The cheapest sensible way to restump a Shepparton house, and when cheap costs you twice.
The cheapest defensible job is a staged partial restump: the failed rows only, in 100mm concrete, permit and engineering included, at $5,500 to $9,500 on a typical weatherboard. A full concrete restump with a laser re-level is $13,000 to $18,000. Galvanised steel adjustable throughout, with new bearers and the subfloor drainage sorted, is $20,000 to $28,000. Below the budget tier there is nothing sensible left: a whole-house quote under about $8,000 has left out the permit, the engineering or the footing depth, and each of those gets paid for later at a worse rate.
Cheap is a scope decision, not a discount.
Nobody saves money on a restump by finding a cheaper crew. The rates around Shepparton are within a few dollars a stump of each other, because the same concrete, the same engineer and the same building surveyor are involved whoever you use. Real savings come from deciding honestly how much of the house actually needs doing, and from taking the parts of the job that do not need a licence away from the crew.
The three tiers below are built around the same house: a three bedroom weatherboard of about 56 stumps in Shepparton, Mooroopna or Kialla, built before 1980, on Class M reactive clay, with reasonable side access. Change the stump count and everything moves proportionally, which is what our stump count estimator is for. Change the soil class to H or the access to a 400mm crawl space and add 12 to 25 per cent across the board.
What each budget actually buys on a 56 stump weatherboard.
2026 figures for Shepparton and the Goulburn Valley, GST included, building permit and engineer’s computations included in every tier because they are not optional on building work.
| Tier | Price, this house, 2026 | What you get | What you give up | Who should pick it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Budget: staged partial | $5,500 - $9,500 | The 10 to 18 failed stumps replaced in 100mm concrete on engineered pads. Local re-level of that area only. Permit, engineering and final inspection. Vents cleared while we are under there. | The rest of the house stays on its original stumps. No whole-of-house level correction, so the old dips stay. You will mobilise a crew again one day. | Homes where the failures are genuinely local: one wet wall, a bathroom row, a verandah edge. Also owners selling within a year who need the structure sound and disclosed. |
| Mid: full concrete restump | $13,000 - $18,000 | All 56 stumps replaced in 100mm precast concrete. Full laser re-level of the whole floor. Ant caps. Blocked vents reopened. Permit, engineering, footing and final inspections. Spoil removed. | No future adjustability: a later correction means jacking and repacking. Bearers and joists only replaced if found rotten, at extra cost. | The right answer for most Shepparton weatherboards, and what we quote unless the site says otherwise. Best cost per year of service. |
| Premium: adjustable steel | $20,000 - $28,000 | All stumps in hot dip galvanised adjustable steel, deeper engineered pads, soft bearers and joists replaced, subfloor drainage and ventilation upgraded, plus a return re-level visit after one full season. | Roughly $7,000 more than the mid tier up front, and much of that value only shows up if the house does move again. | Class H sites, houses with mature gums close in, homes on the river flats, and owners who intend to hold the property for 20 years or more. |
Our recommendation: the mid tier for the typical local house, the budget tier where the failures are genuinely confined to one area, and the premium tier only where the soil class or the trees justify it.
Four places you can take money out without hurting the job.
1. Stage the work, but only along real boundaries.
Splitting a house into two jobs a year or two apart is legitimate when the two halves are in genuinely different condition. A common shape around here is the original 1950s weatherboard core on perished red gum and a 1990s extension on concrete stumps that are fine. Do the core now, leave the extension. What you must not do is split a uniformly failing house purely to spread the cost, because you pay mobilisation, permit and engineering twice, which is $1,500 to $3,000 of pure duplication, and you live with a floor that steps between the two halves in the meantime.
2. Do the prep yourself.
Every hour the crew spends moving your things is billed at trade rates. Clearing the perimeter, removing lattice and removable decking boards, emptying the crawl space of stored timber and boxes, cutting shrubs back a metre from the walls, lifting pavers that sit against the base boards and hiring your own skip typically takes a weekend and saves $400 to $1,500. Ask for that to be itemised as a credit in the quote rather than assumed, so both sides know what has been taken out. What you cannot do yourself is anything under the permit: no digging footing holes, no propping, no backfilling. That is covered in detail on our DIY versus professional page.
3. Take the quiet months, with your eyes open.
Restumping diaries around the Goulburn Valley are fullest from February to April, when the clay is dry, the holes stand up and the work runs fast. July and August are the quiet months and the pricing is usually 5 to 10 per cent softer, but open holes fill with water, spoil turns to sludge and a six day job can run nine. If your budget is tighter than your timeline, winter is a real saving. If you need it finished by a settlement date, it is a false one. There is more on the seasonal trade off in the best time of year to restump.
4. Standard sizes and one material.
Precast concrete stumps come in standard lengths, and a house that takes standard stumps costs less than one where every stump is cut to a bespoke height. A single material across the whole floor also avoids the setup and delivery cost of two supply chains. Mixing concrete and steel is worth doing where the wet rows justify it, as our stump material guide explains, but mixing for the sake of it just adds handling.
Want the cheapest honest number for your house?
The free subfloor inspection tells you how many stumps have actually failed, which is the only thing that decides whether you are a budget, mid or premium job.
Five savings that get paid for twice.
