Two ways the job is priced
Almost every robotic demolition contractor in Australia prices one of two ways.
Wet-hire day rate. A daily rate for the machine, the attachments and a ticketed operator, plus mobilisation. You’re buying a productive day of breaking, and you carry the program risk: if the concrete is harder or the access slower than expected, the job takes more days.
Fixed price by the job. The contractor walks the site, looks at the drawings, and quotes a lump sum for a defined scope. The contractor carries the program risk, and the price will include a margin for it. Fixed price suits builders and head contractors who need a firm number for their own tender; day rate suits repeat clients and shutdown work where the scope moves.
At Robo Demo we do both, and we’ll tell you which one we think suits the job. For a short, well-defined scope on an accessible site, day rate is usually cheaper. For a complex staged job in an occupied building, a fixed price is usually what the client needs.
What’s inside the number
Whichever way it’s priced, the cost of a robotic demolition job is made up of the same parts.
| Component | What it covers | What moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Machine & operator | The demolition robot, its power supply, and a ticketed operator for the shift. | Machine size, shift length, night/weekend loadings. |
| Attachments | Hydraulic breaker, concrete crusher, steel shear, bucket, grapple, drill. | Usually included; specialist tools or extra wear on very hard concrete can add cost. |
| Mobilisation | Getting the machine, attachments and crew to site and back. | Distance from base, crane or access lifts, regional travel and accommodation. |
| Set-up & controls | Exclusion zones, dust suppression, power leads or generator, SWMS. | Site rules, occupied-building requirements, permits and inductions. |
| Waste | Crushing, loading and removing the rubble. | Volume, whether the client’s own bins are used, disposal fees, tipping distance. |
| Extras | Saw-cutting for clean edges, vibration monitoring, engineering input, propping. | Only when the job calls for them; usually quoted as separate items. |
What pushes the price up (or down)
Concrete strength and reinforcement
A 150 mm slab with a single layer of mesh is a fundamentally different job from a 500 mm post-tensioned transfer slab. Higher-strength concrete and dense reinforcement slow the breaker, wear the tools and may need a shear for the steel. If you have the structural drawings, share them; it’s the single most useful thing for an accurate quote.
Access
A demolition robot fits through a standard door and rides a lift, which is the whole point. But every ramp, lift trip and stair climb costs time, and if the machine has to be craned in, that’s a line item. Straightforward access means more of the day goes to breaking.
Quantity
Set-up is a fixed cost, so a bigger job spreads it further. A two-hour breakout still needs a mobilisation and an exclusion zone; a two-week basement strip-out amortises those across the program. This is why a robot often looks expensive on tiny jobs and very cheap on large ones.
Working environment
Occupied buildings, hospitals, food plants and live industrial sites add inductions, permits, out-of-hours work, screening and stricter dust and noise control. All of it is manageable and all of it is priced in.
Waste route
If the rubble can go straight into a bin at the door, waste is cheap. If it has to be barrowed through a building, up a lift and across a car park, it isn’t. Sometimes the crushing attachment is chosen specifically to reduce rubble size and make handling easier.
How it compares with a jackhammer crew
The comparison people actually want is not “robot versus nothing”, it’s “robot versus the way we’d otherwise do it.” On an accessible slab-on-ground, an excavator with a hammer will always be the cheapest tool. The robot is for the jobs where an excavator can’t go.
Against a manual crew, the day rate of a robot and operator is higher than the day rate of one labourer on a jackhammer. But a demolition robot typically does the work of five to ten people on hand-held breakers, and it doesn’t need to rotate every 20–30 minutes for vibration exposure, doesn’t fatigue and doesn’t get hurt. Interior jobs that were three weeks of jackhammers commonly become three days.
The rule of thumb: if the job is bigger than a day or two of hand breaking, or the access, noise, dust or safety requirements make a manual crew awkward, a robot is usually cheaper as well as safer. Below that threshold, a jackhammer might still win on cost, and we’ll tell you so.
There are also costs that don’t show up on the demolition invoice: less scaffold and propping time, a shorter program for the trades that follow, fewer people on site, a cleaner incident register and a client who saw a robot instead of a crew under a slab. On most projects those are worth more than the difference in day rate.
Getting an accurate figure
To give you a useful budget number quickly, a contractor needs:
- What’s being removed — slab, wall, column, refractory, and roughly how much of it.
- Thickness and reinforcement — from the drawings if you have them, or your best guess.
- Access route — door widths, lift availability, stairs, ramps, crane access.
- Site conditions — occupied or vacant, live plant, noise and vibration limits, working hours.
- Program — when the work needs to happen and how long the window is.
- Waste — whether you want the contractor to remove rubble or your own contractor will.
With that, we can usually give a budget figure the same day and firm it up after a site walk. Send it through or call 0487 523 022.