Australian Construction Industry Statistics (2026): Work Done, Dwellings, Workforce and Outlook

The Australian construction industry added $191.75 billion in value in 2024-25 and employed 1,342,100 people in the June quarter 2026. The figure that matters more for anyone using construction statistics is different: most quarterly numbers circulating online come from a preliminary release that a later release supersedes.

Construction Work Done, Australia, Preliminary lands about eight weeks after the quarter closes, on roughly 80% of surveyed entities, then is updated by the fuller Engineering Construction Activity and Building Activity releases. Every figure below carries its release name, reference period and preliminary-or-final status.

Key Takeaways

• Total construction work done fell 2.1% to $82,515.9m in the June quarter 2026, but the total hides a split: building work rose 1.3% to $45,843.7m while engineering work fell 6.0% to $36,672.2m (ABS, Construction Work Done, Australia, Preliminary, June 2026, released 26 August 2026).
• That release is preliminary, on about 80% of surveyed construction entities, and is superseded by Engineering Construction Activity (30 September 2026) and Building Activity (7 October 2026).
• Dwellings commenced rose 7.0% to 52,201 and completions rose 5.8% to 47,168, while 248,733 dwellings sat under construction at the end of June, a record in an ABS series dating from September 1984 (ABS, Building Activity, June 2026).
• Construction is one of the three largest employing industries, at 1,342,100 people in the June quarter 2026 (ABS, Labour Account Australia).
• Both forecasters that measure against the National Housing Accord have it out of reach: Master Builders projects a 204,000-home shortfall and HIA a 186,000-home shortfall. Separately, ACIF projects a 0.8% contraction in work done across 2026.
• These are national aggregates, not a forecast for any one business, and regional and segment-level conditions differ materially from the national figure.

How Big Is the Australian Construction Industry?

Two measures answer this. Industry value added is the economic contribution; employment is the workforce.

Value added was $191,751m in 2024-25, up 7.9% from $177,637m in 2023-24 (ABS, Australian Industry, 2024-25 financial year). Construction employed 1,342,100 people in the June quarter 2026, across 1,374,200 total jobs, up from 1,331,500 in the March quarter (ABS, Labour Account Australia, June 2026, released 4 September 2026). The release states construction was one of the three industries with the highest number of employed people, alongside health care and social assistance and retail trade.

Two cautions. The annual series in the same release puts employment at 1,313,000 at end June 2025, up 1.3% — a different series on a different base, not to be blended with the quarterly figure. And the ABS's structure article puts construction at 7.0% of GDP in 2023-24, with 68.4% of the workforce in construction services — trades and subcontracting — barely changed from 66.9% in 2011-12, so most of the workforce is in trades and subcontracting. The Productivity Commission describes residential building as fragmented, with the average residential building firm employing fewer than two people (Productivity Commission).

Which ABS Release Answers Your Question, and What Is Still Preliminary?

The ABS publishes construction data in waves, and the first wave is explicitly provisional.

The preliminary release states its own supersession: the estimates "are subject to revision when results are updated in Engineering Construction Activity, Australia on 30 September 2026 and in Building Activity, Australia on 7 October 2026".

The revision is material, and the ABS publishes its size. Building Activity's revision note for the March 2026 quarter records that total work done was revised up $453.9m or 1.0%, total work commenced up $1.5b or 2.8%, and residential dwellings commenced up 433 or 1.0% (all original, current price). That is a one-to-three per cent movement on the headline. The caveat is prominent in the release itself; the failure is in coverage that quotes the preliminary number without it.

How Much Construction Work Is Being Done?

$82,515.9m of construction work was done in the June quarter 2026, down 2.1% on the March quarter and up 2.7% on a year earlier. Within that total, building work was $45,843.7m (+1.3% quarter-on-quarter, +10.0% year-on-year), residential $27,867.1m (+1.7%, +9.1%), non-residential $17,976.6m (+0.5%, +11.5%) and engineering $36,672.2m (-6.0%, -5.1%) (ABS, Construction Work Done, Australia, Preliminary, June 2026, seasonally adjusted chain volume measures, reference year 2023-24).

Read those components sideways and the story is not "construction is slowing". It is a building market growing at 10% a year and an engineering market contracting at 5%, netting out to a small fall in the total.

Source: ABS, Construction Work Done, Australia, Preliminary, June 2026, seasonally adjusted chain volume measures, reference year 2023-24. Totals are the sum of the published building and engineering series. All figures preliminary, on about 80% of surveyed entities.

Residential building work rose in six of the seven quarter-on-quarter moves shown above; the one fall was June 2025 (down $143.0m). Engineering peaked at $39,005.3m in the March quarter 2026 and fell back 6.0%. The ABS trend estimate rose 0.7% to $81,966.0m.

