Merbau Decking Cost in Perth — Why Hardwood Still Wins on Price | Endure Decks

The hardwood that replaced jarrah as Perth's staple deck board, what it actually costs, the labour line nobody talks about, and how we maintain it — including the oil we use and why we use it.

Endure Decks — Perth deck builders · Updated 28 May 2026

These are supply + install rates for an Endure-spec'd deck — boards, properly built subframe, design, prelims and the 20-Year Standard build. Not a generic market rate, and not what a less-involved installer charges. What we deliver, all-in.

Expect $440–$540 per square metre installed inc GST. A 22 m² merbau deck on a clean site lands around $15,000 for the deck itself; a 36 m² merbau deck around $18,000–$22,000; a 50 m² merbau deck on a standard subframe around $25,000–$30,000. Both ends of those figures come from actual Endure jobs.

Merbau is the best-priced decking board on the Perth market — by a margin. It replaced jarrah as Perth's staple decking choice after they stopped logging it, and across most jobs we quote, it's the easy yes for a homeowner who wants a real timber deck without paying jarrah or spotted-gum money.

Merbau also costs more per square metre to install than composite — denser, slower, more boards per litre of sweat — so the supply saving is partly returned at the labour line. And it asks for maintenance, on a real schedule, with a real product. That part of the conversation is below.

If you are reading three Perth merbau quotes that look thousands apart for what looks like the same job — or comparing a merbau quote against a composite quote and wondering where the value actually lands — this is the article that walks the real numbers.

Those are our published 2026 ranges, openly listed on the Endure pricing page. The general Perth market for installed hardwood lands roughly $315–$580/m² across published competitor rates; we sit at the upper half of that band. Why we sit there is the hub article on Perth deck pricing: you can build cheaply or you can build to the 20-Year Standard with a 7-year structural warranty, and you cannot do both for the same number.

For comparison: a composite deck at Endure rates lands between $540 and $760/m² inc GST depending on the board (composite cost article here). The dollar difference is real. The lifecycle difference is also real. We'll come back to both.

A bit of history that explains why most Perth timber decks are merbau.

Jarrah used to be the WA staple. It still is in plenty of period houses — flooring, joinery, structural — and you'll find Perth backyards with old-growth jarrah decks that have weathered through 30 years and look spectacular. When commercial old-growth jarrah logging was wound back, the supply dried, the price climbed, and the hardwood deck market needed a new staple. Merbau is what filled that hole.

It made sense. Merbau is a hardwood that lasts decades outdoors — naturally durable in the heartwood, stable in Perth's heat and humidity swings. It's oily by nature — the timber carries its own protective oils, which is one of the reasons it does well around pools and in coastal conditions (more on that below). It's imported, dense, dimensionally stable enough to handle Perth's UV without going to pieces, and most importantly: a lot cheaper than the alternatives.

That last point is the headline. Merbau supplies meaningfully below the other Perth hardwoods on the market — well under jarrah, spotted gum, blackbutt, or Fijian mahogany. Across a 36 m² deck the board-cost saving compared to jarrah or spotted gum runs into thousands of dollars at the supply line. That's the gap that made merbau the staple, and it's the gap that keeps making it the staple now.

If you've got a 50 m² timber deck in the brief and budget matters at all, merbau is almost always the answer.

There are other hardwoods Perth deck builders specify, each with a specific job:

• Jarrah — the WA staple before merbau. Beautiful, dense, deep red, the heritage option. Used where the brief specifically calls for the WA hardwood look, often on architect-led builds or restoration jobs. Supplies meaningfully above merbau; the look is the value.
• Spotted Gum — durable hardwood with a distinctive grain, popular on architect-spec'd contemporary jobs. Sits above merbau on price.
• Blackbutt — hard, dimensionally stable, blonde-toned. A genuine alternative to the other Australian hardwoods at a similar price point above merbau.
• Fijian Mahogany — the standout pick for one specific situation: fully exposed, all-day-sun decks. Fijian mahogany weathers and silvers beautifully — when an exposed deck is going to go grey over time anyway, mahogany silvers in a way that reads extremely beachy and coastal. If your deck is going to live entirely without overhead cover and you want the look to age into the WA coastal aesthetic rather than fight it, Fijian mahogany is worth specifying. We use it when the brief and the aspect line up.

