Every trade owner I talk to says the same two things about apprentices, usually in the same breath. First, that they're hard to find and harder to keep. Second, that they can't afford to take one on right now.
There's a change coming that's worth understanding before you settle on that second answer, because the government has just moved the goalposts on what an apprentice costs you in year one.
What's actually changing
In the 2026–27 Federal Budget, the government announced changes to the Australian Apprenticeships Incentive System that take effect from 1 January 2027. The two that matter most to a small trade business:
The Key Apprenticeship Program employer incentive — the payment for taking on an apprentice in a listed priority occupation, covering areas like housing construction and clean energy — reduces from up to $5,000 to up to $4,000, paid in instalments across the first year.
Employers with 200 or more employees lose eligibility for the employer incentive altogether, with Group Training Organisations the exception. That one doesn't touch most readers of this site directly, but it changes the competitive landscape: the big players who could previously bank the same incentive on every start will be doing their sums differently from 2027, and some of that hiring is expected to shift toward group training arrangements.
The priority occupation list itself is also being retargeted to better reflect where the actual skills shortages are, so the occupations that qualify won't necessarily be the same ones.
The piece that turns this from news into a decision is the transition arrangement. Apprenticeships that commence before 1 January 2027 continue under the current arrangements. Start someone in October and you're on the existing rates for the life of that incentive. Start them in February and you're on the new ones.
Confirm your own eligibility at apprenticeships.gov.au or through an Australian Apprenticeship Support provider before you plan around any of this — the incentives have conditions attached, they've been adjusted more than once in recent years, and what applies depends on the occupation, your business, and the apprentice.
Why a thousand dollars shouldn't decide this
Now the part that matters more than the incentive.
A thousand dollars is not a reason to hire an apprentice. If you take one on for the subsidy and you're not ready to train them properly, you'll spend that thousand dollars in the first fortnight of lost productivity and get four years of frustration for it. The incentive is a tiebreaker, not a business case.
The real question is whether an apprentice is the right hire at all right now, and for a lot of businesses at the $500K to $1.5M mark it isn't the next one. When an owner is drowning, the instinct is to add hands on tools. But if the constraint is that you're doing quoting at 9pm and scheduling from the front seat of the ute, another set of hands makes the bottleneck worse, not better — a point worth reading properly in the first hire every growing service business needs to make. Adding an apprentice to a business with no systems adds a person who needs supervision to a business that has no capacity to supervise.
An apprentice is the right hire when three things are true. You have consistent work in the pipeline twelve months out, not just a busy month. You have a qualified tradesperson with the temperament and the time to actually train someone, which is a specific skill and not every good tradie has it. And you have enough structure — job descriptions, a schedule someone else can read, a way of checking work — that a first-year has something to plug into rather than a chaos to absorb.
Get those three right and an apprentice is one of the highest-return decisions in a trade business: four years of compounding capability at a wage that starts low, and a person who learns your standards rather than someone else's bad habits. Get them wrong and you've created a training obligation you can't meet, which is unfair to them and expensive for you.
Gold nugget. Before you commit, cost the apprentice properly for year one — not just the award wage, but superannuation, workers comp, tools, PPE, vehicle time, and most importantly the supervision drag: the hours your qualified tradesperson loses being interrupted, checking work, and going back over things. Most owners forget that last one entirely and then wonder why margins dipped. Estimate it honestly at something like a fifth of the supervisor's time in the first six months and put a dollar figure on it. If the business still works with that number in it, the apprentice is affordable and the incentive is a bonus. If it doesn't, the incentive was never going to save you.
The commercial argument for starting before January
If you've already decided an apprentice is the right move for the coming year, timing it before the end of the year is straightforward arithmetic. Same hire, same person, up to a thousand dollars more support, locked in by the start date.
There's a second, softer reason. The apprentice intake cycle clusters around the start of the academic year, which means a lot of employers will be looking at the same time in January and February — and this year, with the new rules landing on 1 January, some of them will have brought their hiring forward too. Recruiting slightly against the cycle usually means less competition for the good ones, and the good ones are the entire game. A motivated apprentice who wants to be there is worth several who were sent by someone else.
The thing to avoid is the reverse: rushing a hire in December to beat a date, without the pipeline or the supervisor to support it. A deadline is a good reason to make a decision you were already going to make. It is a terrible reason to make one you weren't.
Get the employment structure right too
One more thing while you're here. If you're weighing an apprentice against putting on another sub, understand that these are not two versions of the same decision — they're different businesses with different risk profiles, and the compliance environment around contractor arrangements has been tightening steadily. The trade-offs are laid out in subcontractors vs employees, and it's worth being clear-eyed about it before you commit either way.
And if the honest answer is that your team is already underperforming and you're hoping a fresh apprentice changes the culture — it won't. That's almost always a systems problem, and it gets louder with more people in the business, not quieter.
If you're not sure whether the next hire should be an apprentice, a tradesperson, or someone in the office, that's exactly the question we work through in the Trade Business Health Check: a fixed-price review of your numbers, your capacity and your pipeline, with a written plan of what to fix and who to hire first. Better to spend a few hundred dollars answering that properly than four years finding out you got it wrong.