- Skipping the building permit to save $600 to $1,400. Restumping is building work in Victoria, so the permit is a legal requirement, not a service upgrade. Without it there is no footing inspection with the holes open, no certificate of final inspection for your file, an awkward conversation at sale, and a clean reason for an insurer to decline a later claim on the structure. Our Greater Shepparton permits page sets out what the process actually involves.
- Skipping the engineer to save $500 to $1,200. The footing design is what sets the pad size and the founding depth for your soil class. On Class M to Class H clay that is the whole job. Without it the crew is guessing, and the guess is always shallower than the engineer would have specified.
- Leaving the drainage and ventilation alone. Reopening paved-over wall vents and moving a downpipe that discharges against the footing is $250 to $900. Skipping it means the new stumps sit in the same wet ground that rotted the last ones, and the subfloor timber keeps going soft above them.
- Replacing stumps and not the soft bearers above them. While the floor is up and propped, bearer and joist replacement runs $80 to $180 a lineal metre. Once the floor is back down and the crew has gone, the same metre costs two to three times that because the whole propping exercise has to be repeated.
- Paying cash with no contract. A discount for cash costs you the written scope, the statutory warranties, the insurance position and any realistic path to having a defect fixed. What that is actually worth is set out on our restumping warranty page.
What is missing when a number looks too good.
When one quote lands thousands below the others on the same house, it is almost never a better business model. Nine times in ten it is one of six omissions, and you can find all six by reading the page rather than the total.
- No permit line. $600 to $1,400 that will land on you later, plus the surveyor fees.
- No engineering line. $500 to $1,200, and the footing depth is now whatever the crew feels like.
- Stumps only, no re-level. The single biggest omission. Re-levelling is roughly $100 a stump of the total, so on 56 stumps that is around $5,400 of work quietly not included.
- No spoil removal. A 56 stump job produces roughly 4 to 5 cubic metres of loose clay. Left in a heap on the lawn, that is your problem and about $300 to $700 to shift.
- No make-good allowance. Bringing a floor back to level moves plaster. A quote that says nothing about cornice cracks and door adjustment has not priced the finish.
- Excludes GST. Compare tax inclusive totals. A 10 per cent difference explains a lot of apparent bargains.
Ask every contractor for the same four numbers and the comparison becomes simple: stump count and material, footing depth per the engineer, re-level scope, and whether the permit and inspections are inside the price. If one quote cannot produce those in writing, it is not cheaper, it is just less specific.
Rebates, tax and the schemes that actually apply in Victoria.
There is no Victorian rebate, grant or concession for restumping an owner occupied home. It is structural maintenance, so it sits outside the energy, solar and heating replacement programs entirely. Anyone implying otherwise is guessing. What does change the arithmetic is smaller and more specific.
Rental properties. Restumping an income producing property is capital works, not a repair, so it is generally written off at 2.5 per cent a year over 40 years under the Australian tax rules rather than deducted in the year you pay it. On a $16,000 job that is about $400 a year of deduction. There are genuine grey areas between a repair and a capital improvement, and an initial repair on a property you have just bought is treated differently again, so this is a question for your accountant, not for a builder. Our rental property page covers the landlord obligations that sit alongside it.
Insurance. Standard home policies exclude gradual movement and subsidence, which is what restumping fixes, so a claim almost never succeeds on age related stump failure. The exceptions are sudden, identifiable events: a burst water main, an escape of water under the floor, or storm and flood damage where you hold that cover. It is worth ten minutes with your policy before you assume either way, and our insurance page walks through the wording that matters.
The building permit levy. Victorian building work above a set value attracts a state levy that the building surveyor collects along with the permit fee. It is a small component of the permit line rather than a separate bill, but it is one reason permit costs scale slightly with the value of the work.
After a declared flood or storm. This region has seen recovery grant programs open after major events, including the October 2022 flooding through Shepparton and Mooroopna. Those programs open, change and close, so the only sensible advice is to check what is currently available through the state recovery channels rather than rely on what applied last time.
When the cheapest option is to do nothing yet.
A floor that is out 8mm to 12mm across a room, with no cracked cornices, no sticking doors and no soft or bouncy patches, is a floor that has probably been like that for 30 years. If the stumps are dry hardwood with sound bases, the honest recommendation is to fix the drainage, clear the vents, and put a reminder in your calendar to look again in two years. That is a few hundred dollars, not a five figure job. We would rather tell you that on the day than sell you a restump you did not need, because the referrals are worth more to us than the job. What we will not do is quote a house without a permit, install timber stumps, or price a partial restump on stumps we can see are the same age and condition as the ones that have already failed.
Budget questions we get asked most
What is the cheapest way to restump a house in Shepparton?
How low is too low for a restumping quote?
Can I save money by doing some of the work myself?
Is there a Victorian rebate or grant for restumping?
Is it cheaper to restump in winter in Shepparton?
Is a partial restump a false economy?
Related reading: what happens day by day, whether it adds value before selling, house levelling on its own and the areas we cover.
Find out which tier your house actually needs
Send the form and we will book a free subfloor inspection, then quote the budget, mid and premium options side by side so you can see exactly what the extra money buys.
The cheapest job is the one you only do once.
Fixed price, itemised, permit and engineering included, with the partial option priced alongside the full restump so you can compare them properly.