The Top 100 Queensland Builders, FY2025/26. The inaugural edition lands Friday 3 July, 2026.

Volume did not carry the year for Queensland’s hundred biggest residential builders.

The money did.

You would expect those two to move together. This year they parted ways, and that gap is the spine of our first Top 100 report. It points to something most of the industry felt but few have measured. This was not a busier market. It was a market that charged more.

A market that charged more. Not a busier one.

What the report is

The Top 100 Queensland Builders is a paid research product from The Good Builder. One hundred of the state’s largest residential builders, ranked by total contract value, with both years of builds, both years of value, the year on year move, and the average contract sitting behind every name.

The ranked hundred are the payoff, and they sit near the end. Everything before them explains why the numbers read the way they do.

This is the inaugural edition. It will not be the last.

The findings worth knowing (and the ones we are holding back)

We are not handing over the table here. But the shape of the year is worth knowing before you decide whether the full read is for you.

The market moved upmarket, and materials did not push it there. The obvious explanation for higher average contracts is cost. We tested that against real Australian cost data over the same window, and it does not hold. Input costs rose, and they have been climbing hard for years. Average contracts rose much further than that. The gap is not inflation. It is mix.

Picture a cafe selling fewer drip coffees and the same number of lattes. The average sale climbs without a single price changing on the board. Queensland’s builders did the equivalent. Fewer cheap homes, more expensive ones, and the blend shifted up. The report draws the crossover line and shows exactly where the bottom of the market thinned.

The head is concentrated. The tail plays a different game. A small group of builders carry a large share of both volume and value. Read against them, the boutique and custom end is measuring something else entirely, and the report is careful not to let one distort the other.

Builders moved hard in both directions. Some grew off real scale. Some posted eye-catching jumps off small bases. Some did fewer jobs for more money, which is the whole-of-market story showing up one business at a time. The report names them and puts the base beside every percentage, so a big swing off a small number never reads as more than it is.

Where builders are based is not where the work is. The ranking lists head offices. So we built a second, independent layer from official ABS approvals to show where Queensland is actually building. The growth corridor is clear. One part of the south east is surging toward the top of the state. And the regions are not sitting still, with a couple of centres heating fast.

How builders, trades and suppliers can use it

Builders. The report tells you which end of the market grew and which end thinned, and where the pipeline is refilling. That makes it a planning document. It informs where to chase work, how to price into a market that is leaning premium, and which segments are quietly emptying out. It also shows you, plainly, where you sit against the field.

Trades. Follow the work. The report separates the volume builders from the custom tail, and maps the geography of approvals independent of head office. If you are deciding which builders to back or which corridor to base around, this is the evidence under that call.

Suppliers. Demand is concentrating, and it is shifting up the spec ladder. The report shows the spend moving and the regional pockets heating. That is the difference between stocking and speccing for last year’s market and stocking for this one. For anyone deciding where to put reps, branches or credit lines, the geography matters.

When it drops

The inaugural Top 100 Queensland Builders lands Friday 3 July.

A free sampler gives you the shape of the year and the top of the table. The paid edition runs the full hundred.

Sign up to The Good Builder to get it: https://newsletter.thegoodbuilder.com.au/sign-up

Want the data on an ongoing basis, not once a year? Subscribe to the Australian Construction Data dashboard: https://constructiondata.com.au/

Related reading

Why smaller builders are winning again in QLD and WA

Queensland house approvals hit their highest level since August 2021

Queensland housing market defies the national slowdown

Queensland housing data reveals uneven growth and rising costs across the state

Author: TGB Editorial