One discrepancy worth flagging. Engineering Construction Activity, Australia, June 2026, released 30 September 2026, reports engineering work done of $37,200.0m for the same quarter, down 4.7% — a different total from the $36,672.2m in the preliminary release. That is not an error: Engineering Construction Activity is the fuller survey the preliminary estimate is superseded by.

Dwellings: Commencements, Completions and What Is Under Construction

Starts are rising, completions are rising more slowly, and the gap is accumulating on site. All figures are ABS, Building Activity, Australia, June 2026, released 7 October 2026, seasonally adjusted.

Response rate approximately 85% of the value of building work done; final June 2026 data due 13 January 2027.

Note the one series going backwards: house completions fell 1.9% year-on-year while house commencements rose 20.7%. More houses are starting and, in annual terms, fewer are finishing. That shows in the stock: 248,733 total sector dwellings were under construction at the end of the June quarter, of which 95,447 were new houses (original series), against 224,571 a year earlier — a rise of 10.8%, our calculation from the ABS series. The stock is at a record in a series that begins in September 1984, above the previous peak of 243,825 in September 2022.

One precision point. Commencements and completions in the same quarter refer to different projects, so their difference is not a direct measure of the change in stock. The defensible statement is that commencements exceeded completions and the under-construction stock is at a record. State figures must be quoted as original rather than seasonally adjusted for smaller jurisdictions: the ABS warns the seasonally adjusted series for Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the ACT are difficult to estimate reliably.

The Pipeline: Work Yet To Be Done

Value of work in the pipeline at the end of the June quarter 2026, current prices, original series (ABS, Building Activity, June 2026, Table 78): $199,918,458 thousand across all building types, of which residential was $103,976,239 thousand, non-residential $95,942,219 thousand and new houses $33,260,253 thousand.

Two qualifications. This is the building pipeline only — engineering has its own "work yet to be done" series in Engineering Construction Activity, and the two should not be added without saying so. And the figure includes work not yet commenced: work yet to be done is work that has started ($165,839,450 thousand), while work not yet commenced is approved but not started ($34,079,008 thousand).

Workforce, Skills and Business Numbers

Productivity. Carry these two figures together, because the first is routinely quoted without the second. The Productivity Commission's Housing construction productivity: Can we fix it? (February 2025) found that over 30 years the number of dwellings completed per hour worked declined 53% — physical productivity — while gross value added per hour worked, which controls for new homes being larger and better specified than in the mid-1990s, declined 12%, against labour productivity growth of about 49% across the broader economy. The Commission also states plainly that there are no official estimates of housing construction productivity and that it built these proxies from ABS data.

Wages and salaries per employee in construction for 2023-24 were $132,900 in heavy and civil engineering construction, $88,700 in building construction and $74,800 in construction services (ABS, The nuts and bolts of the Australian construction industry). Those are 2023-24 figures and will date.

Business failure. Construction leads Australian company insolvencies: 3,472 construction companies entered insolvency in the financial year to 30 June 2026, about one in four of all company insolvencies nationally (ASIC insolvency statistics, Series 1, financial year 2025-26, provisional; the same count is reported by Accountants Daily). This is an ASIC figure, not an ABS one, and ASIC revises, so the count moves.

The Forward Outlook: What the Forecasters Expect

Sources: ACIF, Master Builders Australia, HIA. All checked October 2026.

ACIF frames the industry aggregate: "growth in the industry could be brought to a standstill... This could lead to a contraction in work done of 0.8 per cent in 2026", attributing the shift to "a surge in fuel prices, renewed inflationary pressure and the prospect of higher interest rates".

The two shortfall numbers are not in conflict. They come from different forecasters on different base periods, and each should be cited to its own source rather than averaged. Nor do ACIF's contraction and HIA's rising home building contradict: ACIF forecasts the whole industry including engineering, while HIA is speaking to home building, the part currently growing.

What These Numbers Mean for a Builder's Decision-Making

A national aggregate is not a plan. But four movements in the June quarter data change how a builder should read their own forward bookings.

Commencements rising faster than completions means capacity is being absorbed, not freed. 52,201 starts against 47,168 completions, with under-construction stock at a record 248,733. Work is queuing on site rather than flowing through, which typically shows up as longer programmes, more concurrent jobs per supervisor and trades booked further ahead. A builder reading only commencements would conclude more work is coming and might add capacity; reading both suggests the binding constraint is throughput, not demand.

House completions are the one series falling. House completions were down 1.9% year-on-year while commencements were up 20.7%. Starts up with completions flat to down is a settlement-lag signal. If a builder's own completion rate is falling while their start rate rises, they have the same problem, usually a trades-and-inspections problem rather than a sales problem.

