Tiling Costs in Perth: What Drives the Price

Published Perth figures put a tiler's labour for a standard floor at $42 to $94 per square metre (a cost guide site) or $55 to $75 (a Perth supplier), with bathroom work at $75 to $120. The tiles, taking up an old floor, preparation and waterproofing are priced on top, and they are usually where two quotes for the same room part company.

Whole bathroom renovations spread much further. Search for what one costs in Perth and you will find published figures from about $3,000 at the cosmetic end to $65,000 and beyond at the top. All of them were published in 2026, and all of them describe work in Perth.

That is not because anyone is lying. It is because a builder, a tile supplier, a peak body, a tradie marketplace and a cost guide site all answer the same question from different positions, and use the same words for different jobs.

This guide gives you the published numbers, tells you what kind of business published each one, and explains why they differ. Then it covers the costs that turn up after work starts, and the questions that make quotes comparable. None of these figures are our prices, and none of them were quoted for your job.

How much does a tiler cost in Perth?

Hourly, two Perth sources put a tiler at $50 to $90 and around $60, and a cost guide site at $52 to $105, typically $74. By the square metre, standard floor labour is published at $42 to $94 or $55 to $75, as the table below shows.

Cost to tile a floor, per square metre

For a standard floor, published Perth labour runs $42 to $94 per square metre (a cost guide site) or $55 to $75 (a Perth supplier), and the same supplier's general tile range adds $20 to $65 per square metre. Nationally, a guide puts a standard floor at $40 to $180 per square metre.

Two things stand out. A cost guide site puts standard floor tiling labour in Perth at $42 to $94 per square metre, typically $63. A Perth supplier puts the same work at $55 to $75, and bathroom work at $75 to $120. The bottom of the first range sits roughly a quarter below the bottom of the second. Both were published this year and both say Perth.

Tiles themselves

Tile choice is the part of the quote you control most directly, and the gap between the bottom and the top of that table is larger than most people expect.

Preparation, removal and repairs

Waterproofing is quoted two different ways. A cost guide site prices it per square metre at $37 to $84 in Perth, close to the national $40 to $70. A Perth builder prices it per project at $500 to $1,500. Those are not a range, they are two different units, and a quote that gives you one is not comparable to a quote that gives you the other. Ask which you are being given.

How much does tile removal cost in Perth?

A cost guide site puts tile removal in Perth at $21 to $58 per square metre, typically $37, and a national guide puts it at $30 to $60. Tip fees sit on top, and skip pricing follows weight. In a home built before 1990, an old vinyl floor or the sheeting behind wall tiles can contain asbestos, and if anything is suspected it gets tested before it is broken up. A Perth renovation company puts licensed asbestos removal at $2,000 to $8,000 per room. Whether the old floor has to come up at all is covered on our floor tiling page.

Whole jobs

Figures for tiling a whole bathroom are further down, next to the renovation totals, where the comparison tells you more.

Regrouting and shower work

Two Perth specialists advertise from $250 and from $550 for what sounds like the same job. A national guide puts the average at around $1,500. The word doing the work in the Perth figures is "from". A starting price is a way of getting a phone call, not a quote. What the job actually costs depends on the size of the shower, the grout type, how much of the old grout has to come out, and whether the membrane behind it is still intact. If it is not, regrouting is the wrong repair and the tiles are coming off. That is a diagnosis, and it happens on site.

Regrouting sits inside a bathroom tiling job. The job itself is described on our bathroom tiling page.

How much does it cost to tile a bathroom?

Three Perth sources of three different types land on roughly $3,000 to $6,500 for tiling a standard bathroom, and a cost guide site puts it at $2,950 to $7,900, typically $5,250, excluding waterproofing. Per square metre, a Perth supplier puts bathroom tiling labour at $75 to $120, above the $55 to $75 the same supplier gives for a standard floor.

How much does it cost to retile a bathroom or a shower?

A retile costs more than tiling a new room because the old tiles come up first, at $30 to $60 per m2 in a national guide, and the waterproofing is redone, quoted either per m2 or per project. The sources for each figure are in the tables on this page. What the job involves, and how to get it quoted by a bathroom tiler in Perth, is on our bathroom page.

