Nobody publishes admin hours by trade. Here is everything that is published.

Start with the absence, because it is the finding

The statistic this page was commissioned to publish does not exist. No Australian government agency publishes hours spent on administration by trade, by industry, or at all. We looked at the ABS, the ATO, the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, Treasury, the Productivity Commission and business.gov.au.

That matters because the figure gets quoted constantly. Somebody will tell you tradies lose fifteen hours a week to paperwork, or eight, or twenty — and every version of it traces back to a survey commissioned by a company selling software to fix it. Those surveys are not necessarily wrong. They are just not checkable, and a number you cannot check is not evidence, it is decoration.

So this page does the opposite of what its title promises, deliberately. It publishes what the official statistics do say about the trades, marks clearly where the data runs out, and gives you the arithmetic to work out your own figure — which is the only one that could change a decision anyway.

What is published about the trades

Small businesses employ 804,000 of the 1,291,000 people working in construction — 62% of the industry, and the largest small business workforce of any industry in Australia. ASBFEO Small Business Data Portal, from ABS Australian Industry, 2023–24, published July 2025.

Construction services — the trades, as opposed to builders and civil contractors — account for 68.4% of the construction workforce, more than 883,000 people. ABS, The nuts and bolts of the Australian Construction industry, 2023–24, released 24 June 2025. When people say "the construction industry" they usually picture builders and cranes; two thirds of it is a ute and a couple of blokes.

Construction services turned over $276.1 billion, more than building construction at $235.2 billion and heavy and civil engineering at $122.4 billion. ABS, The nuts and bolts of the Australian Construction industry, 2023–24, released 24 June 2025.

Small construction businesses added $89.6 billion of value — 51% of everything the construction industry contributes, more than medium and large firms combined. ASBFEO Small Business Data Portal, from ABS Australian Industry, 2023–24, published July 2025. Small construction businesses are not a minor part of the industry — they are more than half of it.

Construction recorded 76,414 new businesses in 2024–25 — the highest number of new businesses of any industry in Australia. ABS, 7 facts about Australian businesses, 2024–25, released 26 August 2025. More people start a trade business in Australia each year than start a business in any other industry, which also means more of them are running one for the first time.

Hours worked — the number that exists, and what it cannot tell you

Construction workers actually worked 614.9 million hours in the March quarter of 2026 — an average of 460.4 hours per job for the quarter. ABS, Labour Account Australia, March quarter 2026, released June 2026.

Construction held 1,356,800 jobs in the March quarter of 2026. ABS, Labour Account Australia, March quarter 2026, released June 2026.

That is a real, official, well-collected figure and it does not answer the question. The ABS labour account counts hours worked; it does not ask what the hours were spent doing. A tradie quoting on a Sunday night, a bookkeeper reconciling a bank feed and an apprentice pulling cable are all the same hour in that table.

This is worth understanding rather than complaining about. Splitting hours into billable and administrative would require asking every business to categorise its own time, which is exactly the kind of self-reported estimate that makes vendor surveys unreliable. The ABS not publishing it is a methodological choice, not an oversight — and it is the right one.

What compliance actually costs, and the one figure worth remembering

Tax compliance cost micro-businesses about $90 for every $1,000 of turnover, against about $12 for small businesses and about 40 cents for large ones. Treasury, Regulation and small business, Treasury Round Up, reproducing Lignier, Evans and Tran-Nam, 2014. Treasury reproducing an academic study, not a government collection, and the underlying research is from 2014. It is the best Australian figure of its kind we could find, which is itself the point.

Read that ratio again, because it is the most useful thing on this page. Per dollar of turnover, tax compliance cost a micro-business roughly two hundred times what it cost a large one. Not twice. Not ten times.

The reason is not complexity, it is fixed cost. A BAS takes about the same effort whether the business behind it turned over eighty thousand dollars or eighty million, so the smaller the business, the more of its turnover that fixed effort consumes. That is also precisely why automating admin pays disproportionately at the small end — the work does not scale down on its own.

The caveat travels with the figure: this is Treasury reproducing an academic study whose data is from 2014. It is the best Australian estimate of its kind we could find, and the fact that the best available estimate is more than a decade old tells you how thin this evidence base is.

The admin problem the ATO can actually see

Just over half of small businesses reported their tax correctly, while 35% attempted to comply and made errors. ATO, Small business random enquiry program findings, 2022 bundled sample covering 2019–20 to 2021–22, published 4 November 2025.

Simple mistakes — not avoidance, not complexity, just errors — accounted for 22% of small businesses, up from 11% in the 2017 sample. ATO, Small business random enquiry program findings, 2022 bundled sample, published 4 November 2025. Not avoidance. Not the shadow economy. Not complicated arrangements. Just errors — and the rate doubled in five years.

Poor record keeping was identified as the cause for 3% of small businesses, and complex mistakes for a further 6%. ATO, Small business random enquiry program findings, 2022 bundled sample, published 4 November 2025.

This is the closest thing to an official measurement of the admin problem that exists, and it is measuring the output rather than the hours. A business making simple mistakes on its tax is a business whose records were assembled under time pressure at the end of a quarter, from a system nobody quite trusts.

It is also the argument for automation that survives scrutiny best, because it is not about saving time at all. Correct records assembled continuously beat correct records assembled in a panic, and the ATO can see the difference in aggregate even if nobody can put an hours figure on it.

How to work out your own number in twenty minutes

Since nobody publishes it, measure it. This is deliberately crude, and crude and yours beats precise and somebody else’s.

Pick one week — an ordinary one, not the week of a BAS. Keep a note in your phone every time you do something that is not the work and not selling the work: quoting, invoicing, chasing money, ordering, reconciling, filing, re-entering something you had already written down once. Round to fifteen minutes and do not tidy it up afterwards.

At the end of the week you will have an hours figure. Multiply it by fifty, then by a loaded hourly rate — the calculator uses ABS average weekly earnings and the current ATO super rate as its defaults, so you can start there and replace them with your own. Wages in construction services averaged $74,800 per employee. ABS, The nuts and bolts of the Australian Construction industry, 2023–24, released 24 June 2025.

Then, before doing anything about it, sort the list into three piles: work only you can do, work anyone could do, and work nobody should be doing because it exists only because two systems do not talk. The third pile is the one worth automating, and it is usually bigger than people expect. What not to automate covers the first two.

• One ordinary week Not a BAS week, not a quiet one. A note in your phone each time, rounded to fifteen minutes, not tidied up later.
• Multiply by fifty, then by a loaded rate Wages plus super plus on-costs, not the bare hourly figure. The calculator does the arithmetic and shows a range rather than a point.
• Sort into three piles Only you can do it. Anyone could do it. Nobody should be doing it because two systems do not talk. Automate the third pile first.

What we have not measured, and what would change this page

Everything above is published by an Australian government agency, fetched and dated. None of it is a Kindra measurement, and this page was originally specced as one — a benchmark drawn from twenty-five to thirty instrumented engagements, where we count admin hours in a trade business before and after rather than asking anybody to estimate it.

We have not done that yet, so the page does not pretend we have. What would change it is not a bigger survey — surveys are how this field got into trouble — but instrumentation: a timestamp when a job is marked complete and a timestamp when the invoice leaves, on real businesses, for long enough to be boring.

When that exists it gets published here with the sample size, the method and the failure cases, and the industry framing above comes out. If our own numbers turn out to be less impressive than the ones vendors quote, they still get published. That is the entire point of measuring instead of asserting. In the meantime the leak calculator lets you run the arithmetic on your own figures, which are better than anybody’s average.