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Both, and which suits you depends on how well defined the job is. Hourly, or wet hire as the industry calls it, means machine and operator together. Across Melbourne in mid 2026 that runs roughly $160 to $205 an hour plus GST for a 3.5 to 5 tonne machine, $185 to $245 for a 5 to 8 tonne, and $255 to $325 once you are into the 10 to 14 tonne range. Day rates are normally 8 to 10 hours priced 5 to 10 percent under the hourly. Those are market ranges rather than our quote, and the only number that matters is the one against your actual block. Two things move a bill more than the hourly rate does. Float, which is getting the machine to you and home again, is charged on top and commonly runs $230 to $370 return for a mini and $330 to $480 for a 5 to 10 tonne around metro Melbourne. And exclusions. A standard quote often leaves out float, attachments beyond the standard bucket, tip fees and weekend rates. Comparing two quotes without checking what each one leaves out is the most common way people get stung. Ask us what is excluded, not just what it costs. Where a job is properly defined, a cut to known levels or a wall of a known length, it can be priced as a job instead of by the hour, and that is worth asking for.

It can, and you want that settled in writing before anyone starts rather than argued about afterwards. Around the Yarra Ranges you are mostly into deep red basalt soils that dig well, but mudstone and siltstone turn up underneath with nothing on the surface to warn you. Some of it comes out with a bucket. Some of it needs a hammer, and a rock breaker is charged as an attachment on top of the machine rate, commonly $20 to $60 an hour depending on the machine. That is the honest reason a dig sometimes costs more than the number on the quote. What you should expect from anyone pricing your job is a clear position up front: what the price assumes about the ground, what happens if it turns out different, and who makes that call. We will tell you what we have run into on jobs near you and what the ground tends to do on your side of the valley. What nobody can do is see through dirt, and a quote that pretends otherwise is not being straight with you. There is more on ground conditions on our site cuts page.

Because you are paying for hours, not for horsepower. A 5 tonne machine costs more per hour than a 1.7 tonne, but it moves several times the dirt in that hour, so the job finishes sooner and the total lands lower. As a rough guide on current Melbourne rates, a 3.5 to 5 tonne with an operator sits around $160 to $205 an hour while a 10 to 14 tonne sits around $255 to $325. The bigger machine is nowhere near twice the hourly rate and shifts a lot more than twice the material. Two things push the other way. Float is charged per machine and goes up with size, so a second small machine is rarely cheaper than one right sized one. And wet hire usually carries a three to four hour minimum, so very small jobs pay for time they do not use. The practical answer is that we work out the biggest machine that can physically get to where the work is, and price that, rather than defaulting to the smallest one that fits through the gate.

Further ahead than most people leave it, and it is rarely the machine that holds things up. The usual delays are the things that have to be done before anyone can dig. A set out from your surveyor, excavation levels marked on the plans, a building permit where the job needs one, and services located. Any one of those missing and a booked machine sits there doing nothing while you pay for it. Weather is the other one. Wet ground does not stop a dig, it stops it being neat, and you lose the days after the rain as well as the day it fell, so a booking with a bit of slack in it survives a wet week and one pinned to a single possible day does not. Ring as soon as you have a plan and a rough month, even with nothing locked in. It costs nothing to be pencilled in, and it means we can tell you early if the order you have in mind is going to cause you grief.

Plenty of our work comes through owner builders, and it is worth knowing what changes when you are the one coordinating it. In Victoria, once the total cost of the building work goes over $16,000 you need a certificate of consent to act as an owner builder, and you have to engage a building surveyor to get the permit. Separately, any single job worth $10,000 or more needs a major domestic building contract, and work worth $16,000 or more needs domestic building insurance from whoever is carrying it out. Excavation counts towards those totals, so a decent site cut can put you over the line on its own. None of that is anybody being difficult, it is the framework the whole industry works inside, and it matters to you because getting the sequence wrong is what turns into expensive standing around. If you are running the job yourself, say so early and tell us what else is booked. A fair bit of what we do on an owner builder job is making sure we turn up at the right point in the order rather than on the first free Tuesday.

The machine arrives on a float, which needs somewhere legal and sensible to unload, and that gets sorted when we quote rather than on the morning. Then a walk around with you before anything moves, so we both agree on where the pegs are, where the spoil is going, where the machine will track and what must not be touched. From there we cut to the levels on your plans, not to the eye. Spoil either stays on the block if it has somewhere useful to go, which is always the cheaper answer, or it starts leaving on trucks, and from that point the job runs at the speed of the truck cycle rather than the machine. At the end of each day the site gets left in a state you would be happy for someone to walk onto, and if something has turned up that changes the job, you hear about it that day rather than in an invoice three weeks later. You do not need to be there while we work, but be reachable, because the questions that come up mid dig are usually the ones only you can answer.