No source we collected publishes a price for retiling a shower on its own. The shower is stripped back, rewaterproofed and retiled, and each of those parts is priced in the tables above. Whether a shower can be done without the rest of the room is covered under bathroom tiling.

Bathroom renovation in Perth, side by side

Tiling is one trade inside a bathroom renovation, so the total is the number most people search for first. Here is what Perth and WA sources published in 2026.

Narrow that to one description, a mid-range bathroom, and four sources still give four answers: around $15,667 from a tradie marketplace, around $26,000 from a peak body, around $28,350 from a cost guide site, and $21,000 to $36,750 from a Perth builder. Same room, same year, same city.

What each figure actually covers

Most of the gap in that table comes down to whether each source says what its figure includes.

Two of nine state their scope plainly. Three state nothing at all. When a figure does not say whether it includes demolition, plumbing changes, fixtures, tiling or making good, comparing it to another figure is guesswork, and the $15,667 against $36,750 gap is mostly that guesswork made visible.

Tiling on its own tells a different story

Ask the narrower question, what does it cost to tile a bathroom rather than renovate one, and the published figures stop disagreeing.

Three Perth sources of three different types land on roughly $3,000 to $6,500 for tiling a standard bathroom, and a cost guide site's $2,950 to $7,900 sits around them. The renovation figures for the same room ranged from $15,667 to $36,750.

The last row is not a contradiction either, once you read the scope. It is labour only, with the tiles and materials left out, while the first row is supply and install. Different job, stated plainly, different number.

That is the whole lesson of this page in one table. Figures converge when the scope is defined and scatter when it is not. Tiling is a defined scope. Renovation is not.

Why the numbers disagree so much

Understanding this is worth more than any single figure. The bathroom tiling figures agree with each other and the renovation figures do not, and these are the reasons, roughly in order of how much of the gap each one explains.

Different scopes wearing the same label. This is most of it. "Mid-range bathroom renovation" is not a defined scope. For one publisher it means new tiles, new vanity, same layout and same plumbing. For another it includes moving the shower, replacing the bath and rewiring. The words are identical and the jobs are not. "Tiling a bathroom" leaves far less room to differ, which is why those figures land within a few thousand dollars of each other.

Who is writing, and about whose customers. A tradie marketplace reports what the jobs booked through it cost, and small jobs book more easily online than large ones, so its average sits low. A renovation company quoting full turnkey projects reports the customers who reach it, and its floor sits above the marketplace's ceiling. Neither is wrong about its own book.

Some cost pages are not built from jobs at all. Programmatic cost guide sites publish a figure for every city and every trade. The Perth number and the Adelaide number are often generated by the same process, adjusted by a factor. They can also move between one month and the next: between our September and October 2026 checks, the cost guide site quoted on this page moved its standard floor rate from $37 to $42 per square metre and its hourly rate from $126 to $52 to $105.

Fixtures move the total more than tiling does. A change of tapware, a frameless screen, a stone top or a freestanding bath can move a bathroom total by thousands without changing the tiling scope by a square metre. Two quotes for the same tiling work can be $10,000 apart on fixtures alone.

Averages hide the shape of the distribution. A single average across budget refreshes and western suburbs rebuilds describes almost nobody's actual bathroom.

What to do with that. Stop looking for the right number for a bathroom renovation, because there is not one. Break your job into defined scopes, price each one, and add them up. The bathroom tiling figures above show that a defined scope produces a usable number even from unrelated sources. It is also exactly what you should ask a tiler to give you in writing, as set out under how to get a quote you can rely on, below.

Why cost per square metre is misleading

Per square metre is the figure everyone wants, and it is the least reliable one on this page.

A small bathroom floor is mostly edges. Cuts around the waste, the vanity, the door frame and the shower hob take the time, and a small floor is nearly all edge. The open middle of a living room floor is the fast part, and a big floor has proportionally more of it. So the per square metre rate for a 4m2 bathroom floor is higher than for a 40m2 living area, not lower, and the ranges above reflect that. One Perth supplier prices standard floors at $55 to $75 and bathroom work at $75 to $120 for exactly that reason.

