Office Fitout Services VIC 2026 - Get Quotes

Permits and the Building Surveyor

Fitout work is building work, and treating it as decoration is where tenants get into trouble. The Building Act 1993 and the Building Regulations 2018 set the framework, and a registered building surveyor sits at the centre of it. A building permit is generally required where the work alters the structure, changes the layout of walls or ceilings, affects exits or paths of travel, or touches any essential safety measure such as sprinklers, detection, exit signage or emergency lighting. Replacing carpet, repainting and installing loose furniture usually sit outside that. The grey area is partitioning, which frequently does require a permit because new walls change egress distances, sprinkler coverage and the way a floor is occupied. The relevant building surveyor assesses the documentation, issues the permit, carries out inspections during the work and signs off at the end.

The permit itself states whether completion requires an occupancy permit or a certificate of final inspection, and the distinction matters to the program. A tenant occupying a space before the required approval has been issued is committing an offence, which is a poor way to start a lease. Two further approvals catch people out. A change of use, such as converting an office tenancy into a cafe or a medical suite, changes the building classification and can trigger both a planning permit from the council and upgrade requirements under the code. And landlord consent is nearly always required under the lease before any work begins, with the landlord's own conditions sitting on top of the statutory ones. Building surveyor and permit questions across wider projects sit with commercial builders.

Essential Safety Measures

Essential safety measures are the systems a building relies on in an emergency, and a fitout interacts with nearly all of them. Getting this wrong creates both a compliance problem and a genuine safety risk. The list covers sprinklers, smoke and thermal detection, exit signs, emergency lighting, fire hose reels, hydrants, extinguishers, exit doors, fire dampers and paths of travel to exits. A new partition can block a sprinkler head's spray pattern, isolate a detector, obscure an exit sign or push a travel distance beyond what the code allows, and none of those are visible problems to somebody looking at a floor plan for aesthetics. Victorian building owners carry ongoing obligations to maintain these systems and keep records of inspection and testing, with the measures and their required standards recorded on the occupancy permit or the relevant determination.

A fitout that alters any of them has to be documented so those records stay accurate, and the building surveyor will look for exactly that at sign off. The practical consequence for a tenant is that the fire services trades are not an afterthought to be squeezed in at the end. Sprinkler modifications, detection changes and exit sign relocations need designing alongside the partition layout and booking early, because the contractors who do this work are specialists and are often the constraint on the program. Building regulation in Victoria is administered by the Building and Plumbing Commission, and workplace duties during the work by WorkSafe Victoria.

How a Fitout Project Actually Runs

Fitout projects follow a fairly consistent sequence. Knowing it helps a tenant work out where the real decisions and the real money sit. Briefing and space planning come first, establishing headcount, the mix of open plan and enclosed space, meeting room numbers, and the support spaces a business needs. A test fit drawn against a specific tenancy is the most useful early document, since it shows whether the floor plate actually accommodates the brief before a lease is signed.

Many tenants run test fits across two or three shortlisted tenancies while still negotiating, which is exactly the right point in the process to be doing it. Documentation follows, covering the layout, finishes, joinery, lighting, services coordination and everything the builder and the surveyor need. The building permit application gets prepared at this stage. Skimping on documentation is the most reliable way to produce a fitout full of variations, as anything left undrawn gets resolved on site at a price nobody agreed in advance.

Construction then runs to a program that usually looks like demolition and strip out, services rough in, partitions and ceilings, then finishes, joinery and furniture. A typical suburban office of 300 to 600 square metres takes six to twelve weeks on site once permits are in hand, with the permit process itself adding two to six weeks ahead of that. Handover covers the surveyor's sign off, commissioning of services, the defects period and the manuals covering how the installed systems are run. The faults that emerge over the first months are the contractor's to fix, so treat that period as part of the job rather than treating the final invoice as the end of the relationship.

