Declared events damaged 145,392 homes in 2025. The country completed 172,657 new ones. The repair market draws on the same trades, the same materials and the same capacity, and the official housing numbers do not separate the two.

In 2025, declared natural disaster events damaged 145,392 homes across Australia.

In the same year, 172,657 new homes were completed nationally.

That puts the damaged number at around 84 per cent of the completed number. Not every one of those homes needed a full rebuild. Most did not. But every one of them needed a builder, a trade and a delivery of materials, and those came out of the same pool the country is relying on to lift housing supply.

Both figures were published by the Insurance Council of Australia on 1 September 2026, in the release accompanying its Catastrophe Resilience Report for 2025-26. The report itself rounds them to 145,000 and 173,000. It is the sixth edition, and the first to set the repair task against the housing task.

The repair market is close to the size of the new build market

Between 2022 and 2026, insurers received 409,094 claims relating to declared catastrophes and significant weather events, at an insured cost of $11.3 billion. The average claim was just over $27,500, which tells you most of that work was repair rather than reconstruction.

Across a similar window, roughly 700,000 new dwellings were completed nationally between 2022 and 2025, while extreme weather generated repair or rebuild work across around 406,000 homes.

Here is the part that matters for anyone reading completion statistics as a measure of supply. The Bureau of Statistics Building Activity Survey records a home rebuilt on its original site as a new dwelling, exactly the same way it records a house built on vacant land. Repairs are recorded as alterations and additions, sitting alongside elective renovations. Repair jobs under $10,000 are not captured at all.

So a share of the completions figure that governments and industry quote as new supply is housing that already existed. The work consumed labour and materials. It did not add a dwelling.

How a rebuilt home is counted

Under the ABS Building Activity Survey, a home rebuilt on its original site is recorded as a new dwelling, the same classification given to a house built on vacant land. Repairs are recorded as alterations and additions, in the same category as elective renovations. Repair work valued under $10,000 is not captured in the survey at all. National completion figures therefore include reconstruction of existing housing and exclude most smaller repair activity, which means they do not isolate how much residential construction capacity is going into new supply.

The damage is national. The claims are not evenly spread.

Between January 2022 and June 2026, declared event claims touched 149 of Australia’s 150 federal electorates. That is the national part.

The concentration is the other half of the story. Just 22 electorates accounted for half of all claims nationally, while the 50 least affected electorates represented only two per cent.

Homes rebuilt and repaired by insurers over that period, by state:

Queensland carries the volume. The Insurance Council puts the state at 60 per cent of all claims and just over half the national insured cost, which is higher than the table above implies, because the table sets aside 44,844 homes that could not be attributed to a state. Nineteen of the 22 electorates recording more than 5,000 claims are Queensland seats, mostly in the populated south east around the Gold Coast, Redlands, Logan, Ipswich, Moreton Bay and Brisbane.

New South Wales shows the opposite pattern. Fewer claims, heavier damage. The Northern Rivers electorates of Richmond and Page accounted for 15 per cent of the state’s claims but 38 per cent of its insured costs, with average claims above $60,000 in Richmond and above $76,000 in Page. That is damage capable of occupying local construction capacity for years rather than months.

Western Australia recording 47 homes across four and a half years is not a statement about exposure. It is a statement about where declarations landed in that window. Tropical Cyclone Narelle crossed the coast near Exmouth as a category 4 system in March 2026 and generated more than 1,000 local claims without meeting declaration thresholds, and Port Pirie in South Australia saw an estimated 10 per cent of homes affected by a single November 2025 storm on the same basis.

Building costs have not risen evenly either

Cotality’s Cordell Construction Cost Index puts the national cost of building a home up around 30 per cent over the five years to 2026, against consumer price growth of about 24 per cent. Most of that was frontloaded into 2022, when annual construction inflation peaked above 11 per cent. It cooled. It did not reverse.

The state spread is tighter than the headlines suggest. Queensland sits at 44.65 per cent, Victoria at 43.11, Tasmania at 43.01, Western Australia at 40.82, the ACT at 40.56, New South Wales at 40.36, South Australia at 39.45 and the Northern Territory at 39.43.

