Budget guide · Albury, Lavington, Thurgoona & Wodonga

The cheapest sensible way to do a whole Albury house in blinds

A standard 13-window Albury house comes in at roughly $1,900 to $3,200 in made-to-measure blockout and light-filter rollers, $4,200 to $6,500 done properly with double rollers and wet-area shutters, and $9,500 to $16,000 with basswood shutters and blockout curtains. The genuinely cheap version that does not cost you twice sits around $2,800: good blockout in every bedroom, a sunscreen in the living rooms, and nothing at all in the south-facing rooms until next year. There is no NSW or Victorian rebate for domestic blinds in 2026, whatever anyone tells you.

Get a written quote See the cost breakdown

Nearly every Albury house we quote has the same shape: three or four bedrooms, an open living and dining area, a kitchen window, a bathroom and an ensuite, a laundry, and one big sliding door. Call it 13 openings. What follows is what those 13 openings actually cost at three honest levels, where you can safely take money out, and the four places where taking money out means paying for the same window twice.

Three tiers for a 13-window Albury house

Prices are 2026 Albury and Wodonga figures, supplied and installed, GST included, based on a typical brick-veneer house with an average window width around 1.5m and one 3.6m sliding door.

Tier	Whole house, 13 windows	What you get	What you give up	Who should pick it
Budget	$1,900 to $3,200	Made-to-measure blockout rollers in the bedrooms and light-filter rollers elsewhere, standard fabric range, chain control with compliant child-safety devices, white componentry, the sliding door split into two linked blinds.	No sunscreen fabric, so the living rooms are either open to the street or dark. No motorisation. No double rollers. Shortest fabric warranties, typically 3 to 5 years. Nothing in the wet rooms beyond a basic blind.	Landlords, first-home buyers in Thurgoona or Hamilton Valley, anyone selling inside three years, or a house where the windows are getting replaced later.
Mid (what we recommend)	$4,200 to $6,500	Double rollers with a 5% sunscreen plus blockout in the living, dining and kitchen. Acrylic foam-backed blockout rollers in every bedroom. PVC or polyresin shutters in the bathroom and ensuite. One motorised blind on the stairwell or the high window you cannot reach.	No curtains, no timber shutters, no designer fabric range, no whole-home automation hub. The look is clean and plain rather than decorative.	Owner-occupiers staying five years or more. This is the tier that behaves properly through an Albury summer and an Albury winter without wasting money on finish.
Premium	$9,500 to $16,000	Painted basswood plantation shutters to the street-facing rooms, triple-weave blockout S-fold curtains with pelmets in the main bedroom and living area, honeycomb cell blinds in the remaining bedrooms, PVC shutters in the wet rooms, motorisation on the living and stairwell blinds with an app and voice hub.	Cash now, and a longer wait. Shutters run 6 to 10 weeks to manufacture, so the job finishes in stages rather than in one visit.	Renovators, new builds, big-glass west-facing homes, heritage frontages in Central and East Albury, and anyone staying ten years or more where the shutters will outlast two sets of blinds.

Indicative 2026 figures for a 13-window house. Fewer or smaller windows pull every tier down; a home with a lot of glass or two storeys pushes them up. The measure and the written quote are free either way.

Where you can safely take money out

These savings cost you nothing you will miss. We suggest most of them ourselves at the measure, because a customer who feels squeezed never comes back for the second stage.

Stay on the standard fabric range. Saves $30 to $80 per window. The standard books from the major Australian mills carry the same coated fibreglass sunscreens and foam-backed blockouts as the designer ranges. What you pay extra for in a designer book is colour and texture, not performance.
Keep the componentry white. Colour-matched brackets, bottom rails and chains add $15 to $40 per window. Behind a pelmet or above a window you look out of, nobody sees them.
Motorise only what you cannot reach. Motors add $150 to $350 per blind. On a 13-window house, motorising the two you actually need saves around $1,500 against motorising the lot, and you lose nothing except a party trick.
Single roller where day privacy does not matter. A double roller adds $90 to $160 per window. A back bedroom facing your own yard in Springdale Heights does not need one. A front living room on a Lavington street does.
Do the prep yourself. Take the old blinds down, clear the sills, move the furniture back from the windows and have someone home for the whole install window. It saves handling time and it saves the second trip when the crew cannot get to a window.
Order everything in one measure, install in one visit. Each additional installation visit costs roughly $80 to $150 in travel and set-up. If you can only afford part of the house, order the part you can afford now and take the extra visit knowingly.
Order in the quiet months. February to July is quieter across Albury and Wodonga than the August to December run into Christmas. You will not get a secret discount, but lead times are shorter, install dates are easier and supplier promotions on standard ranges land more often. Our page on the best time to order blinds in Albury goes into the yearly rhythm.
Use a stock size where it genuinely fits. A square, modern garage or laundry window in a new Thurgoona build is often within a few millimetres of a stock width. Made-to-measure earns its money on out-of-square reveals, not on a perfect 900mm opening.