What you'll notice is missing from that list: treated pine. Pine is the wrong call for a Perth deck. The board doesn't have the natural durability hardwoods carry, the treatment leaches, and the failure mode catches up to the homeowner inside a decade. We don't sell pine decks. Plenty of Perth builders do; some are honest about the trade-off and price it accordingly. We've made the call that for the kind of deck we build, pine doesn't earn its place on the spec sheet.

This is the part of the merbau conversation that doesn't get written up in cost articles, and it's the part that actually decides a lot of project budgets.

If your outdoor build has anything beyond the deck surface — handrails, balustrading, a pergola, a privacy screen, anything where structural timber is on show — merbau comes in the section sizes you need for the whole thing. Rafters. Beams. Posts. Handrail uprights. The same timber, machined to whatever the design wants, from the same supplier in the same colour family.

The alternative most cheap quotes reach for is treated pine + paint for the structural timber and a different decking board on top. The all-in supply cost looks lower on day one. What it produces is a deck in one species and a pergola in another — a merbau deck under a painted pine roof reads as two builds, not one. The visual line breaks at every point where the timbers meet.

A merbau deck with merbau posts, merbau beams, merbau handrails reads as one cohesive piece. That continuity is worth real money in how the finished build sits in the backyard — and the upgrade over pine + paint isn't as expensive as homeowners assume, because the boards aren't doing extra work; they're the same family of timber as the surface.

The other practical point: merbau posts and beams span further than equivalent pine sections. A pine beam carrying a roof load wants a post every couple of metres. The same load in merbau can carry across a longer span — which opens up design moves like wider unbroken openings, insulated panels sitting on top of fewer beams, and clean sight lines through the structure. Pine isn't wrong on a pergola; it just costs you posts you didn't want.

If you're already committing to merbau on the deck and the project has structural timber elsewhere, the continuity question is worth a five-minute conversation before the quote gets finalised. The answer is sometimes "stay with pine on the structure" — but it's never the default. The default should be: same family of timber for the deck and the build around it, unless there's a specific reason to break the line.

Most Perth quotes don't show this and it confuses everybody. The board is cheaper. The labour to put it down is not.

At our rates, timber deck labour costs noticeably more per square metre than composite labour. Hardwood fights the saw blade. Board widths vary slightly. You select for grade. You cut around natural features. Each merbau board takes longer to lay than a composite equivalent of the same dimensions — wedging, pre-drilling, screwing, finishing each cut. Multiplied across a deck, the time adds up.

Why? Composite is engineered for installation — uniform profiles, hidden clip systems on most boards, the board is the same dimension you predict it will be. Hardwood is hardwood. The labour difference per square metre is real, and we won't pretend it isn't on a quote.

The take-home: when you see a merbau quote that is significantly lower than another merbau quote of the same dimensions, the difference is almost never the boards. It's the substructure spec and the labour. Cheap merbau labour is the single most reliable signal that corners are being cut. A builder who has costed the labour properly for the time hardwood actually takes is not the builder with the lowest number on the table. The full read on labour is the deck labour cost article.

This is the part most quotes don't write up, and the part that decides whether your merbau deck holds for fifteen years or starts looking sorry at year five.

We only use Equisol. That's not a sponsorship; it's a build decision we've made and stuck with. Equisol is an oil — penetrating, not coating. The difference matters. Here's how the system runs:

At the supplier, before install. Every timber board we install comes pre-oiled from the supplier — including, critically, the underside. That underside oil is the one coat that board will never get again once it's down, so it gets done before it goes anywhere. The board lands on the substructure already protected on both sides.

On site, every cut gets oiled. A fresh cut exposes raw timber to weather. Every cut on every board on every Endure timber deck gets oiled before the build moves on. It's a discipline thing — not glamorous, but it's the reason cuts on our decks don't show up later as failure points.

At the finish, the whole deck gets Equisol. The full surface, before handover. The first oil is included on every Endure timber build.

Why Equisol specifically, and why it matters: Equisol penetrates the timber rather than coating it. You see this clearly the first time it rains — water beads off the deck and runs. That's the timber being protected from inside.

The contrast is coatings — surface films that look great on day one but trap moisture inside the timber over time. The film fails, the surface flakes, and the deck looks worse than if nothing had been used at all. Equisol is like conditioning your hair — it brings the oils back into the timber, keeps it protected, doesn't form a film on top.

