About Rated Tradies

Choosing a trade is a decision most people make rarely, with a lot of money at stake and almost nothing to go on. Construction is consistently among the hardest-hit industries for business failure in Australia, and homeowners wear the consequences: half-finished jobs, lost deposits, and no easy way to tell a steady operator from a struggling one.

A directory listing on its own tells you nothing. Anyone can write “20 years experience, fully licensed, no job too small”.

So we built the directory around the one thing that is hard to invent: finished work that the customer who paid for it agrees was finished. It serves two people at once: the homeowner who needs to pick someone, and the trade business that deserves to be picked on the strength of its work.

Search by trade and suburb and you get businesses that actually cover your area, with the things you would otherwise have to ask for already on the page: their licence and its status on the state register, how long they have held it, whether their ABN is currently active, and the insurance they carry.

Where a business has a history here, you also see the work itself: completed jobs with photos, what each one cost, whether it ran to schedule, and reviews written only by the customers who had those jobs done. You can compare on typical price, on the on-time rate, or on how much confirmed work there is.

When you have decided, call them, email them, or send a quote request describing the job. It goes to that business and no one else. Using the site costs nothing and you are not asked to create an account to contact anyone.

Work comes to you directly. A homeowner who has read your profile calls you, emails you, or sends a quote request with the details of the job. It arrives in your inbox with their contact details and a reply goes straight back to them. We are not in the middle of it, and the same enquiry is not sold to three of your competitors an hour later.

You get somewhere to be found. Your profile has its own page, and we publish pages for each trade in each suburb we cover, so people searching for your trade in your area have something to land on. Your dashboard shows the quote requests you have received and how many people looked up your number or emailed you, so you can see what the listing is actually doing.

You build a record that belongs to you. Add a job you have finished, we ask that customer to confirm it, and what they confirm becomes part of your profile: an on-time rate, a typical price, photos of the work, and an invitation for them to review you. It is slower than writing your own testimonials. It is also the reason a homeowner has any reason to believe it.

Listing is free, and so is claiming. Many businesses are already listed here from the public licence register, without contact details, waiting for their owner. If one of them is yours, claim it and it becomes yours to edit. A person checks each claim against the register by hand, and you hear back from us either way.

Every published metric traces back to a specific job that the customer confirmed. A business enters a completed job: what it was, what it cost, when it finished and whether it ran to schedule. We then email the customer and ask them to confirm those details.

Until the customer confirms, the job appears on the profile clearly marked as unconfirmed, and it counts toward nothing. Once confirmed, it feeds the on-time rate and the median cost.

Where there isn't enough evidence, we say so rather than publishing a flattering number. A profile needs at least 3 confirmed jobs before an on-time rate or a median cost appears at all. Two jobs is an anecdote, not a rate.

Only a customer with a confirmed job can leave a review, and only one review per job. The invitation comes from us, automatically, once the job is confirmed.

A business cannot write, edit, hide or delete a review about itself. That is enforced in the database, not merely by the interface. It also cannot choose who gets asked. Selectively inviting happy customers is the most common way review scores are quietly managed, and it is treated as misleading conduct in Australia.

Businesses can publicly reply to a review, and can report one they believe is false or defamatory. A reported review is reviewed by a person; it is not automatically hidden, because letting a complaint alone remove criticism would defeat the purpose.

We don't sell leads. When you reveal a phone number or send an email, it goes to that business and nobody else. Your enquiry is not auctioned to competitors, and businesses don't pay per contact. Pay-per-lead is why so many directories are full of whoever is willing to pay the most, rather than whoever did the best work.

We don't sell ranking. No business can pay to appear higher in results.

We don't import reviews from elsewhere. Every review here was written by a customer whose job was confirmed on this platform.

Licence numbers, insurance details and ABNs are supplied by each business. We check an ABN against the Australian Business Register and show whether it is currently active. Licence and insurance details are checked for currency, meaning whether the expiry date has passed, but we do not independently verify them against state licensing registers.

Always confirm a licence yourself with the relevant state authority before engaging a trade for significant work.

Looking for someone: search by trade and suburb.

Running a trade business: list your business, or search for your name first. If we already have you from the licence register, claim that listing instead so you keep the licence history already on it.

Questions, corrections, or a problem with a listing: see our privacy page for how to reach us and how to ask about the information we hold.