The quote is the weak point: what 20,286 NZ trade reviews say about pricing.
A study of every publicly posted customer review across 369 electricians, plumbers and painters. Workmanship is almost never the problem. Being overcharged, or given a quote that didn’t hold, is.
What do New Zealanders complain about most with tradespeople?
Across 20,286 publicly posted reviews of NZ electricians, plumbers and painters, price is the recurring weak point. It’s the lowest-scoring of the four rated categories (communication, quality, reliability, value) in all three trades, and where negative reviews exist in enough volume to categorise, being overcharged or given a quote that didn’t hold is the single most common complaint.
Satisfaction is genuinely high. One category drags the rest down.
Across 20,286 reviews spanning electricians, plumbers and painters, the average overall score sits between 97.3 and 98.7 out of 100 depending on the trade, and roughly four in five reviews give a perfect score. That’s a real number, not survey spin: most jobs go fine. But when you break the average into its four parts, comfortably, consistently, in all three trades, one category drags the rest down.
| Trade | Communication | Quality | Reliability | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Electricians | 98.7 | 99.0 | 98.8 | 97.1 |
| Plumbers | 97.7 | 98.2 | 97.9 | 95.5 |
| Painters | 98.8 | 98.9 | 98.9 | 97.8 |
Value is the lowest of the four scores in every single trade, and it’s not close. Plumbers show the widest gap: value sits 2.7 points below quality. That’s a small number on a 100-point scale where everything scores in the high 90s, so read it as a relative pattern, not a crisis — this is not a trade in trouble. But three independent datasets pointing the same direction is a real signal, and it lines up with the complaint data below.
The same theme, every time it can be measured.
Negative experiences are rare. Across the full corpus, only 1.0% of electrician reviews, 2.1% of plumber reviews and 0.4% of painter reviews score below 50/100 on any dimension. That’s the honest scale of the problem — small.
Where the negative sample was large enough to break into categories (electricians and plumbers; painters’ negative sample was too thin, about 27 reviews total, to categorise with confidence), one theme leads every time: being overcharged, or given a quote that didn’t hold once the job was done. It shows up more than any other complaint category for both trades we could measure, ahead of communication delays, no-shows, and rude front-of-house staff. Workmanship complaints are comparatively rare; most of what goes wrong is what happens around the job, not the job itself.
The mirror image, just as consistent.
Across all three trades, politeness is the single most-praised trait (74–81% of positive reviews mention it) and referral language runs a close second (53–64%, people explicitly saying they’d use the business again or recommend them). Both numbers are strikingly uniform across three trades with nothing else in common but the review platform.
The two least-mentioned traits, in every trade, are quote accuracy (7–11%) and aftercare follow-up (2–3%). That’s the same gap showing up from the other side: pricing and post-job communication are the parts of the job customers are least likely to specifically praise, and, on the complaint side, most likely to specifically flag.
For plumbers and electricians, a little. Painters buck the pattern.
Businesses in the top third by review volume (a rough proxy for size/years trading) score 2.3 points lower on average than businesses in the bottom third for plumbers (97.0 vs 99.3), and 0.9 points lower for electricians (98.2 vs 99.1). The correlation between review count and approval rating is weakly negative for both (r = −0.32 plumbers, r = −0.23 electricians).
Painters buck the pattern entirely: small, mid and large painters score within half a point of each other (98.5–98.8), and the correlation is effectively zero (r = 0.02). Whatever’s driving the size-vs-reputation trade-off in the other two trades isn’t inherent to scaling a trades business — it’s something plumbers and electricians are doing (or not doing) as they grow that painters aren’t.
A hypothesis, offered as a hypothesis. The obvious difference between the three trades in this corpus is job shape. Plumbing and electrical work is dominated by short, high-volume, one-off jobs: quote it, do it, invoice it, move to the next one. A painter’s work is longer per job than a callout, and often a repeat relationship with the same customer over several rooms or a full exterior, with the customer able to see the standard of work directly as it happens. If a business’s quoting and follow-up depend on the owner personally staying across every job, that dependency breaks at exactly the point where job volume climbs — and it breaks first in the trades doing the most jobs. The painter never hits that wall as hard, because a smaller number of larger jobs a year can still be carried in one person’s head.
The corpus is consistent with that reading rather than proof of it. The dimensions that decline with size are the process-side ones (value in particular), not quality — which is what you’d expect if the thing that degrades at volume is the admin around the job rather than the work itself. But this study can’t see a business’s actual quoting process, only what customers said about it, so treat this as the explanation worth testing, not the one that’s been tested.
Only two regions clear our anonymisation threshold.
Only Auckland and Wellington have enough businesses in the corpus to report regionally without risking identifying an individual firm — see the methodology page for the exact threshold.
| Trade | Auckland | Wellington |
|---|---|---|
| Electricians | 98.5 | 98.6 |
| Plumbers | 97.0 | 98.2 |
| Painters | 98.8 | 98.4 |
Plumbers is the only trade with a meaningful regional gap, 1.2 points, Wellington ahead of Auckland. Electricians and painters are effectively flat between the two centres.
Directionally stable to slightly better.
Where the data supports a year-on-year read (plumbers and painters; electricians’ historical review dates aren’t in a format the current extractor parses — a known gap, not a finding), overall scores held flat to slightly up from 2025 to 2026: +0.2 points for plumbers, +0.0 (flat) for painters. Review volume itself is trending down each year in this snapshot (plumbers: 631 reviews in 2024, 512 in 2025, 351 so far in 2026; painters: 687, 548, 373 over the same three years), but 2026 is a partial year at the time of writing, so that’s a pace artefact, not a claim that fewer people are reviewing tradespeople over time.
Three steps, each one anchored to a number.
Read the praise and complaint data side by side and they aren’t two findings — they’re one. Customers rate the work highly and rate the people highly. What they rate lowest, and complain about most, is everything that happens around the work: the price conversation before it and the silence after it. That’s not a skills problem or an attitude problem. It’s a process problem, and the data points at three specific steps that are missing from the job rather than done badly.
- 01No agreed-in-writing price before the work starts — value scores lowest of four dimensions in every trade, and overcharging/unheld quotes lead the complaints. Both describe the same moment: the customer’s and the business’s understanding of the price were never the same document.
- 02No sign-off step when the job changes — quote accuracy is among the least-praised traits (7–11%) while quote problems lead the complaints. A trait rarely praised but frequently complained about is one that only becomes visible when it fails — the signature of a step nobody performs until it’s too late.
- 03No follow-up after the job is done — aftercare is the least-mentioned trait of all (2–3%). A trait can only be praised if it happened; a single deliberate touchpoint after completion is the last chance to catch a pricing surprise before it becomes a public review instead of a conversation.
None of these three gaps are about competence or goodwill. Politeness is the most-praised trait in all three trades (74–81%) and more than half of positive reviewers volunteer that they’d recommend the business (53–64%). The relationship customers have with their tradesperson is, on this evidence, genuinely good. What’s missing sits in the paperwork around it — the part of a trades business most likely to be carried in someone’s head rather than written into how the job runs.
Full corpus, collection method, scoring, coding, thresholds and platform name are stated on the methodology page. This is public reviews, not a random sample of every job done; correlation, not causation, on the size-vs-reputation pattern; small percentages on small bases are reported as rank order, not precision measurement. Figures are candidate findings pending internal promotion to verified status.
