Rained off again: keeping cash flowing when sites shut down

Nobody can pour a slab in a downpour. A roof sheet in the wind is a safety call you make once. The painter’s exterior booking evaporates with the first front. And yet the ute repayment, the insurance premium and the hire invoice have not read the forecast.

For outdoor trades, weather is not an occasional bad luck story. It is a recurring line in the budget.

What does a wet week really cost a tradie?

The loss is bigger than the day’s takings. You lose the revenue, but you keep every fixed cost, and you often keep paying people.

Here is a simple way to see it. This is an illustrative example, not a real business.

Weekly item	Illustrative amount
Wages for a two-person crew	$4,800
Vehicle and equipment repayments	$900
Insurance, phones and software	$450
Plant hire already booked	$600
Weekly cost with no work	About $6,750

Three rained-off weeks puts roughly $20,000 of outgoings on a business that is earning nothing. Then there is the catch-up problem: when the sun returns, every customer wants you at once, so you cannot cleanly recover the lost days.

Which trades are hit hardest?

Anyone who works outside, or who depends on someone who does.

• Concreters lose pour days, and pumps booked in advance still cost money.
• Roofers are stopped by rain and by wind, and by heat on the other end of the calendar.
• Landscapers deal with waterlogged ground and delayed plant deliveries.
• Painters need dry surfaces and settled conditions for exterior coats.
• Earthmoving crews struggle on saturated ground and can see machines sit idle.
• Fencers and bricklayers lose days to mud, wind and unsafe footing.

Indoor trades are not immune. Delays on the outdoor stages of a build push the whole programme back, and your start date slides with it. If your trade is on that list, our pages on concreters, landscapers and roofers go deeper on the cycle for each.

How do I build a weather buffer?

Treat it as a fixed cost, because it is one. A simple method:

1. Add up your weekly fixed costs, including wages you intend to keep paying.
2. Decide how many lost weeks you want to be able to survive.
3. Multiply, then divide by the number of working weeks in a year to get a weekly set-aside.
4. Move that amount into a separate account every week, before anything else.
5. Touch it only for genuine weather losses.

Keep it boring and automatic. Most tradies who say they will save “when it’s busy” never do, because busy is exactly when the money is needed for tools and wages.

If you want a sense of where your weeks run thin, the cash flow gap planner lets you test a few scenarios in a minute or two.

Can I plan my work around the weather?

A little, and it is worth the effort.

• Keep a pipeline of indoor jobs. Fit-offs, repairs, quotes and small works can fill a wet fortnight.
• Check the Bureau of Meteorology outlook for your region before you commit crews to long outdoor stages, and use it to sequence prep work.
• Move admin forward. Wet days are good for invoicing, quoting, bookkeeping and chasing payments.
• Quote with float. Programme in lost days and say how delays are treated, so customers know before the first cloud.

Seasonal patterns also matter for borrowing. Our seasonal business loans page explains how repayments can be matched to when your income actually arrives.

What funding helps through a run of lost days?

Funding cannot make rain stop, but it can keep the business whole while you wait it out.

• A short-term loan for a defined stretch of lost income, sized on turnover and bank statements. Typical unsecured amounts run from $5k to $500k.
• A line of credit you hold in reserve and only draw on when the weather bites. That model is covered in line of credit for tradies.
• A property-secured loan from $20k to $5m if you own property and the hit is bigger, such as storm damage to equipment.

If the cause is a declared flood or storm, check the Australian Government’s Disaster Assist site for support that may apply to your area. Finance can sit alongside that help, particularly for replacing damaged tools or getting a crew back on site.

The best time to arrange cover is before the wet season, while your books look healthy. Asking after three lost weeks is harder than asking beforehand. You can see what you might access now.

What should I do the moment a wet spell is forecast?

Act early. Ring customers with outdoor work booked and agree revised dates before they go looking for another tradie. Re-order deliveries so materials are not sitting on a muddy site. Tell your crew what the plan is for the week, whether that is indoor work, workshop prep or time off, so nobody is guessing.

It also helps to tidy up the paperwork queue: quotes waiting to be sent, variations waiting for sign-off and invoices waiting to go out. Money arriving in a wet week is worth more than money arriving in a dry one.

Make the wet season someone else’s problem

You cannot control the sky, but you can control how exposed the business is to it. Cover for a patch of lost days should be a decision you made in a dry month, not a panic in a wet one.

Sending an enquiry takes about a minute, and there is no credit check at that point, so your file is not touched just for asking. We do not hand your details to a stack of lenders, which means no flood of calls. Someone real reads your situation, then rings to talk through what suits your trade and your region.

Please answer the form as accurately as you can, particularly turnover and the trade you work in. That helps us find the right fit the first time round.

Check your options before the next front →