Services, Capacity and What the Base Building Gives You

The base building sets limits a fitout cannot design around, and discovering them late is expensive. Lease negotiation is the cheapest moment to establish what those limits are. Electrical capacity comes up first. An existing tenancy switchboard has a finite rating, and a business moving from paper based work to dense desking with monitors, kitchen appliances and server equipment can exceed it. Upgrading a tenancy board is manageable, while upgrading the supply from the street is a different order of cost and time entirely, so the answer belongs in the due diligence, not the construction phase.

Air conditioning follows the same logic. Base building systems are designed for an assumed occupant density and an assumed layout, and enclosing rooms out of an open floor changes air distribution completely. A meeting room built where a single supply diffuser once served open plan will be uncomfortable within a fortnight, and fixing it afterwards means opening a finished ceiling. After hours air conditioning availability and the cost of it also belong in the lease discussion, as a business running late will otherwise discover the charge on its first invoice.

Data, communications and the kitchen fill out the list. Cabling is cheap during construction and disruptive afterwards, so running spare capacity to likely future positions is sensible. Kitchens and end of trip facilities need water and waste, which in an upper level tenancy means finding a path to existing plumbing, and that path does not always exist. Mechanical work sits with commercial air conditioning contractors, and the electrical scope with electrical services providers.

Accessibility and Paths of Travel

Accessibility requirements apply to fitout work and are not optional, and they reach beyond the parts of the tenancy actually being altered. Designing them in costs almost nothing, while retrofitting them costs a great deal. The technical requirements come from AS 1428.1, which covers door widths and clearances, circulation space, corridor widths, counter heights, sanitary facilities, luminance contrast at stair nosings and glazing, and tactile indicators where hazards exist. The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 sits behind all of it as a separate federal obligation that applies regardless of whether a permit was issued, which is why a tenant cannot simply argue that a surveyor approved the drawings. Where building work is carried out, the requirements commonly extend to the affected part of the building and to the principal path of travel to that part.

A fitout can therefore trigger upgrades outside the tenancy itself, in the lift lobby, the entry or the shared amenities, and whether the tenant or the landlord pays for that is a question the lease may not answer neatly. Raising it early avoids a standoff at permit stage. The practical design points are unglamorous and easy to get right at the drawing stage. Doorways need adequate clear width once the door and hardware are accounted for, corridors need passing and turning space, at least one accessible meeting room and workpoint makes a real difference, reception counters need a lowered section, and glazed doors and full height glass need contrast marking so nobody walks into them. Partitioning and internal carpentry sits with cabinet making and joinery contractors.

Acoustics, Lighting and Air Quality

The complaints that arrive a month after a fitout are almost always about noise, glare or stuffiness rather than about how anything looks. Acoustics cause the most trouble. Open plan floors with hard finishes reflect sound, and a meeting room whose partitions stop at the suspended ceiling instead of continuing to the underside of the slab, leaking conversation into the space next door. Specifying full height partitions for rooms that need confidentiality, insulating them properly and paying attention to door seals and the path over the ceiling grid costs far less during construction than remediation does afterwards.

Carpet, acoustic ceiling tiles and soft surfaces do the rest, and ceiling work of that kind sits with plastering and gyprock repairs contractors. Lighting deserves the same attention. Office lighting should suit screen based work, not simply be bright, which means controlling glare and avoiding reflections, and daylight is valuable provided it does not put the afternoon sun directly onto a bank of monitors. Zoning and sensors cut running costs and are trivial to include at rough in stage, with the switchboard capacity to support them checked by switchboard upgrade electricians. Meeting rooms used for video calls need thought about where the light falls on faces.

Air quality and comfort round it out. Enclosing rooms changes air distribution, densifying desking raises the heat load, and both show up as complaints within weeks. Low emission finishes, adhesives and furniture cut the initial odour that puts people off a new space for its first few weeks, and they are increasingly specified as standard. Where a tenancy is being reoccupied immediately, that specification is worth insisting on. Flooring selection across commercial buildings sits with commercial flooring contractors.

