millions and widening against demand
- Labour costs rising through 2025, before any policy change took effect
- The new labour codes, in force from late 2025, bringing social-security and standardised-wage obligations into the real cost of employing site labour properly
- Specialist trades — waterproofing among them — commanding a clear premium wherever skilled hands are scarce
- Forecasts of construction cost inflation in the low-to-mid single digits for 2026
Finishing work is more exposed to all of this than structure work, because it is labour-dense by nature. A slab is largely material and formwork. A tiled floor, a dado run, a waterproofed bathroom and a snagged flat are largely somebody's hands and hours.
Why the cheapest quote just got more dangerous
When labour genuinely costs more, a quote that comes in materially below the others has absorbed that somewhere. In practice there are only a few places it can go:
- Thinner manpower than the floor count needs, which surfaces as schedule slip around the middle floors
- A lower material grade substituted quietly at the point of purchase
- Supervision removed — the cheapest single line to delete, and the most expensive to have deleted
- Hold points skipped, which stays invisible until a defect appears after handover
- Snagging pushed onto the builder's own inspection
None of these are visible when the quote is accepted. All of them are visible by the eighth floor.
What a realistic finishing quote should show
- Scope stated unit by unit, with common areas priced separately rather than folded into a lump sum
- Material specified by grade and make, so a substitution becomes a variation rather than a discovery
- Manpower planned per trade against the actual floor count and finishing window
- A timeline built up from the trade sequence, not worked backwards from a target possession date
- Supervision named as a line item rather than assumed
- Hold points and the handover standard written down
A quote structured that way is comparable. A rate per square foot with no scope behind it is not, and comparing two of them tells you only which contractor was more optimistic.
Where cost can genuinely be taken out
There is real room to reduce a finishing budget, but it is in specification and sequencing rather than in the rate:
- Choosing a tile size and format that reduces cutting and wastage against the actual room dimensions
- Ordering a full run in one batch, which avoids both shade mismatch and the cost of correcting it later
- Planning the trade sequence so no finished surface is reopened for a service that was missed
- Fixing the finishing specification before work starts, since mid-project changes are the most expensive kind there is
Each of those is decided during planning — the cheapest point in a project to change anything, and the stage most often compressed to save time.
Chamunda Constructions quotes finishing work against a scope agreed on site rather than a rate applied to an area. If you are comparing quotes on a project right now, asking each contractor to walk you through how they arrived at their sequence and manpower usually tells you more than the bottom line does.