New Report Reveals Australia’s Top-Earning Trades

For many trade businesses, the focus is simply keeping the lights on — but once you move beyond survival, planning for growth becomes harder. Without transparency around earnings and performance across trades, it’s difficult to understand where your business sits, what’s achievable at your size, and how decisions like pricing, workload, or hiring will affect your bottom line.

Tradify created the Top-Earning Trades Report for Australian trade businesses to remove that guesswork, so you can plan your next move based on facts, not feelings.

1. Why we built the Top-Earning Trades Report
2. Higher earnings aren’t about working more hours
3. Quote speed and confidence
4. Cash flow pressure
5. Sustainable success comes from adapting, not pushing harder

1. Why we built the Top-Earning Trades Report

The aim of the Top-Earning Trades Report isn’t to crown winners, but to understand what actually drives sustainable trade business success in a modern market.

Some trades consistently bring in higher revenue than others do to a mix of product costs, scale and accepted profit margins. For trade business owners, the most actionable insights come from looking at how revenue changes within a trade as a business grows. When businesses are compared within the same trade, patterns emerge around business structure and stage. Moving from a sole trader to a small team, hiring an apprentice, or adding operational support can materially change how much work your business can take on and how reliably you can convert demand into revenue.

2. Higher earnings aren’t about working more hours

One of the clearest patterns in the report is that higher-earning trade businesses aren’t simply putting in longer days. Instead, they’re more deliberate about how their time is used and where effort is spent. Without better systems, owners often absorb the extra workload themselves, leading to longer hours, more admin at night, and less visibility over what’s actually driving profit. 

Many of the strongest-performing businesses are intentional about protecting work life balance. By keeping admin within work hours and reducing after-hours catch-up, you're better positioned to make clearer decisions, follow up on quotes promptly, and stay on top of cash flow.

This isn’t about doing less work. It’s about shifting effort away from reactive tasks and towards activities that directly supports your revenue and team productivity.

Systems, not sacrifice

Job management systems play a key role in this shift. By centralising scheduling, quoting, invoicing, and follow-up, your business can reduce manual effort and minimise delays that often creep in as teams grow. This makes it easier to grow consistency, even as job volume increases.

3. Quote speed and confidence

Across all trades, one factor consistently separates stronger-performing businesses from the rest: how quickly you move from enquiry to approval.

When quotes are slow, unclear, or look unprofessional (i'm looking at you 'sent from iPhone' emails), jobs stall. Customers delay decisions, seek alternatives, or push back on price. The report shows that with faster quote turnaround and more structured quote follow-up, you'll tend to convert more work without relying on heavy discounting.

Why fast quote turnaround matters

Speed signals professionalism. A fast quote turnaround shows customers that your business is organised, reliable, and ready to start. In competitive markets, this often matters just as much as price.

Quoting speed also affects internal momentum. When quotes go out promptly, follow-ups are easier, scheduling is clearer, and teams spend less time revisiting half-finished work. This creates a smoother workflow and reduces the mental load on owners who would otherwise be juggling open enquiries in their head.

4. Cash flow pressure

As your business scales, revenue rises, but so does the work required to keep things moving. One of the most common challenges is the rise of cash flow stress as admin grows and payment cycles lengthen.

More jobs mean more invoices, more follow-ups, and more money tied up between completion and payment. Without clear processes, this quickly creates pressure, even in businesses that appear busy and profitable on paper.

Visibility and follow-up become critical

Managing you cash flow as your grow requires visibility across your whole business. You need to know what’s been invoiced, what’s outstanding, and where delays are occurring. When this information lives across spreadsheets, team members phones, inboxes, or paper job sheets, problems often surface way too late.

The report shows that businesses with structured invoicing and follow-up processes are better able to stay ahead of cash flow issues. Timely invoicing, clear payment tracking, and consistent reminders reduce delays and help smooth out income as the business grows.

5. Sustainable success comes from adapting

Ultimately, the report shows that growing a successful trade business isn’t driven by trade type alone, or by working longer hours. It comes from your ability to adapt as demand increases.

Businesses that grow sustainably invest in systems, protect time, and make deliberate decisions around pricing, hiring, and operations. They build structures that support the team, rather than relying on the owner to hold everything together.

In a market shaped by construction industry growth and ongoing skills shortages, these choices are becoming more important. Demand is there, but turning that demand into consistent, profitable growth depends on how well a business evolves as it scales.

Looking for the best tool to grow your trade business? 

Tradify is a job management app used by thousands of tradespeople building better lives and businesses all over the world. It gives you all the features needed to manage and grow a successful trade business, including:

• Enquiries
• Quoting
• Invoicing
• Scheduling
• Job tracking
• Subcontractor management

Start your 14-day free trial today. No credit card required. No pressure. Or take a look at Tradify in action during one of our weekly 30-min live walkthroughs.