The Hidden Costs of Building: What Sits Outside the Contract Price

The contract price covers the building work your builder has agreed to carry out and nothing else. On a Sunshine Coast new build, the costs that sit outside it fall into five groups: consultants’ reports and design documentation, council and certifier fees, statutory charges and levies, site works that cannot be priced until the soil test and survey are back, and everything past the front door threshold — driveway, turf, fencing, letterbox, pool. None of that is hidden from your builder. It is hidden from you only if the exclusions list is thin. The fastest way to judge a builder is to read what they have excluded before you read what they have included.

What the contract price actually buys

In Queensland, domestic building work priced over $3,300 including labour, materials and GST must be under a written contract, and the QBCC sets $20,000 as the line between a Level 1 and a Level 2 renovation, extension and repair contract (QBCC, domestic building contracts). At $20,000 and over, your builder must give you a copy of the QBCC consumer building guide before you sign.

What no contract does is force a builder to price the whole project. The contract price is the scope in the contract documents — plans, specification, inclusions schedule and exclusions schedule. If the driveway is not drawn and not specified, it is not in the price. The exclusions schedule is the builder telling you, in writing, where their responsibility stops and your cheque book starts.

Two builders quoting the same house can look a long way apart on paper and finish up close to identical in real cost, purely because one carried a provisional allowance for site works and the other excluded them. Read both exclusion lists side by side before you compare a single headline figure. Our guide on the cost to build a house on the Sunshine Coast covers the base rate; this one covers what sits on top.

The 18 exclusions to check before you sign

For each line below, ask your builder one question: is it in the price, is it a provisional allowance, or is it excluded and my responsibility? Write the answer down. There are no dollar ranges in this table, and that is deliberate — site costs on a flat infill lot at Cotton Tree and an acreage block at Ninderry are not the same number, neither council publishes a per-item price list you could hold against your own block, and any builder offering a “typical” range before the soil test and contour survey are back is guessing. What follows is what actually sets the number.

Site costs: your soil test decides most of this

Rows 13 to 17 are where budgets actually break, and every one depends on two documents usually commissioned after you have already fallen in love with a design: the contour survey and the soil test.

The soil test classifies the site under AS 2870 Residential slabs and footings. That classification — A, S, M, H1, H2, E or P — drives the slab and footing design, and the jump from stable coastal sand to highly reactive clay changes the slab package substantially. Class P covers the sites that cannot be classified normally: soft soils, landslip, collapsing or eroding soils, abnormal moisture conditions, or uncontrolled fill. On a P site an engineer designs the footing system from first principles instead of picking a standard detail.

On the coastal strip we often find sand and a straightforward slab. Move inland to Ninderry, or onto the steeper Noosa Heads and Marcus Beach blocks, and you are into retaining, benching, piered footings and crane access. If your block has fall across it, read our guide on building on a sloping block in Queensland before you set a budget. Either way, commission the soil test and survey before you sign. It converts your single largest unknown into a number.

Council and statutory costs on the Sunshine Coast and in Noosa

Before construction starts on most domestic building work in Queensland you need a building development approval, which you can get from your local government or a building certifier, with inspection requirements set out in section 44 of the Building Regulation 2021 (Business Queensland). That certifier fee is separate from anything council charges.

Sunshine Coast Council publishes a Development Services register of fees and charges each financial year, covering development advice and information, material change of use, reconfiguring a lot, operational work, building work, plumbing and drainage work and waste management; the 2026–27 register was adopted on 1 June 2026 (Sunshine Coast Council fees and charges). Infrastructure charges sit separately again, under the council’s Infrastructure Charges Resolution (No. 9) 2022, effective 28 March 2022, which brought the adopted charge rates into line with the prescribed amounts in the Planning Regulation 2017 apart from previously adopted lower rates, which are indexed (Sunshine Coast Council). Neither the register nor the resolution page publishes a single headline number for a house, so get the charge worked out for your actual lot rather than borrowing someone else’s figure.

In Noosa Shire, charges are levied under the Noosa Shire Council Charges Resolution (No. 10) 2026, adopted on 20 August 2026 and applying to development approvals and charge notices issued from 21 August 2026. Worth knowing if you are adding a granny flat: Noosa Council resolved on 15 May 2025 to stop issuing infrastructure charge notices for secondary dwellings from 1 July 2025, although charges already issued remain payable in full (Noosa Shire Council). Noosa also treats retaining walls, carports, sheds and swimming pools as work that generally needs approval, issues plumbing approvals for certain plumbing work itself, and offers a Temporary Home permit through its Health department if you intend to live on site while your house is being built (Noosa Shire Council).

