The obvious difference is that one has stairs and one doesn’t, but that’s really only the surface of it. Building up changes your engineering, your roofline, your footings, and how trades move through the build. A single storey home spreads its footprint across the block, which means more roof, more slab, and more site works up front. A double storey home stacks living space vertically, which adds structural cost but frees up your backyard. Neither is “better” in the abstract; it genuinely depends on what you’re starting with.
Before you fall in love with a facade or a floor plan online, measure your block. As a rough guide, single storey homes generally need a block width of around 15 to 18 metres to fit a comfortable four-bedroom layout with decent living zones and a usable backyard.
This is where the national picture matters. The Housing Industry Association has pointed to shrinking lot sizes as one of the key drivers pushing families toward two-storey construction, simply because there’s less width to work with than there used to be. The UDIA’s 2026 State of the Land report put the combined capital city median lot size at 416 square metres in 2025, and lots of 10 to 12.5 metres wide are now standard through newer growth corridors around Melbourne.
In our experience building across Melbourne’s northern growth corridor, this is the most common surprise for buyers. Families often arrive with a floor plan saved on their phone, then discover their 12.5 metre lot can’t fit it without losing the backyard entirely. It’s worth checking what a single storey layout can actually achieve on your block before ruling it out, because narrow-lot designs often fit better than people expect once the plan is reworked around a courtyard or side-loaded garage.
Cost is usually the deciding factor once the block size question is settled. Current industry figures put single storey builds at roughly $1,800 to $2,800 per square metre, with double storey running around $2,100 to $3,500, a premium of roughly 15 to 25 percent for going up. That gap comes down to staircases, additional structural steel, scaffolding, and the extra trades needed to work safely at height. On a typical four-bedroom home, it can add well over $100,000 to the build price.
The trade-off is land, and here the numbers are striking. HIA Chief Economist Tim Reardon has noted that over the past 25 years, residential land prices have risen more than three times faster than construction costs, climbing over 500 percent since 2000 while construction costs and skilled labour rose by around 150 percent. Put simply, land has become the expensive part. If a wider block costs more than the double storey premium in your area, going up can work out cheaper overall once you weigh land plus build together.
We run this exact comparison with clients before design starts, and the answer genuinely swings both ways depending on the estate and lot pricing at the time.
This is where personal preference matters as much as the numbers. Single storey homes make everyday life simple. There’s no carrying a laundry basket up and down stairs, no worrying about toddlers on a staircase, and it’s genuinely easier to keep an eye on kids playing outside while you’re in the kitchen. Double storey homes, on the other hand, give growing families proper separation, parents downstairs, teenagers upstairs, and everyone gets a bit more breathing room from each other.
A pattern we see often: families with young children lean single storey, while families with teenagers lean double storey. If your household values togetherness on one level, single storey wins. If you need distance between bedrooms and living areas, double storey usually does the job better.
Double storey homes tend to offer better views from upper-floor bedrooms, stronger street presence, and more separation from neighbouring properties overlooking your yard. Single storey homes, by comparison, generally deliver a stronger connection between indoor living spaces and the backyard, since everything sits at ground level and opens straight out. If that kind of indoor-outdoor flow matters more to your family than extra floor space, it’s worth browsing through a single storey home designs range to see how those layouts handle light, flow, and outdoor connection in practice.
Long-term maintenance tends to favour single storey homes, mainly because there’s no staircase to worry about as you get older, and general repairs like gutters, external painting and window cleaning are usually more accessible without scaffolding or extension ladders. Double storey homes can be trickier and pricier to maintain externally, though they do give you more usable floor space per square metre of land, which matters if you’re on a tighter block and don’t want to compromise on room count.
Worth thinking about honestly: a fair number of clients come to us specifically because stairs have become a problem in their current home. Building single storey the first time avoids that conversation entirely.
As a quick gut check, single storey is probably your fit if you’ve got a wider block, want easy day-to-day living, or are thinking long-term about ageing in place. Double storey probably suits you better if your block is narrow, your family needs separated zones, or you want more floor space without buying more land. There’s no universally “right” answer here, only the right answer for your block, budget, and the way your family actually lives.
Working this out on paper is a good start, but the real answer comes from looking at your actual block, your budget, and your family’s day-to-day habits together. If you’d like a straight answer on which option makes sense for your situation, get in touch with our team and we’ll walk through your block and your options properly, no guesswork required.
