The Real Cost of Strata Admin in 2026: Hours and Dollars Per Lot

The average Australian strata business earns about $240 per lot per year in revenue, spends roughly half of that on wages, and carries one full-time staff member for every 365 lots under management. That's the shape of the margin problem in 2026, and most principals can't see it clearly from inside their own P&L. The numbers below come from the Australasian Strata Insights 2024 Report (UNSW City Futures Research Centre with SCA) and the Macquarie Business Banking 2023 Strata Management Benchmarking Report, supplemented by the MRI Software Voice of the Strata Manager Report and a 2026 NSW fee guide from StrataClear. No publicly available source breaks admin cost down to hours-per-task-per-lot, so where we've derived a ratio from published data, we've flagged it.

The headline finding: industry revenue nearly doubled between 2005 and 2022, but profit margins shed ten points and wages now consume 49% of every dollar earned — meaning the only lever left is lots-per-FTE.

Sources and methodology

Four sources underpin this piece. The Macquarie Business Banking benchmarking report was published in 2023 using FY2022 survey data from 270 strata business leaders; it is the most recent granular per-lot financial benchmark publicly available. A 2026 Macquarie update exists but no standalone report with revenue-per-lot figures was retrievable at the time of writing, so FY2022 remains the most recent confirmed benchmark. The UNSW City Futures / SCA Australasian Strata Insights is a 2024 national census (revised October 2025) covering scheme counts, lot counts, and SCA-member employment. The MRI Software Voice of the Strata Manager report is a 2024 industry survey of working hours and workload. The StrataClear fee guide is a 2026 NSW practitioner reference. Where we refer to "roughly one FTE manager per 685 lots" in the professionally managed segment, that figure is a Bloc calculation derived from the UNSW headcount (2,796 FTE managers covering SCA's ~60% share of lots), not a figure stated in the UNSW report.

The numbers

The sector is bigger than most principals realise

Australia now has 368,234 strata schemes containing more than 3.19 million individual lots, up 3% in schemes and 5% in lots since 2022, according to the UNSW/SCA 2024 Insights report. Around 4.2 million Australians, roughly 15% of the population, live in strata-titled property.

Annual levies collected across all schemes rose from $8.5 billion in 2022 to $10 billion in 2024. That's the total pool of money flowing through the sector. Management fees are a thin slice of that pool — more on that below.

Revenue per lot is flat. Wages aren't.

The Macquarie benchmarking data is where the margin problem becomes obvious. Average revenue per lot in FY2022 was $240 per year, up just 1.0% ($2.37) on the prior year.

In the same dataset, wages as a share of revenue rose from 29% in 2005 to 49% in 2022. Average profit margins fell from 33% to 23% over the same period, despite total industry revenue growing 84%.

Read that again. Revenue nearly doubled. Margins compressed by ten points. The entire productivity gain was absorbed by headcount.

One FTE per 365 lots — but the top performers run lighter

Macquarie's 2023 report pegs the national average at one full-time equivalent staff member per 365 lots under management. High-performing firms run 65 more lots per employee than the rest of the industry.

Plugging the UNSW employment data into the same ratio: SCA member companies employ about 2,796 full-time strata managers and 3,656 other staff, managing roughly 60% of all Australian lots. That works out to roughly one FTE manager per 685 lots in the professionally managed segment (a Bloc-derived figure from the UNSW headcount, not stated in the report itself).

The takeaway for a principal: if your ratio is much below 365 lots per FTE, you're carrying more admin overhead than the benchmark. If it's above 430, you're probably in the top quartile — or your managers are burning out.

Most managers are already over their contracted hours

Per MRI Software's survey, 60% of Australian strata managers work more than the standard 38 hours per week, and nearly 20% work more than 51 hours.

Translated into the revenue math: if a manager handling 400 lots is working 45 hours instead of 38, that's 7 unbilled hours per week. At $240 revenue per lot per year, there's no slack to absorb that. It shows up as wages creeping toward 49% of revenue, and it shows up as the 33% industry staff turnover reported by Macquarie in 2022, up from 14% in 2018.

Management fees are a rounding error in the levy pool

Base management fees in NSW typically sit between $250 and $550 per lot per year under Schedule A, with small schemes under 10 lots subject to minimum flat fees of $3,000 to $5,000 per annum.

Do the sector-wide math. $10 billion in levies, 3.19 million lots. That's roughly $3,100 in annual levy contributions per lot on average (Bloc calculation from UNSW/SCA aggregate levy and lot figures; actual levies vary widely by state, scheme size, and building type). Management fees at $240 to $550 per lot represent 8–17% of what each lot owner is already paying into their scheme. The other 83–92% goes to insurance, maintenance, capital works, utilities, and sinking funds.

You are not the expensive line item on the owner's bill. You just feel expensive, because the labour cost of delivering that thin fee slice keeps rising.

Why this matters

If you run a strata business, the combined picture from UNSW and Macquarie tells you three things.

First, the sector is growing — 5% more lots in two years — but the revenue per lot is flat. You can't price your way out of this in most markets. Owners compare fees on a per-lot basis and the benchmarks are public.

Second, wages are now half of revenue and profit margins have shed ten points in fifteen years. The only two levers left are (a) manage more lots per FTE, or (b) reduce the hours required per lot. Those are the same lever.

Third, the people doing the work are already over 38 hours a week and turning over at 33% a year. You can't solve margin compression by asking managers to absorb more lots manually. The top quartile firms aren't working harder. They're running 65 more lots per employee because their admin workflow is different.

What to do about it

Three concrete moves, in the order a principal should make them.

1. Measure your own per-lot numbers. Pull your last full financial year. Divide total revenue by total lots under management. Divide total FTE headcount by lots. Divide wages by revenue. If you land near $240/lot, 1 FTE per 365 lots, and 49% wages-to-revenue, you're average. If you're worse on any of the three, you know where to focus.

2. Audit hours by task type, not by person. This is the data gap the public research doesn't fill. For two weeks, have your managers tag time against categories: levy chasing, inbox triage, maintenance coordination, meeting prep, compliance. In our experience working with strata businesses, the majority of recoverable hours sit in repetitive communication tasks — levy chasing, inbox triage, maintenance coordination — which is the exact work automation handles well.

3. Set a target lots-per-FTE and work backwards. If you're at 365, the top performers manage roughly 430 lots per FTE — derived by adding Macquarie's reported 65-lot outperformance gap to the 365 average; this is a Bloc-derived estimate, not a separately published quartile figure. That's an 18% productivity gap. Closing it via hiring is impossible at 33% turnover. Closing it via automation of the repetitive admin layer is where the industry is heading, and the firms moving first are the ones whose margins will look like 2015 again instead of 2022.

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If you want to see how your portfolio compares on the numbers above — revenue per lot, FTE ratio, wages-to-revenue, and where the hours are actually going — we can run that benchmark with you in thirty minutes and show you which admin categories have the most recoverable time. Book a benchmark call and bring your last full year of P&L and lot count. That's all we need.