Make Good and Lease End Obligations

Make good is the single most commonly underestimated cost in commercial tenancy, and it is negotiated at the wrong end of the relationship. Reading the clause carefully before signing is worth more than any amount of argument later. The obligation varies enormously in scope. Return to base building condition means removing partitions, ceilings, floor coverings, joinery and cabling, reinstating services to their original configuration and repainting, which for a mid sized tenancy runs from $160 to $420 per square metre. Return to the condition at commencement, fair wear and tear excepted, may require little more than repairs and a clean.

Those two clauses look almost identical on a page and differ by tens of thousands of dollars in practice. Several practical measures reduce the exposure. Take a full photographic condition report at handover and have the landlord acknowledge it, as without one the argument becomes a contest of recollections. Keep the fitout drawings and the permit documentation, which prove what was installed and when.

Ask whether the landlord will accept a cash settlement in place of physical works, a common and often cheaper resolution for both parties, and try to have the clause allow the fitout to stay where the landlord agrees at the time. Timing carries its own trap. Make good works usually have to be finished before the lease runs out, not afterwards. That means arranging access, permits where the strip out affects services, and contractors, all while the business is also packing up and moving into somewhere else. Six months of lead time on that planning is sensible, not excessive, for most tenants. Contractors who handle rubbish removal take the strip out waste away, and larger volumes need skip bin hire arranged separately.

Space Planning and How Much Area You Need

Getting the area right carries the longest financial consequences of any decision here, since it sets the rent for the whole term. A square metre too many is paid for every month for five or ten years. Australian offices have historically been planned at roughly 10 to 15 square metres per person including circulation, meeting rooms and support space, with denser layouts reaching 8 to 10 and more generous professional offices sitting at 15 to 20. Those figures remain a reasonable starting point, but they assume everybody attends at once. A workforce attending three days a week does not need a desk each, and planning on that basis leaves a business renting floor area it never uses. The better approach starts with measured attendance, not a headcount from payroll.

Access card data over a few weeks shows the real peak, and planning to that peak with a modest buffer produces a floor that works on the busiest day without carrying dead space on the quietest. Shared and bookable desking suits some teams and irritates others, so the decision belongs with the people who will live with it and not with whoever is signing the lease. Then check the plan against the building. Column grids, core positions, window lines and base building services all constrain where partitions can sensibly go, and a layout drawn without reference to them produces rooms with a column in the middle or no air supply. A test fit on the actual floor plate settles all of this in a week, and it is the single most useful thing a tenant can commission before signing anything. It costs a fraction of one month's rent.

Joinery, Furniture and Long Lead Items

Partitions and ceilings rarely hold a fitout up. The ones that hold a project up are predictable enough to plan around, and they are usually ordered later than they should be. Custom joinery leads the list, covering reception desks, kitchen cabinetry, built in storage and feature elements, all fabricated to order and needing drawings signed off well before they are wanted on site. Lead times of six to twelve weeks are normal and longer for complex work, so the joinery package usually gets released during documentation, well before construction starts.

A delayed reception desk holds up an entire handover. Changing a joinery detail once fabrication has begun costs real money. Furniture sits outside most fitout contracts and carries its own long lead times, particularly for imported task chairs and sit stand desking. It is also a substantial budget in its own right at $900 to $3,500 per workstation, which surprises tenants who assumed it was included.

Australian manufacturers including Schiavello, Zenith Interiors and UCI supply much of the Victorian commercial market, and local fabrication generally beats imported stock on lead time when a date is fixed. Ordering early and paying for a few weeks of storage beats delaying occupation. Glazing, doors and specialist items complete the picture. Glass partitions and internal glazed doors are made to measure, so they cannot be ordered until partition framing is set out and measured on site, which puts them on the critical path near the end. Audio visual equipment, access control hardware and signage all need ordering earlier than instinct suggests, and camera and access systems are installed by CCTV and security camera installation specialists. Where cabling for these systems is involved, it is installed by data cabling installation contractors during rough in.

