The honest answer is that a complete bathroom renovation in Sydney costs between about $22,000 and $40,000 in 2026, and where you land inside that range is decided mostly by three things: how big the room is, whether the plumbing moves, and how far your tile and fitting selections go. Everything else is noise.
What makes the question hard to answer is not the range. It is that renovation quotes in Sydney are rarely comparing the same work. One quote is the finished room; another is labour with a page of exclusions. Below is what each price band actually buys, and how to tell which kind of quote you are holding.
Sydney bathroom renovation cost by room type
These are complete-room prices including GST, labour, every trade, tile and fitting supply, certified waterproofing and rubbish removal — not labour-only rates.
| Type of bathroom | Complete price | Time on site (working days) | What drives it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Powder room / small ensuite | $12,000 – $18,000 | ~15 days | No bath, small footprint — but the same trades and the same waterproofing. |
| Small bathroom, same layout | $21,999 – $24,000 | ~20 days | Under about 5m², plumbing stays put, standard tile sizes. |
| Standard main bathroom | $24,000 – $30,000 | ~24 days | 5–8m², tiles to ceiling, freestanding bath, feature wall. |
| Apartment / strata bathroom | $23,000 – $33,000 | ~24 days | Acoustic underlay, by-law approval, restricted hours, lift access. |
| Large or reconfigured bathroom | $30,000 – $40,000 | ~29 days | Layout change, plumbing relocated, stone, double vanity, frameless screen. |
| Bathroom + ensuite together | $38,000 – $52,000 | ~31 days | Two rooms, one mobilisation — typically 12–18% under separate bookings. |
For what these numbers look like on real jobs, our case studies publish the actual contract value, time on site and full specification of twelve Sydney projects — including what the variations were and what they added.
What actually drives the price
1. Size, and specifically wall area
People estimate bathrooms by floor area, but the cost sits on the walls. Tiling to the ceiling instead of halfway can add two days of labour and 40% more tile in the same footprint. It is also the single upgrade that most changes how finished a bathroom looks, which is why it is standard in our Deluxe package rather than an extra.
2. Whether plumbing moves
Keeping the shower, bath, vanity and toilet where they are is the biggest saving available. Moving a shower or vanity is straightforward. Moving a toilet is the expensive one, because the waste line has to be re-run and often the slab cut — budget $2,000 to $4,000 for that move alone. Whether it is worth it depends entirely on whether the layout is the reason you dislike the room.
3. Selections
Tiles run from about $35/m² to well past $200/m², and a bathroom uses 25–40m² of them. Tapware ranges from $400 for a chrome set to $2,500 for a designer finish. A stone-top vanity is $1,500 more than a laminate one. None of these are wrong choices — they are just where a $24,000 bathroom becomes a $34,000 one, and you should be making them with the numbers in front of you.
4. Access and building type
A ground-floor bathroom in a freestanding house is the cheapest scenario. A second-storey bathroom adds material handling. A strata apartment adds acoustic underlay, a by-law application, restricted work hours and lift bookings — typically $1,500 to $2,500 identified as its own line on our quotes rather than buried in the rate.
5. What is behind the old wall
In Sydney bathrooms built before 1990, four things turn up often enough to plan for: no waterproof membrane at all, rotten floor framing at the old bath or shower waste, corroded copper or galvanised pipework, and asbestos sheeting. Asbestos must be removed by a licensed removalist and is always priced separately. If your house is that age, hold 5–10% aside.
The exclusions that make quotes incomparable
This is the part worth doing carefully. Take any two quotes and check that each of the following appears explicitly in both:
- Tile supply — not just tiling labour, and with a stated $/m² allowance
- Vanity, toilet suite, shower screen, tapware, mirror — supplied, not just installed
- Waterproofing certificate — the certificate, in your name, not just “waterproofing”
- Demolition and rubbish removal — including the skip, and who parks it where
- Making good — doorway, architraves, cornice and the wall the old vanity was screwed to
- Painting — ceiling and any untiled wall, in a mould-resistant paint
- Home Building Compensation cover — legally required in NSW over $20,000
- GST — still quoted ex-GST more often than you would expect
In our experience most of an $8,000 gap between two Sydney bathroom quotes closes to almost nothing once both quotes cover the same list. If you are holding a quote now, send it to us and we will map it line by line against ours — including telling you if theirs is genuinely the better deal.
Where the money is well spent
After a thousand-odd rooms, the upgrades that consistently repay themselves are not the ones people expect:
- Tiling to the ceiling. The cheapest thing that makes a bathroom look expensive, and the place cheap renovations fail first.
- Waterproofing done properly. Invisible, unglamorous, and the only element whose failure means taking the finished room out again.
- A wall-hung vanity. Seeing floor run underneath it makes a small bathroom read noticeably larger for a few hundred dollars.
- A recessed niche. Removes the shower caddy forever, and costs almost nothing while the wall is already open.
- Better lighting. An LED strip under the vanity and a decent exhaust fan change how the room feels more than an upgraded tile does.
And the reliable way to save real money: if you are doing more than one room, do them at once. The site set-up, skip, trade mobilisation and project management are shared, which typically takes 12–18% off two separate bookings — and compresses the disruption into one stretch instead of two.
What we charge, and what it covers
Our packages are complete-room prices: Premium from $21,999, Deluxe from $24,999, Luxury from $28,999, all including GST, labour, every trade, tile and fitting supply, certified waterproofing and rubbish removal. Kitchens start at $24,999 and laundries at $8,999.
You can compare all three packages line by line, or tell us your room size and what you want changed and we will send you a written fixed-price quote — usually within one business day.