When to recoat: the homeowner doesn't need a calendar. Watch the surface. When water stops beading off, or the deck starts looking a little dry — that's the signal. Most Perth merbau decks need recoating every 12–18 months for the best result, sometimes a little longer if the deck is undercover or doesn't see much direct sun.

For homeowners who don't want to do it themselves: DeckCare is our productised maintenance line — yearly clean and oil, on the schedule, by the same crew that built the deck. We explain it on every timber build at handover, so the maintenance decision isn't a surprise five years later.

The instinct most homeowners arrive with is that you put composite around a pool because timber will struggle with chlorine and splash. It's not wrong — composite is fine around pools and plenty of pool decks are built in it.

But merbau is actually a really good performer around pools. It's an oily timber by nature, so it's better protected against moisture than a less-resinous hardwood. The natural oils are a defence the timber comes with. Combined with the Equisol maintenance approach above, merbau around a Perth pool holds up well — and the warmth of timber underfoot near water is a thing composite genuinely can't replicate.

We've built merbau pool decks across Perth's western suburbs. None of them are showing the failure modes the "composite-only-for-pools" school of thought predicts. Pick the right board for the right reasons, build the substructure properly, maintain it with the right oil — and merbau does what it's supposed to do.

Properly built and properly maintained: comfortably 15 years and aiming for 20+. Without maintenance, less.

Two things determine the answer.

One — the subframe. A merbau deck on a properly built H4 subframe with joist tape and the correct fasteners outlasts most of what people remember from the 2005–2010 outdoor-living boom. A merbau deck on the substandard subframe that was common in that era — H3 bearers, no joist tape, untaped joists, galvanised hardware in coastal air — is what's failing across Perth right now. The boards aren't the cause. We wrote it up properly in Why Decks Fail in Perth.

Two — the maintenance. Merbau without oil weathers gracefully to grey but loses surface protection over the long term. Merbau on the Equisol schedule holds its surface, holds reasonable colour, and gets the long lifespan the timber is capable of. The deeper read is Deck Lifespan in Perth.

The boards are the headline. They are not the biggest cost on the quote. Roughly:

• Boards — about a fifth to a quarter of the total on a merbau deck (lower share than composite, because merbau is the cheapest board).
• Subframe — around a sixth to a fifth. Our standard timber subframe runs around $85–$95/m² in client pricing vs roughly $75/m² at most Perth builders, because we run H4 bearers, joist tape on every joist, tighter spans and more concrete per footing. The substructure cost article walks the detail.
• Labour — around a third. The line where philosophy lives. Cheap labour is the single most reliable tell on a quote. The labour cost article is the full read.
• Stairs, prelims, oil, design — the rest. Stairs on a hardwood deck run a couple of thousand inc GST for a standard 3-rise set. Prelims (drawings, site setup, end-of-job clean) run around $1,050 ex GST. The first oil is included on every Endure timber deck.
• The warranty and the 12-month return. Every Endure deck — timber or composite — carries a 7-year structural warranty and a 12-month DeckCare return where we come back and check fasteners, fixings and finish. None of that is a line on the quote. It's in the margin.

For standalone deck builds that need council approval, Endure runs a paid design phase — a $1,200 design fee, credited toward the build. For a simple low-clearance deck on an existing slab, there's no upfront design fee. (Our Process has the detail.)

A few real situations where we'd specify composite rather than merbau:

You don't want to oil the deck and you don't want it grey. Merbau will go silver-grey over a few years without oil. If that look would bother you and you also wouldn't keep up with the maintenance, composite is the right answer regardless of what supply costs say. Composite asks for almost nothing once it's down.

The deck is going to live in full unshaded sun for most of the year, and you want a finish that's actively designed for it. A heat-reflective composite (MoistureShield Meridian with the CoolDeck tech) is the right call for an exposed-aspect, no-overhead deck where heat underfoot is a real factor. The composite article walks this in detail.

You specifically want a look that hardwood doesn't deliver. Pioneer at the top end of the composite market is, frankly, a different aesthetic — premium, ultra-realistic, the centrepiece of an outdoor build. The full board comparison sits in the timber vs composite article.

For everything else — most Perth decks, most clients, most blocks — merbau is genuinely the easy answer.

A recent Endure quote: a 22.5 m² merbau deck on a standard timber subframe — the deck alone. Sell ex GST around $14,600. With stairs, prelims, oil and the warranty package, that lands well inside our published $440–$540/m² band.