Energy, Waste and Tender Requirements

Environmental requirements appear in more Victorian fitout briefs each year, and several of them save money instead of adding to it. Three of them come up repeatedly in Victorian tenders. Efficient fittings with zoning and occupancy sensors cut running costs measurably against a floor lit uniformly through the working day, and the additional cost at installation is modest. Daylight harvesting, where fittings near windows dim automatically, suits Melbourne's variable conditions better than a fixed installation does. Material choices come next in the brief.

Low emission adhesives, paints, carpets and board products reduce the strong smell that makes a new fitout unpleasant for weeks, and they are frequently mandated in projects targeting a sustainability rating. Recycled content, product certifications and take back arrangements at end of life appear in tenders regularly enough that suppliers now publish the documentation as standard. Contractors most often fall short on waste handling. A strip out generates a large volume of material, much of it recyclable, including metal stud, ceiling tile, carpet and cardboard, and separating it on site costs little where the contractor plans for it. Asking for a waste management approach in the tender response is a reasonable request, and the answer tells you a good deal about how organised a contractor actually is. Commercial waste obligations, including where demolition material may lawfully go, are administered by EPA Victoria.

Medical, Professional and Specialist Suites

Some tenancies carry requirements an ordinary office fitout never encounters, and the difference shows up in both the permit and the price. How the building code classifies the space drives most of that difference. Medical and allied health suites come up most often in Victoria. Consulting rooms need acoustic separation that genuinely works, because patient confidentiality is a professional obligation rather than a preference, and that means full height insulated partitions with sealed doors instead of the usual partial height walls. Hand basins in consulting rooms need plumbing that may not exist on an upper floor, surfaces need to be cleanable and impervious in treatment areas, and waiting areas need enough circulation space for prams and wheelchairs.

Changing a tenancy from office to medical use also alters the building classification, which brings both a planning permit question for the council and potential upgrade requirements for the building itself. Assessing the base building belongs at the start, as discovering it after a lease is signed removes every option a tenant had. Other specialist uses follow the same pattern. Childcare, food preparation, laboratories and training facilities all bring their own regulatory overlay, and each changes what the building surveyor is assessing. The practical rule is that any use other than straightforward office work needs the classification question answered before anything else happens. Where food service is involved, the fitout intersects with the floor and surface requirements covered under epoxy flooring for food premises.

What an Office Fitout Costs in Victoria

Rates are quoted per square metre of tenancy area, and the spread is wide. The term covers everything from new paint through to a complete build. A cosmetic refresh keeping the existing layout runs $450 to $900 per square metre, covering paint, floor coverings, some lighting and minor works. A standard fitout of an existing office with layout changes sits at $900 to $1,700.

A full fitout of a bare shell tenancy, where partitions, ceilings, lighting, services distribution and everything else is built from nothing, runs $1,400 to $2,600. High specification or client facing space with substantial joinery, feature finishes and audio visual integration runs $2,600 to $4,200 and beyond. The supporting costs slip out of budgets easily. Design and documentation runs 5 to 12 per cent of the build cost, the building permit and surveyor $2,600 to $9,000 depending on complexity, and loose furniture $900 to $3,500 per workstation, which is a separate budget from the fitout itself and frequently a large one.

Audio visual, security systems and the relocation itself all sit outside most fitout contracts, and each needs its own line in the budget rather than being discovered late. Two things reliably reduce the number. Reusing what is already there, including partitions in serviceable positions, the existing ceiling grid and base building lighting, saves both cost and program time. And designing to the floor plate instead of against it, meaning accepting the column grid and the existing services positions, avoids expensive work that delivers very little. Painting scope across the tenancy is priced by commercial painting contractors.

