Tile Repair near you

Tap a suspect tile lightly and listen. A tile bonded properly to its bed gives a solid, dead click; one that has debonded sounds hollow, which tilers call drummy. Then look at where the damage sits and what shape it takes, because the pattern usually says more than the broken tile does.

Tile and grout are rigid and barely move, so they crack wherever whatever is beneath them moves more than they can tolerate. On a timber-framed floor the usual cause is deflection: joists or sheet flooring that flex slightly as someone walks past, which a carpet or a vinyl floor would have hidden completely. Joists notched for old plumbing, a heavy bath or an appliance concentrated in one spot, and sheeting that was never fastened properly all add to it. Stiffening a floor from below is carpentry and occasionally structural work, and it belongs before the new tile rather than after.

On a slab, a shrinkage or settlement crack tends to telegraph straight up through the tiles above it, opening and closing slightly with the seasons. Tiling run hard up against walls, columns and cabinets without flexible joints at the perimeter, or across a large area without movement joints within the field, builds up stress every time the house heats, cools, dries out and takes up humidity again — until something has to give. Workmanship contributes too: too little adhesive under the tile, adhesive that had skinned over before the tile was placed, or an adhesive that was never suited to a dense, large-format tile.

A repair is only as convincing as the match, and tile is genuinely hard to match after the fact. The same product varies in shade and in size between production runs, which is why cartons carry a shade or batch code, and a tile bought a few years later from the same range can still sit visibly apart from its neighbours.

The grout around the damaged tile is cut out first, with a grout saw or an oscillating tool, so that breaking the tile does not transfer load into the tiles beside it. The tile is then scored or drilled and broken out from the centre towards its own edges, and the old adhesive bed is scraped or ground back until the replacement will sit flush with the surface around it. Over an in-slab heating system or embedded services, that grinding has to be done slowly and carefully, because a chisel or a grinder will find a cable long before the tiler does.

The new tile is back-buttered, bedded in an adhesive suited to that tile and substrate, pressed level with its neighbours and left to cure for the time the manufacturer states before anything is grouted. Fresh grout almost never matches weathered grout exactly, so some tilers deliberately regrout a wider area to keep the floor looking even. Where the tile meets a wall, a bath, a shower base or a cabinet, that junction takes a flexible sealant rather than grout, because it is a joint between two things that move independently.

One question is worth asking before the work starts: what happens if the tile beside the broken one cracks during the removal. On an old floor with no spares it is a real possibility, and it is better priced as a contingency than argued about afterwards.

Replacing a tile means cutting and grinding tile, adhesive bed, screed and sometimes the concrete beneath, and all of those are silica-bearing. SafeWork NSW describes crystalline silica as a natural mineral found in many products such as sand, concrete and granite, and also found in manmade products like engineered stone, and warns that microscopic silica dust particles can settle deep in the lungs, causing serious illness and death. It also notes that crystalline silica laws changed in 2024, so a tiler working to older habits is working to superseded rules.

The controls regulators expect are specific and easy to recognise on site. SafeWork NSW names a fully enclosed operator cabin fitted with high-efficiency air filtration, wet dust suppression, an on-tool dust extraction system and local exhaust ventilation among the control examples, alongside personal protective equipment, and singles out using water to control dust while cutting materials such as brick or concrete, describing on-tool dust capture as an effective way to eliminate and reduce exposure to silica dust. Where respirators are relied on they must be fit tested when a worker starts and every 12 months after that, and the workplace exposure standard for respirable crystalline silica is 0.05 milligrams per cubic metre averaged over eight hours.

The engineered stone prohibition is the backdrop rather than the rule for your floor. In New South Wales the manufacture, supply and installation of engineered stone benchtops, slabs and panels containing at least 1 per cent silica is banned — which concerns benchtops, not floor tiles, but tells you exactly how seriously the same dust is now treated when it comes off a grinder in your hallway. Asking a tiler how they will control the dust is a fair question, and a tiler with a ready answer about cutting wet, cutting outside, extraction on the grinder and a vacuum rather than a broom is the one to book.

