The states with the fastest and slowest home build times in Australia

Building a new home involves two main stages: the wait from approval to commencement, and the build itself from commencement to completion. Both stages matter, but the real blowout has been in construction, not in getting projects started.

What you build matters almost as much as where you build it. Detached houses remain the quickest to complete, taking an average of 9.2 months¹ nationally in 2025. Townhouses are slower at 11.7 months. Apartments take the longest at 28.7 months², pushing the average build time close to two and a half years from commencement to handover. In NSW, apartment completion times reached 31.8 months in 2025, the longest recorded in this dataset.

Once the approval phase is added in, the gap becomes even clearer. The total time from planning approval to completion is 11.5 months for houses and 14.8 months for townhouses. Apartments are in a different category altogether, taking almost 33 months from approval to completion, or close to three years.

Once a building approval is granted, the next question is how quickly construction actually begins. Nationally, new houses in Australia took an average of 2.3 months³ to move from approval to commencement in 2025, or roughly ten weeks. But that average masks a wide gap between states.

The ACT was the fastest at 1.7 months, followed closely by the Northern Territory and Victoria at 1.8 months. South Australia was the slowest at 3.6 months³, more than double the ACT's pace. It has held that position for most of the past decade, suggesting a structural issue rather than a short-term delay.

For townhouses, New South Wales recorded the slowest start times in the country in 2025, at 4.6 months³. That is almost double its 2021 low of 2.3 months. Even so, approval-to-commencement times have remained far more stable than construction times. The biggest post-COVID blowout in build times has happened after projects get underway, not before.

This is where the numbers are most striking. House build times blew out after 2021 as supply chain delays, labour shortages, and the HomeBuilder-driven surge in demand pushed construction capacity to its limit.

Queensland and the NT have the fastest house completion times, both at 7.1 months² in 2025. The Sunshine State has been the fastest of the six states in every year of the past decade, helped by less complex houses and a labour market that has generally been less strained than the southern states.

At the other end is Western Australia. WA has the longest home build times of any state, with commencement-to-completion times peaking at 15.6 months² in 2024, about 50% above the national average. Extended border closures worsened labour shortages just as demand was rising. That eased to 13.1 months in 2025, but WA remains well above the national average and its pre-COVID level. The ACT, at 11.3 months, and South Australia, at 10.1 months, are also slower than average.

The national average for houses fell from a peak of 10.4 months in 2024 to 9.2 months in 2025. Conditions are easing, but build times across Australia are still about 40% longer than they were before COVID.