Working in an Occupied or Adjoining Tenancy

Plenty of fitouts happen around people who are still working, and the arrangements for that belong in the contract rather than in an optimistic assumption. Getting them wrong produces complaints from staff and from neighbouring tenants alike. Staging is the usual answer, dividing the floor so one area is completed while the business operates in another, then swapping. It adds time and cost through double handling but avoids the expense of temporary premises. The alternative is a decant into swing space or a short overlap between two leases, which is cleaner for the program and more expensive in rent. Noise and disruption need managing whichever way it goes.

Core drilling, demolition and anything involving hammering are usually restricted to before or after business hours by the building's own rules, and neighbouring tenants have standing to complain to the landlord. Dust control matters a great deal where a tenancy shares air handling with adjoining spaces, and a contractor who seals the returns and runs proper extraction avoids complaints that would otherwise land on the tenant instead of on them. Building access is its own logistical exercise in a Melbourne tower. Loading dock bookings, service lift allocations, security inductions and after hours access procedures all constrain how much material reaches the floor, and a contractor who has worked in the building before is genuinely worth more than one who has not. Post construction cleaning before occupation is handled by commercial cleaning contractors.

Choosing a Fitout Contractor

The market splits into design and construct firms that handle everything, and separate designers and builders engaged individually. Both work well once the tenant understands which arrangement they have. A design and construct arrangement gives one point of accountability and usually a faster program, at the cost of the designer and builder being the same commercial interest. Engaging a designer separately produces documentation that can be tendered to several builders, which tends to sharpen pricing and gives independent oversight during construction, at the cost of time and a second fee.

For a straightforward tenancy the first suits most tenants, while for larger or more complex projects the second is generally worth it. Registration and insurance form the baseline checks. Commercial building work in Victoria should be carried out by a registered building practitioner in the appropriate class, and the registration is checkable. Confirm public liability cover with a sum insured appropriate to the building, confirm workers compensation is in place, and ask to see the safety documentation any commercial landlord will require before granting site access to the floor.

Then interrogate the quote itself instead of the presentation around it. Ask what is excluded, what is provisional, and what assumptions have been made about the base building. Those three answers explain most of the difference between two prices that otherwise look comparable. Ask who applies for the permit and who pays the surveyor. Ask for references from tenants whose fitouts are two or three years old, since that reveals how the joinery, the finishes and the door hardware have actually held up under daily use. Trade coordination across the whole project typically falls to commercial builders running the program.

What to Look Out For

The most expensive mistake is signing a lease before anybody has tested whether the tenancy suits the business. The fitout then spends money working around a floor plate that was never right. Be cautious about a quote that does not mention the building permit, since either the contractor has not understood the scope or the cost is about to arrive as a variation. Treat with caution provisional sums covering fire services, mechanical and electrical, which are exactly the items that move. Watch for partitions specified to ceiling height where confidentiality matters, and for a program that leaves the services trades until the finishes are in.

Keep the documentation together, meaning the permit, the certificate issued at completion, the as built drawings, the operating manuals handed over at completion, and the warranties. Photograph the tenancy at handover from the landlord and again at completion of the fitout, then store both sets somewhere that survives staff turnover. Those records settle the make good question when you eventually hand the space back, and their absence is what turns that conversation into a dispute. Consumer and contract guidance is published by Consumer Affairs Victoria, with the relevant construction standards from Standards Australia.

How to Get Comparable Quotes

Provide the floor plan with the area marked, then state the headcount the space has to hold and the split between open plan and enclosed rooms. Those two numbers shape the price more than the finishes do. Say what condition the tenancy is in now, whether there is an existing fitout and whether any of it can stay. Note the building, the floor level and whether after hours access is available, along with the lease commencement date that sets the deadline.

Mention any known constraint, including base building services limits, heritage controls or landlord conditions already issued. Then ask every contractor to price the same documented scope, stating separately what they have allowed for the building permit, fire services, mechanical changes, electrical capacity and furniture. Ask for the program in weeks with the permit period shown separately, as that is the part most often left out of an optimistic timeline. Where make good on the outgoing premises is also required, ask for that as a separate quote, and note that flooring is frequently priced independently through flooring services contractors.