The Good Builder’s inaugural Top 100 Queensland Builders report ranks the state’s hundred largest residential building businesses by contract value. The headline is a paradox: the market built fewer homes and banked more money. Here is why.
Queensland’s hundred largest residential builders wrote fewer new home contracts in FY2025/26 than the year before, and still took more money to the bank. Contracted builds across the panel fell from 16,395 to 15,433. Total contract value rose 4.9% to $8.33 billion. The average contract climbed 11.5% to $539,791.
That is not the signature of a busier market. It is the signature of a dearer one.
The full picture sits in The Good Builder’s inaugural Top 100 Queensland Builders report, produced with data partner Australian Construction Data. It ranks every one of the state’s hundred largest residential building businesses, franchise networks grouped as single operators, across two financial years of builds, value and average contract. What follows is a preview of what the numbers show.
It was not the cost of materials
The obvious explanation for an 11.5% jump in the average contract is that everything got more expensive to build. The report tests that explanation against real cost data and finds it wanting.
Over the same window, input materials to house construction rose about 2.5%. The broadest all in measure of construction output, materials plus labour, rose around 4%. The typical builder’s average contract rose far further than either. The median builder lifted 9.4%. Roughly two thirds of the increase is mix and pricing, not input cost passed through.
In plain terms: the industry did not add a flat premium to every quote. It changed what it was selling.
The cheap end fell away
The clearest driver is a shift in the type of home being built. Contracts under $400,000 fell by more than half, from close to one in four builds to about one in eight. Everything under $500,000 shrank. Above that line the market grew, and the fastest growth of all came at the top: the $750,000 and above tier jumped 45%.
Picture a cafe selling fewer cheap coffees and the same number of expensive ones. The average sale climbs without a single price changing on the board. Queensland’s builders did the equivalent, and the blend moved upmarket.
One franchise grew while the rest repriced
Count every licence and Queensland’s biggest franchise network is Stroud Homes, whose Queensland licences wrote 372 contracts for $210.6 million, enough for tenth place overall. It was also the only major network to grow its build count in a market that shrank.
The contrast tells the year’s story in miniature. G.J. Gardner runs the larger network and held its revenue almost flat on 17% fewer builds, carrying the highest average contract of any volume operation in the ranking. One network grew. The others held their dollars by moving upmarket, the same move the whole market made.
Where the work is actually landing
Because the ranking lists builders by head office, the report draws on official ABS approvals to show where the work is really happening. Statewide, new residential dwelling approvals rose 22.2% on a like for like basis. The Gold Coast is the standout, with approvals up 71% year on year and closing on Brisbane.
But there is a catch for the builders in this ranking. Almost all of the approvals surge is attached dwellings, apartments and the like. Detached houses, the Top 100’s core product, barely moved. For a detached builder, the map that matters runs through registered land, and there it points to Moreton Bay, where lot registrations more than doubled, and to Logan.
What it means
The market rewarded value over volume this year, and the totals say it plainly: value up, volume down. The pipeline is refilling, led by the Gold Coast corridor, but the cheap end has thinned, and that reshapes where the work is. Cost forecasters put 2026 growth at around 5% for Brisbane and up to 6% on the Gold Coast, still roughly half the contract value rise, which leaves mix as the bigger driver.
The open question is whether premiumisation holds, or whether the entry level segment returns as approvals convert to completions. Edition two will tell.
Read the full report
The Top 100 Queensland Builders report ranks all one hundred businesses in full, with both years of builds and value, the franchise networks broken out, the regional approvals map, the land layer and the complete methodology.
Read it here: https://qldtop100.thegoodbuilder.com.au/home
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