Want the tiers priced against your actual windows?

We will quote the same house at two levels so you can see the real gap before you decide. Free measure, written quote in 2 business days.

Get two quotes side by side See the price list

Where saving money means paying for the window twice

Every one of these is a job we have been called back to fix, usually within five years of someone else installing it. The maths is not close.

Cheap blockout fabric in a west-facing bedroom. Screen-printed polyester saves $40 to $60 per window and lasts 3 to 6 summers here before the edges curl and the pinholes appear. Replacing it costs about $200 including the second install visit. The coated fabric lasts 8 to 12 years.
MDF composite shutters in a bathroom or laundry. Saves roughly $70 to $120 per square metre against PVC. Albury bathrooms go from steam to near-freezing overnight in winter, the cut edges of an MDF panel drink that moisture, and the louvres bind within a couple of years. Moisture damage is excluded from almost every shutter warranty, so you wear the whole replacement.
Corded blinds without the compliant safety devices. Saves a few dollars per blind and breaks a mandatory safety standard. In a home with young children it is the one shortcut with a consequence that is not financial. Our page on blind cord safety covers what has to be fitted and how.
Trimming a stock blind to fit a heritage reveal. Older Central and East Albury houses are routinely 10mm to 25mm out of square from top to bottom. A trimmed stock blind fits the widest point and leaves a light gap at the narrow one, and there is no fixing it afterwards.
One giant roller across a 3.6m sliding door. Saves maybe $60 against two linked blinds. The tube deflects, the fabric tracks off to one side, and it is too heavy to lift daily. Within two years someone stops using it.
Doing the main bedroom last. Not a product saving, a sequencing mistake. The room where blockout pays back first is the one you sleep in through a run of 38°C nights. Do it in stage one even if the living room has to wait.

What a suspiciously low quote is usually leaving out

A quote that is 40% under everyone else is almost never a better business. It is a different scope. These are the nine things we see missing, in rough order of how often.

Installation. The price is supply only. Fitting 13 blinds is half a day of labour.
GST. A domestic quote should be GST inclusive. A price quoted plus GST is a 10% surprise at invoice time.
The headline window. The from price is calculated on the smallest window in the house, then every other window is extra.
Child-safety devices. Cord tension devices, cleats and warning labels for corded blinds.
Removal and disposal of your existing blinds. Usually $10 to $35 per window if you are not doing it yourself.
Face-fit brackets and packers. Fitting to render, weatherboard or a tiled splashback return takes different hardware than a plain plaster reveal.
Second-storey and stairwell access. Ladder or platform work on a void window is a different labour rate.
The sliding door counted as one blind. When it comes back as two, the price moves.
A fabric substitution clause. Words like or similar mean the fabric you chose is not what is on order. Get the exact fabric name and colour code on the quote.

Ask for the quote itemised per window with the fabric name, the control type, the mount type and GST included. Once both quotes read that way, the gap between them usually collapses to a few hundred dollars, and then you are comparing businesses rather than guessing.

Rebates, rules and tax that change the maths in NSW and Victoria

There is no rebate for domestic blinds, curtains or shutters in either state in 2026. The NSW Energy Savings Scheme and the Victorian Energy Upgrades program both pay incentives against a defined product list, and those lists are built around lighting, hot water, heating, cooling, appliances and building sealing rather than window furnishings. Check the current list yourself before you believe a discount that is described as government funded. If a seller cannot name the scheme and the product code, the discount is just a discount.

What can genuinely change your maths is finance rather than a rebate. Several Australian lenders offer discounted household energy upgrade loans supported by Commonwealth funding, and homeowners doing a wider efficiency package such as insulation, a heat pump or double glazing sometimes fold window coverings into that scope. Ask your lender what the loan covers before you assume blinds qualify on their own.

Victorian rentals are a different question entirely. If your property is in Wodonga, Baranduda or anywhere else across the Murray, the Victorian rental minimum standards require window coverings that provide privacy in rooms likely to be used as a bedroom or a main living area. That is not a budget decision, it is a compliance one. New South Wales has no equivalent blanket requirement, but the mandatory ACCC safety standard for corded internal window coverings applies to every corded blind on both sides of the border. Our rental property page sets out what a landlord actually has to do.

For investors, the deduction is depreciation, not an expense. Blinds, curtains and shutters in a rental are depreciating assets your accountant claims over their effective life rather than writing off in the year you buy them. Since the 2017 changes to second-hand plant and equipment, an investor who buys an established rental generally cannot depreciate the previous owner's blinds, but items you buy and install new can be claimed. Keep the tax invoice with the ABN and the install date, because that is the document your accountant needs.

