Most trade businesses that miss out on government money are not ineligible. They are busy.
The programs are real, they are published, and the rules are written down. But they sit across federal, state and council websites, they change without notice, several are capped and close when the cap fills, and the conditions that actually decide the money usually sit three clicks below the headline. Someone quoting jobs at 6am and invoicing at 9pm is not going to find them.
So we built a service that does that reading for one business, by name, and hands back a single document.
What the Tradie Funding Assessment is
It is a researched report on one trade business: grants, rebates, apprentice and hiring incentives, training and ticket subsidies, and the tax settings that apply to the tools and vehicles a trade business actually buys.
There are three sections.[3]
1. Your business, checked. ABN, GST and licence position first. That is housekeeping, and it is also the most common reason an application is knocked back before anyone reads the merits. 2. Every program, verified. Federal, state and council. Each one checked against the funder's own page on the day the report is written — including the closed ones, named as closed, so nobody spends an evening on a dead program. 3. The three moves. A watch-list of what is about to open, and a plain call on the three things worth doing this quarter. If nothing is worth the time, the report says that instead.
It is $495 plus GST, flat, delivered within three business days.[3] There are no success fees, and there never will be. We are not paid a percentage of anything a business wins.
A worked example of why this is a job
Queensland's TradieStart apprentice incentive is a fair test of whether a program is easy to use on your own.
The headline is genuinely good. An eligible employer can claim $10,000 for an apprentice under 21 or $14,000 for an apprentice 21 and over, rising to $12,000 and $16,000 if the apprentice identifies with a priority cohort.[1]
Now the parts that decide whether a business ever sees it.[1]
- The small business stream is only for employers with no prior record of employing an apprentice under a training contract in Queensland. It is a first-apprentice program. A business that put one on years ago is out of that stream.
- The apprentice must have commenced or recommenced from 1 August 2026 and completed probation, generally 90 days.
- Registrations are open for the first 2,500 eligible apprentices — 1,500 in the small business stream, 1,000 in the medium, large and group training stream. It is capped.
- Before claiming, the employer must complete a free TAFE Queensland micro-credential in mentoring, workplace safety or supervision.
- The money arrives in two halves, 50% after six months and 50% after 18 months, and the claim form does not exist until early 2027.
None of that is hidden. It is all on the official page. It is simply five paragraphs down a page most people never open, and four of those five points can cost an employer the entire amount.
A second Queensland program runs alongside it. The Small Business Apprenticeship Program pays 50% of a typical apprentice wage in years one and two and 25% in years three and four, for businesses with up to 19 employees and turnover under $10 million, capped at 4,000 apprentices, with a further 2,000 places opened on 20 July 2026.[2] Whether a particular business can hold both at once is a question for the administering department rather than for an article — and putting that question in front of the right people, with the business's own details attached, is exactly what the assessment is for.
What it is not
It is not an application service, and it is not an eligibility ruling. Eligibility decisions belong to the body running the program. We check published rules against the business as it actually is, and we say plainly where a rule is unclear or where a program's current status could not be confirmed.
It is not a list scraped from a database either. Every program that appears in a report is opened at the source and checked on the day.
And it does not promise money. Some businesses get a report saying the general cash grants are shut right now and the value this quarter sits in training subsidies and a hiring decision. That is a real answer, and it is worth having before spending three nights hunting for one.
Read one before you buy one
We publish a full assessment — the exact report a Queensland plastering company received in August 2026, shared with their permission, with the client's identifying details removed and the findings redacted.[4] The structure, the reasoning and the tone are all there.
If it is not worth $495 on a particular business, that should be obvious from the sample, and we would rather someone worked that out for free.
Program rules, amounts, caps and dates change. Everything above was checked against the official pages on 5 September 2026, and any business relying on a figure here should check the current page before committing to a hire or a purchase.