A larger one: a 52 m² merbau deck plus an attached pergola on a Maylands block. Substructure and footings line $5,900; pergola structure $25,300; deck and finish $27,500 — about $58,700 inc GST all-in for the combined deck-plus-pergola build. That's a clean snapshot of what a substantial merbau deck looks like when it's part of a real outdoor-living project rather than a standalone slab.

Both are 2026 numbers from actual builds.

One. What's the subframe spec, exactly? Treatment level (H3 or H4), joist spacing, fixings, ground clearance, joist tape. A vague answer is the same flag here as anywhere — the subframe is where the long-term outcome of the deck sits, and the merbau on top doesn't change that.

Two. What does the labour line cover, and what's the build day-count? Hardwood takes longer to lay than composite. A quote with a labour line that assumes three days for a job that genuinely needs five is a quote about to lose money — which means corners on day one. A real builder will tell you what crew over what days.

Three. What's the oil schedule, and is the first oil included? Which product? A merbau deck without a maintenance plan is a deck that goes grey and then loses surface protection. The first oil should be on the quote. The product should be named (we use Equisol). The follow-up plan should be a real conversation, not a generic line.

The full version of the three-questions framework is in our hub on Perth deck pricing.

What does merbau decking cost in Perth per square metre? Supply + install for an Endure-spec'd deck inc GST: around $440–$540/m² at the 20-Year Standard build spec. The general Perth market lands roughly $315–$580/m² across published competitor rates.

How much is a 30 square metre merbau deck in Perth? At our rates and on a clean site, roughly $18,000–$22,000 inc GST for a 30 m² merbau deck on a standard subframe — boards, structure, labour, prelims, first oil, warranty included. Price moves with site difficulty, stairs and whether the deck needs council approval.

Why is merbau the most common hardwood deck board in Perth? It replaced jarrah as Perth's staple decking choice after large-scale jarrah logging was wound back. Merbau is a hardwood that lasts decades outdoors, naturally oily, stable in Perth conditions, and supplies meaningfully below the other hardwoods on the market — it's the best-priced decking board in Perth by a margin.

Why does merbau cost more to install than composite? Hardwood is denser, board widths vary, you cut around natural grain features, and most boards need wedging and pre-drilling. A timber deck genuinely takes longer to lay than a composite deck of the same dimensions. The labour gap is real and shows up on the quote.

What oil do you use on merbau decks? Equisol. It penetrates the timber rather than coating it — water beads off when it's working. Coatings (surface films) trap moisture inside the timber and fail visibly over time; penetrating oils condition the timber from inside. The first oil is included on every Endure timber build. After that, recoat when water stops beading or the surface looks dry — typically every 12–18 months in Perth conditions.

Is merbau OK around a Perth pool? Yes — actually better than most homeowners expect. Merbau is naturally oily, so it carries its own moisture protection. Combined with the Equisol maintenance approach, merbau around a pool holds up well and reads warmer underfoot than composite. We've built merbau pool decks across Perth without the failure modes the "composite-only-for-pools" assumption predicts.

Should I use merbau for the handrails, posts and beams too? If your build has structural timber on show — handrails, balustrading, a pergola, a privacy screen — using merbau across the whole job is worth a real conversation. Merbau comes in the section sizes needed for posts, beams and rafters, the deck and the structure around it read as one cohesive piece rather than two builds bolted together, and merbau spans further than equivalent pine sections — which opens up design moves like wider unbroken openings and cleaner sight lines through the structure. Not a default — but the question is worth asking before the quote gets finalised.

How long does a merbau deck last in Perth? Properly built on a subframe that holds, and maintained with a real oil schedule, merbau typically lasts well into the second decade. Without maintenance, less. The two variables that decide the answer are the subframe and the oil cycle — not the boards.

Is merbau decking cheaper than composite over the long run? Initial cost: yes, by a meaningful margin per square metre installed. Lifetime cost: depends on how heavily you discount your own time. Composite asks for almost no maintenance; merbau wants an oil every 12–18 months and the materials and labour to do it. Whether you save money over twenty years depends on whether you do it yourself or pay DeckCare to.

If you want a real merbau deck number for your dimensions and your site — not a ballpark — that starts with a conversation. We'll walk through your block, the substructure spec your job needs, which oil schedule fits how you want to live with it, and what the all-in figure looks like.

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