The engineering decline is a trade-market signal. Engineering work fell 6.0% in the quarter and 5.1% year-on-year, and engineering draws heavily on civil, earthworks, concreting and structural trades. A sustained slowdown releases that labour into the building market, which over time eases trade pricing in the same trades a residential or commercial builder relies on. It is the connection between the two halves of the industry that the totals conceal.

Non-residential building is the quietly strong series. Up 0.5% in the quarter and 11.5% year-on-year, it has the fastest annual growth of any component, so for a builder with exposure to commercial, industrial or fit-out work that is the segment with momentum.

The distance between a national aggregate and a decision is the region and the segment, which is why the ABS publishes state-level series, and a builder's own forward-bookings coverage is a better leading indicator than the national total. DDDI Group works across planning, design, development and delivery in this market, and the way we read these figures is against our own pipeline rather than in place of it — our own practice, not a benchmark from other builders.

What This Page Does Not Establish

It is not a forecast for any individual business. National aggregates describe the industry; a builder's own pipeline, region and segment decide their year.

It is not representative at regional or segment level. Conditions differ materially between states and between detached housing, apartments, commercial, industrial and civil work. The ABS publishes the state series for this reason, and they do not move together.

It is not final data. Figures sourced to Construction Work Done, Australia, Preliminary, June 2026 are preliminary, on about 80% of surveyed entities, and are superseded by the Engineering Construction Activity and Building Activity releases. The Building Activity figures quoted here are themselves subject to revision, with final June 2026 data due 13 January 2027.

How to Cite This Page

DDDI Built Environment Research, Australian Construction Industry Statistics (2026): Work Done, Dwellings, Workforce and Outlook, DDDI Group, accessed on the date you read it, https://dddi.com.au/insights/industry/australian-construction-industry-statistics

Last updated: 14 October 2026. Refreshed each ABS quarter, immediately following the Construction Work Done, Australia, Preliminary release. The next refresh follows the September quarter 2026 preliminary release, scheduled for 25 November 2026 on the ABS release calendar. All ABS figures are reproduced from the releases named against them, and the ABS remains the authoritative source.

Frequently Asked Questions

How big is the construction industry in Australia?

It depends which measure you take. Construction generated $191.75 billion in industry value added in 2024-25 (ABS Australian Industry) and employed 1,342,100 people in the June quarter 2026 (ABS Labour Account Australia). The ABS put the industry at 7.0% of GDP in 2023-24. Each covers a different period.

How much construction work is being done in Australia?

$82,515.9m in the June quarter 2026, down 2.1% on the March quarter (ABS Construction Work Done, Australia, Preliminary, June 2026). That splits into $45.8 billion of building work, up 1.3%, and $36.7 billion of engineering work, down 6.0%. The figure is preliminary, on about 80% of surveyed entities.

Why does the ABS revise construction data?

The preliminary release covers about 80% of surveyed construction entities and is published roughly eight weeks after quarter end. Engineering Construction Activity and Building Activity then update it from fuller responses. In the March 2026 quarter those updates raised total work done by 1.0% and total work commenced by 2.8%.

How many homes are being built in Australia?

52,201 dwellings commenced and 47,168 were completed in the June quarter 2026, and 248,733 were under construction at the end of June, of which 95,447 were houses (ABS Building Activity, June 2026). The under-construction figure is a record in a series dating from September 1984.

How many people work in construction in Australia?

1,342,100 people were employed in construction in the June quarter 2026, across 1,374,200 total jobs (ABS Labour Account Australia, June 2026). Construction was one of the three industries with the highest number of employed people, alongside health care and social assistance and retail trade.

Is the construction industry in Australia growing or shrinking?

Both, depending on the segment. Total work done fell 2.1% in the June quarter, but building work rose 1.3% and 10.0% year-on-year while engineering fell 6.0%. Home commencements rose 7.0%. Both forecasters that measure against the National Housing Accord target of 1.2 million homes expect it to be missed, by 186,000 homes on HIA's numbers and 204,000 on Master Builders'.

Where This Leaves a Builder

The industry is large, its building half is growing, its engineering half is contracting, and the National Housing Accord target is out of reach on both Master Builders' and HIA's numbers. That is the state of play for the June quarter 2026.

The discipline worth keeping is the one this page applies to itself: read the release name, the reference period and the preliminary-or-final status before reading the number.

For how the operational systems sit underneath these numbers, the construction management software in Australia guide maps the category, and once a project reaches practical completion the asset moves into a different set of tools — commercial property management software covers that side. If you would rather have the operating system than the statistics, our builder-enablement work is where DDDI runs estimating, scheduling and cost control onto a real building business.