Fixed costs make it worse. Setting up, protecting the rest of the house, mixing, cutting, cleaning up and disposal do not shrink with the room. Spread across a small area, they dominate the rate.

Use per square metre to sanity-check a quote against the ranges on this page. Do not use it to price your job.

What actually drives the cost

The tile itself

Large format tiles need a flatter substrate and more careful setting. Mosaics are slow. Natural stone needs sealing and is less forgiving. Budget ceramic starts around $20 per square metre to supply and premium stone reaches $260, according to a Perth supplier and a cost guide site respectively.

The layout

A straight lay is the baseline. Diagonal, herringbone and brick bond patterns add cutting and wastage, and a national guide puts the extra labour at 20 to 40 per cent.

The substrate, which is where the money hides

A flat, sound, dry substrate is cheap to tile. One that needs grinding, patching or self-levelling is not, and nobody knows which one you have until the old floor comes up.

Wet areas

A bathroom carries waterproofing, falls to the waste and junction detailing that a hallway does not. The requirements are set by the National Construction Code and AS 3740:2021, not by the tiler, and they are described on our bathroom tiling page.

Access and sequencing

Second storey, tight parking, a single bathroom in an occupied house, or a job that has to wait on a plumber and an electrician. All of it costs time.

What makes Perth different

These are the things that make Perth figures different from national ones.

Whether your floor is a slab. Check this before you plan a new layout, because it changes the cost of every decision that follows.

If the bathroom sits on a concrete slab, moving a shower, a vanity or a floor waste means cutting the slab first. A Perth supplier puts that at $2,000 to $6,000 per plumbing point. It is a concrete job before it is a plumbing job, and it happens before any tiling starts.

If the floor is suspended timber, the same change is a different job and usually a cheaper one, because the pipework is reached from below rather than cut out of the structure.

Either way, this is the strongest argument for keeping the existing layout. A bathroom that keeps its plumbing where it is can absorb a much better tile budget for the same total.

Freight. Master Builders WA puts the freight component at 8 to 15 per cent on WA renovation budgets compared with the eastern states.

Labour. A cost guide site puts Perth labour 10 to 20 per cent above Melbourne, attributing it to mining and FIFO competition for trades. That is one publisher's claim rather than a settled number.

Suburb. A cost guide site puts western suburbs work 20 to 30 per cent above the outer suburbs, and a Perth renovator quotes $50,000 and up for western suburbs bathrooms against $15,000 to $35,000 as a standard range.

Coastal corrosion. A cost guide site notes that coastal suburbs push buyers toward stainless and corrosion-resistant hardware. It affects fixtures rather than tiling, but it lands in the same total.

The costs people do not budget for

Wastage. Order 10 to 15 per cent over the measured area, and more for diagonal or herringbone. Running out mid-job and finding a different dye lot is worse than over-ordering.

Removal and disposal. Tile removal is published at $30 to $60 per square metre by a national guide, and tip fees sit on top. Tile and mortar waste is heavy, and skip pricing follows weight. When an old floor can stay and when it has to come up is covered on our floor tiling page.

What demolition reveals. Rot, movement, failed old waterproofing or a substrate that will not take a new floor. None of it is visible when the quote is written, which is why quotes carry variation clauses.

Asbestos in older Perth homes. In homes built before 1990, the sheeting behind wall tiles, bathroom wall panels and old vinyl floor tiles can contain asbestos. WorkSafe WA treats removing any quantity of friable asbestos, or more than 10 square metres of non-friable asbestos, as licensed asbestos removal work, and WorkSafe has to be notified at least five days before it starts. A Perth renovation company puts licensed removal at $2,000 to $8,000 per room. If anything is suspected, work stops and it gets tested before it gets cut.

Old pipework. A Perth renovation company puts replacing galvanised steel pipe in a bathroom zone at $3,000 to $7,000. It is not tiling work, but it is discovered during tiling work.

