Two quotes on a café tenancy off Crown Street last year. One at $68,000, one at $196,000. Same shell, same floor area, same drawings sitting on the same folding table.
The owner assumed one of us was dreaming. Neither was. The cheap one had priced the joinery and the partitions. The other had priced the joinery, the partitions, the mechanical exhaust over the cooking line, the grease trap, the three-phase upgrade, the accessible toilet the certifier was going to insist on, and the make-good at the end of the lease.
She went with the expensive one, which sounds like a plug and isn't. It wasn't my quote. Mine was the joinery.
That gap is the thing to understand before you talk to anyone about a fitout. "A fitout" is not one number, and the biggest cost driver is usually not the carpentry.
Rough ranges, per square metre
Around Wollongong and the Illawarra in 2026, for the whole job, all trades:
Basic retail, a simple shop with a counter, some shelving, paint and lighting into a tenancy that's already got services: $600 to $1,200 a square metre. A 60m² shop, call it $40k to $70k.
Mid-range retail or a professional office, partitions to make meeting rooms, decent joinery, new flooring, data and power reworked: $1,200 to $2,500 a square metre. That's the bracket most fitouts round here actually land in.
Hospitality: $2,500 to $5,000 a square metre, and the top of that isn't a ceiling. A café or small restaurant is a commercial kitchen with seating attached, and kitchens are where the money lives. Exhaust canopy and ductwork, grease trap, hydraulic upgrades, mechanical ventilation, the coolroom. I've seen a 90m² café clear $400,000 and the owner got value for it.
Second-generation sites, meaning you're taking over a tenancy that was already the same use, are the cheapest fitouts going. A café moving into a space that was a café keeps the exhaust, the grease trap and the plumbing. Halves the budget in some cases. If you're still choosing between two tenancies and one of them was your trade already, that's worth a lot more than a slightly better rent.
What the carpentry costs on its own
This is the bit I can be precise about, because it's my line on the quote.
A sales counter or reception desk, built on site, framed properly with a hard-wearing top: $3,000 to $9,000 depending on size, shape and what's going on the face. Curved fronts cost more than straight ones, and everyone wants a curve.
Stud partition walls to carve up an open tenancy: $180 to $400 a square metre of wall, framed, lined both sides and set. Add insulation if it's between an office and a waiting room and you want conversations staying put. Glazed sections push it up.
Shelving and display joinery: $400 to $1,200 a lineal metre, and the spread is all about the material and whether it has to carry real weight. Painted MDF at the bottom, spotted gum or a decent laminate at the top.
Café benches and back-bar cabinetry: $1,200 to $2,500 a lineal metre. Substrate and finish get chosen for water, heat and someone wiping the same spot four hundred times a day.
On a $150,000 fitout the carpentry might be $35,000 to $50,000 of it. Useful to know when you're comparing quotes, because a builder's price with everything in it and a chippy's price for the joinery are not comparable numbers and people put them side by side all the time.
The lease is half the job
Two clauses decide whether a fitout hurts.
The first is the fitout period. Most landlords give you a rent-free stretch to build in, commonly four to eight weeks. Run over it and you're paying rent on a shop you can't trade from, which for a lot of small tenancies is a couple of grand a week straight out of the opening budget. That's why I go on about programs and holding to them. A week late on a deck is annoying. A week late on a fitout has a dollar figure attached.
The second is the make-good. At the end of the lease you hand the space back in whatever condition the clause spells out, and the clauses vary wildly. Some want bare shell, everything you built stripped out, walls and floors patched, services capped. Some want it left tenantable with the fitout in place. A few want specific items kept and everything else gone.
Budget $10,000 to $50,000 for a make-good on a typical Illawarra tenancy, more for hospitality where there's a kitchen to strip. Nobody budgets for it at the start, and then five years later there's a bill nobody planned for at exactly the moment the business is moving or closing. Read the clause before you sign the lease, not before you leave it. The NSW Small Business Commission has decent plain-English material on retail leases and handles the disputes when they go bad, which they do.
Compliance, which is not negotiable and not cheap
A commercial fitout has to meet the National Construction Code, and the parts that catch small tenants are accessibility, exits and fire separation. An accessible toilet where there wasn't one is $15,000 to $30,000 in a tight space. Path-of-travel widths can eat floor area you were planning to sell from. Exit door swings and signage, fire-rated linings if you're up against a tenancy boundary.
Most fitouts need approval, and which flavour depends on whether the use is changing and what you're touching. Change of use from retail to food is the one that reliably triggers a full development application through Wollongong, Shellharbour, Kiama or Shoalhaven, and it can add months. The NSW Planning Portal sets out which path applies. Get a certifier involved early rather than after the drawings are done, because the changes are cheap on paper and expensive in plasterboard.
Centre tenancies are their own world again. Contractor inductions, set work hours, lift and loading dock bookings, sometimes a nominated list of trades you're allowed to use. Management won't bend any of it for you. Tell whoever's quoting which centre you're in on the first phone call, because it changes the program and therefore the price.
Where fitout budgets actually blow out
Services, nearly every time. A tenancy with single-phase power and a plan involving three ovens and a coolroom needs an upgrade, and depending on where the board is and what the building's got spare, that's $8,000 to $40,000 before you've hung a single shelf.
Then the ceiling. Older buildings up Crown Street and through the arcades have services running above the grid that nobody documented and nobody expected. You lift a tile to run new data and find forty years of somebody else's decisions.
And variations. A fitout with a designer's drawings that get changed twice during the build costs more than the same fitout built once. Lock the drawings before anyone starts. I'd rather spend an extra week on site with you working out where the bar goes than build it twice.
The pattern is the same as any renovation, honestly. The visible stuff prices easily and the hidden stuff decides the number, which is exactly what happens in kitchen renos at a domestic scale.
Getting a quote that's worth something
Ask for it broken down by trade. A single lump sum tells you nothing and can't be compared to anything.
Ask what's excluded. Every fitout quote has exclusions and the honest ones list them.
Ask about the program in days on site, not just a finish date, and ask what happens to the price if the centre restricts hours.
And check the licence. Anything over $5,000 needs a licensed builder and a written contract under the NSW rules. On a commercial job the property manager will usually ask for the licence and the certificate of currency before you've finished unloading the ute, so it may as well be sorted.
We do the carpentry end of this across the Illawarra, Helensburgh down through the Shoalhaven. Counters, partitions and framing, shelving, café joinery and end-of-lease strip-outs, worked around your trading hours. There's more on the commercial side of the business and on fitouts specifically if you want the detail.
Got a tenancy, a lease clock and a set of drawings? Ring Dave on 0414 007 351 or send through the floor plan and the make-good clause and I'll price the carpentry properly and tell you honestly what else you're going to need.
Want a hand with this at your place? Get a free quote or call 0414 007 351.