A cracked tile on a hallway floor is mostly an appearance problem. The same tile in a shower or around a bath is an opening. The tile and the grout were never the waterproof layer — the membrane behind and beneath them is — and a crack or a tile that moves lets water reach that membrane and its detailing every time the shower runs. A tile that flexes under thumb pressure often means the substrate behind it is already wet or soft.

The scale of what is at stake is set by the building rules. The housing provisions require building elements in a wet area to comply with AS 3740, the shower floor to be waterproof including any hob or step-down, and the shower walls to be waterproof not less than 1800 millimetres above the floor substrate, with the floor of the room outside the shower water resistant where it is concrete or fibre-cement and waterproof where it is timber, and walls adjoining a bath or a basin water resistant to a height of not less than 150 millimetres above the vessel.

So the repair has to answer a bigger question than the tile does. If water has reached framing, a skirting outside the bathroom or a ceiling below, the membrane or its detailing at a corner, a penetration or the step-down is the likely failure, and fixing it properly means removing tiles rather than replacing one. Until it is repaired, using another shower and drying the walls down after each use limits the damage. A repairer who presses tiles, takes moisture readings or lifts one tile to look at the substrate before quoting is doing the job correctly.

New South Wales licenses wall and floor tiling as a trade. The work is described as attaching tiles to the internal or external surfaces of buildings for functional or decorative reasons, and it takes in tiles made from cork, linoleum, rubber or thermoplastics, mosaics, waterproofing wet areas to get them ready for tiling, and preparing and doing minor repairs — but not renewing or replacing — and inserting expansion joints to surfaces before tiling. A contractor licence is needed for building or trade work valued above a set figure in labour and materials including GST, so a single cracked tile may sit below that line while a re-tiled bathroom certainly does not.

Queensland splits the work into two QBCC classes, and the distinction matters on a repair that turns into a rebuild. The wall and floor tiling class covers cutting and fixing tile — ceramic, glass, marble, slate, stone and terracotta — to fireplaces, floors, hearths, spas, swimming pools and walls, constructing terrazzo floors, steps, risers and stringers, and applying waterproofing for wall and floor tiling. The separate waterproofing class covers applying, installing and repairing waterproofing including surface preparation, and applying or installing material or systems for preventing moisture penetration.

The point for a homeowner is that a shower repair often crosses from one into the other. Once the membrane is involved, ask which licence covers that part of the work and check the number on the regulator's public register. In an older house the repair can also cross into asbestos territory, since the national product register records asbestos in vinyl flooring and tiles produced prior to the 1980s and in the black paint-on adhesives beneath them, and SafeWork NSW warns that any home built before the late 1980s may contain asbestos.

The consumer guarantees under Australian Consumer Law cover a tile repair as fully as they cover a new bathroom: the service must be carried out with an acceptable level of care and skill, it must be fit for any purpose you made known, and it must be supplied within a reasonable time where none was agreed. Those rights stand regardless of what any contract says, and the ACCC states that they cannot be taken away by anything a business says or does. Put the specifics in writing all the same — whether a matching tile has been found or one is being salvaged, what happens if a neighbouring tile breaks during removal, whether the cause is being investigated or only the symptom replaced, how the dust will be controlled, and who is responsible if the substrate turns out to need repair.

LokalMatch is where that search begins. You set out the job once — which room, how many tiles, whether it is a wet area, whether you have spare tiles, the age of the house and your postcode — and tilers working in your area contact you directly. Those businesses pay LokalMatch for the requests they take on, and describing a job is free for homeowners. LokalMatch does not carry out tiling or waterproofing, does not quote or set prices, and does not vet, rank or recommend any of the businesses that respond, so verifying the licence and the insurance is still your step.