No council permit is needed for internal blinds in AlburyCity or the City of Wodonga. Internal window furnishings are not a building or planning matter, even on a heritage-listed house, because nothing changes on the outside of the building. If the window itself is being replaced, that is a different conversation with your builder.

What we would actually do with $3,000 in an Albury house

Here is the staged plan we give people who tell us the number up front. It gets the comfort first and the finish later, and every stage stands on its own if the next one never happens.

Stage one, about $1,450. Acrylic foam-backed blockout rollers in all four bedrooms, plus the main bedroom done properly with a face fit and a wide overlap so the light stops at the architrave rather than at the glass. This is the stage that fixes summer sleep.
Stage two, about $1,150. A 5% sunscreen double roller across the main living window and a single sunscreen on the dining and kitchen windows. Glare and heat under control, the view to the yard intact.
Stage three, about $400 or deferred. The bathroom and laundry. A basic blockout roller now for $140 to $220, or hold out and put PVC shutters in later when there is $900 for the pair, because that is the finish that lasts twenty years.
Deliberately not done: the hallway, the south-facing spare room and the garage. They can wait indefinitely with no comfort penalty, and nobody who visits will notice.

That is a real $3,000 plan that leaves the house working. Compare it with spending the same $3,000 on the cheapest possible product across all 13 windows: you would cover every opening, and in five years you would be replacing the four that face west.

When the cheap answer is the right answer, and when to do nothing

We would rather tell you not to spend the money than sell you something that does not earn it. If you are selling within twelve months, do not fit out the whole house: presentable blinds on the street-facing rooms and the main bedroom are what a buyer notices, and our page on window furnishings before selling explains where the return actually is. If the room is being renovated inside three years, buy the cheap product on purpose and expect to bin it. If the windows themselves are being replaced, wait: new frames change every measurement and you would be paying twice for the same opening.

And if what you have is a set of good blinds with a broken chain, a failed spring or a bent bottom rail, do not replace them. A repair is usually $80 to $220 against $200 or more for a new blind, and our blind repairs page covers what is worth fixing and what is not. We would rather do the small job now and the whole house when you are ready.

Budget questions we get asked

What is the cheapest sensible way to do a whole house of blinds in Albury?

Made-to-measure blockout rollers on the standard fabric range, chain control, no motors and no double rollers. For a 13-window Albury house that lands at roughly $1,900 to $3,200 supplied and installed. Going cheaper than that means stock sizes trimmed on site, and on an out-of-square reveal that costs you the light seal you were paying for.

Is it cheaper to do the house in stages?

Staging is cheaper on the day but slightly dearer overall, because each extra installation visit costs roughly $80 to $150 in travel and set-up. The measure is free every time. If cash flow is the constraint, stage it: bedrooms and street-facing rooms first, south-facing rooms and spare rooms last.

Are there any rebates for blinds in NSW or Victoria in 2026?

No. There is no NSW or Victorian rebate for domestic blinds, curtains or shutters. The NSW Energy Savings Scheme and the Victorian Energy Upgrades program pay incentives against defined product lists built around appliances, lighting, hot water, heating, cooling and building sealing, not window furnishings. If a seller claims a government rebate on blinds, ask them to show you the scheme and the product code.

Why is one quote $1,800 and another $4,000 for the same house?

Usually four things: supply-only versus supply and install, a headline price quoted on the smallest window, single rollers where the other quote allowed double rollers at $90 to $160 more per window, and GST added at the end. Ask both quotes to be itemised per window with the fabric name, the control type and GST included, and the gap usually shrinks to a few hundred dollars.

Do I legally have to put blinds in a Wodonga rental?

In Victoria the rental minimum standards require window coverings that provide privacy in rooms likely to be used as a bedroom or a main living area, so for a Wodonga rental it is not optional. New South Wales has no equivalent blanket requirement, but every corded blind in either state must meet the mandatory ACCC safety standard for corded internal window coverings.

Where should I never try to save money on blinds in Albury?

The bedroom blockout fabric and the wet-area shutter material. A cheap screen-printed blockout on a west-facing bedroom window curls in 3 to 6 summers, so a $50 saving costs about $200 in year five. MDF shutters in an Albury bathroom swell and bind within a couple of years, and moisture damage is excluded from almost every shutter warranty.

Keep reading

Get a price

Tell us your budget and we will build the plan around it

Give us a number and the rooms that matter most, and we will send a staged written quote within 2 business days that fits it.

Get a staged quote that fits the budget you actually have

Free in-home measure across Albury, Lavington, Thurgoona and Wodonga. Written quote within 2 business days.

Get a written quote See service areas