Trims, edging and sealing. Tile trims, silicone to junctions, and sealing for stone and some grouts. Small individually, and usually left out of a verbal estimate.

Other trades. Plumbing work in WA has to be done by a licensed plumber, with narrow exceptions at your own home such as replacing a shower head or clearing a blocked fixture or waste pipe with a plunger. If your job moves water, that is a second trade and a second invoice.

Making good. Paint, cornice, door adjustment and the skirting that did not survive the demolition.

Margin and GST. A quote that looks 10 per cent cheaper than the others is sometimes a quote excluding GST.

How to get a quote you can rely on

The goal is not the lowest number. It is quotes that describe the same job.

Give every quoter the same brief

Same room, same measurements, same tile, same scope. If one tiler prices a full retile and another prices tiling over the existing floor, the difference between the quotes tells you nothing.

Ask what is included, line by line

• Removal and disposal
• Substrate preparation
• Waterproofing
• Tiling
• Grout and silicone
• Trims
• Making good

A single total with no breakdown cannot be compared to anything.

Ask what is excluded

Tile supply, plumbing, electrical, asbestos testing and rubbish removal are the usual exclusions.

Ask how variations are handled

Specifically, what happens if the substrate is worse than expected. An hourly rate and a written approval step is a reasonable answer. Silence is not.

Settle the tile order

Who buys, who counts, who wears the wastage, where the tiles are stored and how long the lead time is.

For repairs, expect a diagnosis before a price

A cracked tile, a drummy floor and a leaking shower can look identical and have three different causes. Quotes given over the phone for repairs are guesses. Cracked and drummy tiles are covered on our floor tiling page, and the signs of a failed shower on our bathroom tiling page.

Your rights on a WA tiling contract

This part is not a matter of opinion, and most homeowners do not know it.

The Home Building Contracts Act 1991 (WA) covers fixed-price home building contracts between $7,500 and $500,000, and it names tiling explicitly as home building work. It applies whether or not the contractor is a registered builder.

Where it applies:

• The contract must be in writing and signed by both parties.
• The deposit is capped at 6.5 per cent of the contract price.
• Progress payments can only be claimed for work actually carried out.
• Complaints can be made to the Building Commissioner, through Building and Energy, generally within three years of the contract or of the cause of the dispute.

Separately, building work valued at $20,000 or more that requires a building permit must be carried out by a registered builder, and home indemnity insurance is required for permit-requiring work over $20,000. Whether a permit is needed depends on the scope of the work, not its cost. Schedule 4 of the Building Regulations 2012 lists the exempt work.

And the line worth remembering regardless: under section 37(2) of the Building Act 2011, where building work is done without a building permit, the owner must ensure the finished work complies with every building standard that applies to it. A small job is not an exempt job.

Budgeting sensibly

Hold a contingency. Something almost always turns up when the old tiles come up. A contingency is the difference between a variation being an inconvenience and being a crisis.

Understand what the cheapest quote is cheaper at. Sometimes lower overhead. More often a narrower scope, less preparation, an assumption that becomes a variation later, or a price that excludes GST.

Spend where failure is expensive. Waterproofing and substrate preparation are hidden once the tiles go down, and putting either right means taking the finished surface off. Tile is visible and replaceable. If the budget has to give, give on the tile.

Keep the plumbing where it is. On a slab, moving a shower, vanity or floor waste means cutting the slab before anything else happens, at $2,000 to $6,000 per plumbing point according to a Perth supplier. Keeping the layout frees that money for everything else.

Nothing on this page replaces an on-site quote

Every figure here was published by someone describing a job that is not yours. Prices change and publishers revise their pages. The substrate under your existing floor is the largest single variable in a tiling quote, and it is not knowable until the tiles come up. Use this page to recognise a number that is out of range. Use a tiler standing in the room to get a real one.

Common questions

Working out a budget for a Perth tiling job

Tell us the room, roughly the area, and what is there now. We will pass it to a Perth tiler who can quote it, and the tiler sets their own price.