Raise and restump costs in Queensland

What the job actually is

A raise and restump lifts the whole house on hydraulic jacks, removes the old stumps, and sets the house back down on new, taller steel posts or concrete stumps, usually at a height that makes the space underneath legally usable. In Queensland that means at least 2.4 m floor-to-ceiling for habitable rooms once the downstairs is finished, so the house typically ends up a full storey in the air.

It is worth separating this from plain restumping, which replaces the stumps and returns the house to roughly its original height for $15,000–$30,000. A raise and restump does everything a restump does, plus the engineering, jacking height, bracing and services work a full-storey lift demands, which is why the range starts around $30,000 and climbs. The structural side is covered in our house raising guide.

What moves the price

Five things drive most of the variation.

• Raise height. Higher lifts mean more jacking stages, more cribbing and longer posts.
• House size and weight. A small workers' cottage sits at the bottom of the range; a wide-verandah Queenslander with a tiled roof and extensions sits at the top.
• Engineering and soil. Every raise needs an engineer's design, and design work on a lift commonly runs to about $2,500, plus a soil test at $400–$1,000.
• The new stump system. Tall raises are almost always finished on engineered steel posts, which cost more than concrete but handle the height and bracing loads. Our stump types guide compares the options.
• Services and access. Plumbing, drainage, gas and power must be disconnected, extended and reconnected, stairs rebuilt to the new height, and a tight inner-city block with no side access always costs more than an open corner.

Approval and certification costs typically add roughly $800–$2,000 on top of the construction price.

Building in underneath

Few people raise a house for its own sake; they raise it for the space underneath or to get above flood level. The raise is the enabling step. Turning the underneath into bedrooms or living areas, with a slab, walls, windows, wet areas and ceilings, is a separate building project that can cost as much again as the raise, and sometimes more.

If a build-under is the goal, say so before design starts. The legal minimum of 2.4 m for habitable rooms is exactly that, a minimum; many designers aim for 2.7 m plus a service cavity so the new downstairs does not feel like an afterthought. Overall height limits apply too. In Brisbane, planning rules generally treat raising as minor building work up to about 9.5 m of total building height, beyond which a planning application is needed. Brisbane raise-and-restump specialists work with these thresholds every week.

Approvals and timeline

House raising is licensed building work in Queensland: any job worth more than $3,300 requires a QBCC-licensed contractor, and a raise also needs building approval issued by a private certifier working from the engineer's design. Character-housing overlays, flood levels and height limits can add a council planning layer on top. Our Queensland regulations guide walks through the approval path in detail.

Allow several weeks to a few months for design and approvals. The lift itself is quick, with the house usually up within days, but new stumps, bracing, stairs and service reconnection stretch the on-site work to several weeks.