Indicative prices
Published ranges, and an honest account of what moves a job from one end of them to the other. A committee cannot budget from silence.
Remedial concrete pricing is genuinely variable, which is the reason most contractors will not publish anything. That is understandable and it is unhelpful when you are trying to work out whether to commission a report. Concrete Cancer Brisbane publishes ranges instead. They are ranges, not quotes, and a fixed price follows a scope.
| Work | Indicative range | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Initial inspection and written scope | Free | Arranged through us. A defect schedule and a scope your committee can send out to several contractors on the same basis. |
| Independent engineer's report | $1,800 – $4,500 | Where the extent is unclear, a slab is post-tensioned, or the committee needs an independent opinion before committing to a levy. |
| Concrete repair, patch method | $650 – $1,400 per square metre | Cut back to sound concrete, expose and treat the steel, then reinstate with a repair mortar. The standard remedial approach for localised spalling. |
| Crack injection | $180 – $420 per linear metre | Epoxy or polyurethane injection where cracking is the route in and the steel is not yet badly affected. |
| Sacrificial anodes, per anode | $95 – $180 | Zinc anodes set into the repair to protect the surrounding steel. Worth it where chloride is present, because a patch alone can accelerate corrosion at its edges. |
| Balcony repair and re-membrane, typical unit | $4,500 – $16,000 | Concrete repair plus a new waterproof membrane and finish. Doing the concrete without the membrane simply schedules the next repair. |
| Protective anti-carbonation coating | $55 – $110 per square metre | Applied after repair to slow further carbonation. It is maintenance, not a cure, and it does nothing for steel that is already corroding. |
| Full remediation, small walk-up block | $60,000 – $400,000 | The range is enormous because access, extent and whether scaffolding or swing stages are needed dominate the cost. This is why a scope comes before a number. |
Prices are indicative ranges only. Remedial concrete work is priced from a scope prepared after inspection, and a fixed quote follows that.
On a three storey walk-up you can often work off a scaffold. On a taller block you may need swing stages or an elevated work platform, and on a constrained site you may need a crane permit and traffic management. Access regularly costs more than the concrete repair itself.
A hammer tap survey routinely finds two or three times the drummy area that is visibly damaged. That gap between visible and actual is the single most common cause of variations, and it is exactly what a proper inspection exists to close before you commit.
Carbonation damage can often be patched conventionally. Chloride-affected concrete usually needs sacrificial anodes, and sometimes needs the contaminated concrete removed well beyond the visibly damaged area.
Surface rust is one job. A bar that has lost meaningful cross-section needs supplementary reinforcement and an engineer's involvement, which is a different scale of work.
A balcony repair without a new membrane is a repair with a short life. Reinstating waterproofing, screeds and tiling is frequently half the cost of a balcony job and is the half people forget to budget for.
Working around residents means staging, protection, notices and restricted hours. It is slower than the same work on an empty building and priced accordingly.
On remedial concrete this is not a platitude. Without a common written scope, contractors price different amounts of work, and the cheapest number usually reflects the smallest assumption about extent rather than better value. Variations then arrive once the concrete is opened up. A scope prepared before quoting turns three prices into a genuine comparison, and it is the main practical reason to have one.
The second reason is method. A patch repair in chloride-affected concrete without anodes can accelerate corrosion in the steel immediately around the patch — the repair changes the electrochemistry at its edges. It looks like a saving and it schedules the next repair. See how the repair is actually done.
Most of the stock affected is the 1960s–80s walk-up belt and the bayside strip, where salt air reaches the steel faster.
Tell us what the concrete is doing. We will arrange an inspection and a written scope your committee can actually price.