On the model house the Insurance Council used, a standard Brisbane home moved from $344,000 in June 2021 to $498,000 in June 2026. Melbourne moved from $344,000 to $493,000 over the same period. Hobart went from $355,000 to $507,000, Perth from $339,000 to $478,000 and Adelaide from $341,000 to $476,000. The model is a 200 square metre house, concrete floor, brick veneer, timber frame inner wall and concrete tile roof, costed on materials and labour and excluding builder margins. The Insurance Council notes its rebuild costs also carry permits, builder’s insurance, council fees and other regulatory costs that the index itself does not capture.

Remote costs sit higher again before anything goes wrong. A rebuild in Alice Springs was costed at $743,000 and Darwin at $629,000, against $491,000 in Sydney.

The materials that fail first are the ones that rose fastest

Roof tiles are up 77 per cent over five years, more than triple CPI. Windows and plaster products are up 48 per cent, plywood and board 45 per cent, copper pipe and fittings 41 per cent, cement and mortar 39 per cent, structural steel 39 per cent, plastics 38 per cent, concrete 37 per cent and clay bricks 32 per cent.

Labour follows the same shape. Roofer salaries are up 50.4 per cent over five years and glaziers 46.4 per cent, against 16.4 per cent for carpenters and joiners and 9.2 per cent for licensed plumbers and gasfitters.

Roof, glass and plaster are what hail and storms destroy first. They are also the line items that have inflated hardest, and the trades attached to them are the ones whose rates have moved most.

More recently, disruption around the Strait of Hormuz has pushed delivery surcharges and fuel levies of five to ten per cent through to site, with concrete moving by up to $10 a cubic metre. The shelf price looks stable. Getting it to site does not.

Roof, glass and plaster are what hail and storms destroy first. They are also the line items that have inflated hardest.

Repair demand arrives without notice

A new development can be planned years ahead. A hailstorm creates thousands of jobs in an afternoon.

Cat 255, the November 2025 storms across Queensland and New South Wales, produced more than 44,600 claims within the first eight days and finished as the year’s costliest declared event at $2.2 billion across more than 95,000 claims. Demand for roofers, glaziers and tarping crews ran well above capacity through the peak recovery period, on top of claims still sitting in the system from severe spring storms weeks earlier.

The Insurance Council’s report cites Master Builders Australia estimates that the industry needs an additional 116,000 housing construction workers, with around 20,000 construction vacancies unfilled, and notes those shortages are sharpest in the regions extreme weather hits most, where trades are often brought in from capital cities at additional cost. Master Builders has since put the gap at 141,000 in its Future Workforce Blueprint, which we covered when commencements rose while the workforce shrank.

Disaster repair is also not the only market bidding for those people. In releasing the report, the Insurance Council pointed to demand from AI data centre construction and the 2032 Olympic Games as further pressure on a stretched sector, which lines up with what the data centre boom is doing to Brisbane build costs.

Resilience is being argued as housing policy, not disaster policy

The Insurance Council’s recommendations to federal, state and territory governments run to building codes that hold up against extreme weather, a national planning framework that keeps homes out of high risk locations, a national hazard database, a Flood Defence Fund costed at $30.15 billion over ten years, and disaster mitigation funding moved to a rolling ten year program.

Its own analysis puts Disaster Ready Fund investment since 2022 at $1 for every $39 lost to extreme weather.

The argument underneath all of it is a construction argument, and the report makes it plainly: every home protected from future disaster is one less home requiring repair or reconstruction, and one less claim on a limited construction workforce. Rebuilding a house to the standard that just failed leaves it in the queue for next time.

Around 1.36 million properties are at risk of flooding, and the Insurance Council estimates half of them fall short of the flood resilience measures in modern planning and building standards.

THE GOOD BUILDER TAKE

The completions number is not a clean measure of supply, and now there is national data to show why. The more useful read for our community is the trade spread rather than the headline index. Roofers and glaziers up around 50 per cent while carpenters sit at 16 per cent shows where surge capacity is thinnest and which line items move first after the next declared event. In regions that get hit repeatedly, the repair market is not an interruption to the new build market. It is a second book of work with its own mobilisation problem, and it arrives with no notice.

Australia’s construction challenge is not only how many houses we can build. It is how many we have to keep standing.

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Last updated: 22 September 2026. Figures sourced from the Insurance Council of Australia Catastrophe Resilience Report 2025-26.

General information only. This article reports publicly available data and does not constitute financial, legal or professional advice. Readers should seek independent advice relevant to their own circumstances.

Author: TGB Editorial