Most construction businesses assume casual labour is just expensive. It’s a cost you wear, like fuel or insurance, without ever pulling it apart to see where the money actually goes. But sit down and run the numbers properly and something surprising shows up. There isn’t one saving hiding in the maths: there are two and most businesses are capturing neither. So what does it actually cost to put a casual worker on site in 2026 and where is the extra money going?
The Cost Everyone Knows
Labour hire has been the default path to casual workers in construction for decades. Which means, understandably, it’s familiar and convenient. But few businesses ever stop to examine what that path actually costs. A general labourer through a labour hire agency in Queensland typically costs a business around $57 an hour all-inclusive.¹
That rate bundles the worker’s wage, super, insurance, payroll tax, casual loading and the agency’s margin, which typically runs between 15 and 25 per cent of the bill.¹ The worker takes home considerably less than the invoice suggests. The gap in the middle pays the agency for finding the worker, running payroll and managing compliance.
Run that worker at 20 hours a week across a 48-week year and the annual bill lands around $54,720. It’s a number most businesses accept without questioning, partly because the alternative has always felt too complicated to be worth it.
The Saving Nobody Told You About
There’s another way of engaging that worker: direct casual employment. But what does that actually mean in practice? With labour hire, the worker and the admin are theirs. With direct casual employment, the worker is yours but the admin isn’t. So think the perks of traditional casual employment, minus the admin.
Let’s break down the numbers of this pathway. Take a labourer on $32 an hour, then add super and a 16 per cent service fee covering onboarding, payroll, matching, reporting and compliance. The all-in cost lands around $40 an hour, which across the same 20-hour week for 48 weeks comes to roughly $38,400 a year.
Against the labour hire equivalent that’s a saving of more than $16,000 a year on one part-time worker. For a full-time casual at 38 hours, the saving climbs past $31,000 per worker. Think about that for a second: the work and the worker are identical. The only difference is how much your business spends to employ them.
The Second Saving Hiding on Your Own Site
Want to know the good news? That saving is only the first of the two, because the second sits in who does what on site. Walk onto any project in Brisbane or across SEQ and you’ll find a familiar mismatch: qualified trades moving materials, taking deliveries and cleaning up at day’s end. Meaning, work that needs a White Card and a decent attitude is routinely being done at trade rates.
Here’s what correcting that is worth. Every hour of basic work shifted from a $100-an-hour tradie to a $40-an-hour casual puts $60 back in your pocket. Reallocate just 10 hours a week and that’s roughly $28,800 a year, per tradie.² A second saving stacked on top of the first, produced by the same workers you’ve just employed.
It’s the site-level equivalent of paying head-chef wages to have someone wash the dishes. The meal still gets made but the kitchen bleeds money making it. Match the pay rate to the task across a whole site and the same crew produces the same output for thousands less every month.
What the Maths Means for Your Business
If you’re running a construction business right now, labour is one of the few costs you can genuinely pull a lever on. With material prices and timelines sitting largely outside your control, the lever moves further than most owners realise because the two savings compound.
Here’s what that looks like in real numbers. Employ one full-time casual through a system like Casu and you’re more than $31,000 a year ahead of labour hire. Hand them the deliveries, the clean-up and the material runs eating your tradies’ week and you buy back 10 hours of trade time, worth up to $48,000 a year. Call it close to $80,000 of value from a single hire.
So hold that number against everything else you do to protect a margin. You’d chase a supplier over a few hundred dollars on a materials bill, yet up to $80,000 a year has been sitting in the one cost nobody thought to question, hidden across invoices that looked perfectly normal. Until now that cost was invisible, so nobody could blame you for wearing it. But an invisible cost is bad luck. A visible one is a choice.