Three statutory items catch people out. First, your energy report is assessed against whichever edition of the National Construction Code is in force here, and Queensland adopts NCC 2025 from 1 May 2027 (ABCB, NCC 2025 adoption), so a house being designed now is still assessed against NCC 2022. Second, design and siting is governed by Queensland Development Code parts MP 1.1, for single detached housing on lots under 450m², and MP 1.2, for lots of 450m² and over — both republished on 14 August 2026 as part of the new Queensland Housing Code, whose transition period runs from 1 September 2026 to 1 September 2029 and which applies only in local government areas where the planning scheme has been amended to specify how it applies (Business Queensland). A design that does not meet the siting standards needs a siting variation, and that is a separate application with its own fee. Third, a portable long service leave levy is payable to QLeave under the Building and Construction Industry (Portable Long Service Leave) Act 1991 once the value of the work passes the threshold set under that Act, and it is paid before work starts. Confirm the current threshold and rate with QLeave, because both are reviewed.

Service connections are a separate transaction

Rows 10 to 12 catch nearly every first-time builder. Your builder installs the plumbing and electrical inside the boundary; the water, sewer and electricity connection is an application to a network provider with its own fee, timeframe and queue. On an infill lot where a house already stood, the connection points usually exist. On a newly created lot, or a battle-axe block with a long driveway, you are paying for trenching, road crossings and possibly a network upgrade. Connections also sit on the critical path, so a delay there delays practical completion no matter how fast the build is going.

The finishing costs that land right at handover

Row 18 is the one that hurts, because it arrives at about the same time as your first full mortgage repayment. Driveway, turf, gardens, irrigation, boundary fencing, clothesline, letterbox, blinds and window furnishings, and the pool are all commonly excluded from a new build contract. Add pool fencing if there is a pool, because that is a compliance item, not an optional extra.

Decide early whether you want these inside the contract. Putting the driveway, fencing and landscaping into the builder’s scope gives you one point of responsibility, one warranty, and trades already on site. Staging them yourself over the following year is equally defensible. What you must not do is assume they are included because the render shows a lawn.

Allowances, provisional sums and variations

An allowance is not a price. Where a builder carries a provisional sum for site works or rock, or a prime cost item for tapware, that figure adjusts to actual cost when the work is done. Ask which items are provisional and have the allowances tested against real quotes before you sign. That is the difference between a genuinely fixed price and a price that merely looks fixed, which we cover in our guide to building contract variations in Queensland.

Queensland regulates how variations are handled. Before the variation work starts, your contractor must present the variation to you in writing and you must agree to it in writing, and you must be given a written copy before the first of two things happens: the domestic building part of the variation work starting, or 5 business days from the day you both agreed to it. Your builder cannot require payment for a variation before that variation work has started, and must deal with changing, cancelling or amending the home warranty cover when the contract is varied (QBCC, contract changes and variations). There is a narrow exception for urgent variations where producing the written document beforehand is not reasonably practicable. If variations are routinely arriving verbally, that is a problem with the builder, not with the process.

What home warranty insurance does not cover

Residential construction work valued at more than $3,300 including materials, labour and GST must be covered under the Queensland Home Warranty Scheme. Your contractor collects the premium from you and pays it to the QBCC, it is included as part of your contract, and the scheme pays up to a maximum of $200,000 on claims (QBCC). Cover runs 6 years 6 months from whichever comes first: you pay the premium, you agree to a contract, or work starts (QBCC, time limits for cover and claims).

Here is the part that belongs in a hidden-costs guide, and it is narrower than most people assume. Driveways, paths, roads, fences, air conditioning, hot water systems, security doors and grilles, and landscaping built as part of a bigger project are covered only for non-completion claims, not for defective work. Done on their own rather than as part of a bigger building project, they do not require home warranty insurance at all (QBCC, what work requires insurance). So the driveway and the landscaping never carry defect cover under the scheme wherever you put them, and pushing them outside the build contract strips out even the non-completion protection. On that work your protection is the contract itself and your contractor’s own warranty, which is a good reason to get the scope and the workmanship terms written down properly.

How to make two builders’ prices comparable

Print both exclusion schedules. Put the 18 rows above down the left of a page and tick which builder has carried each one. Then ask each builder to convert their three largest exclusions into a real allowance based on an actual quote. More often than not the cheaper headline price closes most of the gap once those three lines are filled in, and sometimes it overtakes.

Tom Roebuck has more than 20 years in residential construction, and Roebuck Concepts holds QBCC licence 15280811. To have your exclusions list walked through line by line against your actual block, book a consult, or read how we scope new home builds on the Sunshine Coast.