How much does it cost to post a job on Seek?

Seek does not publish a flat price. Each ad is priced by job title, location and market demand, and regional listings commonly run to several hundred dollars for 30 days, with premium tiers and add-ons above that. Check Seek's own price lookup with your specific role and postcode before budgeting.

Is Gumtree free for job ads?

Gumtree jobs listings are low cost, with paid options to feature or bump ads. The trade-off is audience quality: it reaches locals in your region but carries no filtering, and farm job seekers are not concentrated there.

What do labour hire companies charge?

Labour hire firms typically charge a margin of around 15 to 30 percent on wages. On a casual horticulture worker at the 2026-27 award minimum of $32.18 an hour, that is roughly $5 to $10 per worker per hour on top of the wage, in exchange for recruitment, payroll, compliance and replacements being handled for you.

Are Facebook job posts free?

Posting in regional farm work Facebook groups is free. The cost is your time: sorting unfiltered replies, and overcoming the suspicion created by the scam job posts that fill those groups. Real farms need to show a farm name, location and phone number to stand out from the fakes.

What It Costs to Advertise a Farm Job in Australia (2026)

September 11, 2026/FWA Staff

Pricing a job ad shouldn’t take six open tabs and a phone call. Here’s every option side by side, with the catch for each one. Numbers checked September 2026; where a platform prices case by case, we say so instead of inventing a figure.

The short answer

Channel	Price	What you get	The catch
Seek	Priced per ad, commonly several hundred dollars regional	Huge reach, 30 days	Mostly city audience, wrong crowd for picking work
Labour hire	15 to 30% margin on every hour worked	Full service: recruitment, payroll, compliance	The margin never stops while the crew works
Gumtree	Low cost, paid bumps extra	Local reach	No filtering, thin farm audience
Facebook groups	Free	Fast replies in season	Scam posts everywhere, you do all the sorting
Workforce Australia / Harvest Trail	Free	Government referrals	Slow, never enough on its own
Farm Work Australia	$79 flat, 30 days	~9,000 farm work seekers a month, relist free if no applicants	Farm and regional roles only

Seek and the big boards

Seek prices each ad by role, location and demand, so there’s no number to quote here honestly. For regional agricultural roles the base tier commonly lands in the several-hundred-dollar range for a 30-day ad, and Advanced and Premium tiers with branding and priority placement cost more again. Run your actual role and postcode through their price checker before you budget.

What you’re buying is reach, the biggest jobs audience in the country. What you’re not buying is relevance: the overwhelming share of that audience is metropolitan and professional. For a farm manager or an ag mechanic, that reach can be worth it. For eight weeks of picking, you’re paying city prices to advertise past the people you need.

Labour hire: the cost that compounds

Labour hire has no ad cost at all, which is exactly how it looks cheap until you do the arithmetic. The firm’s margin, typically around 15 to 30 percent on wages, runs on every hour every worker works.

Take a crew of six casuals at the horticulture award minimum of $32.18 an hour, 38-hour weeks, for an eight-week season. That’s about $58,700 in wages, and at a 20 percent margin the labour hire premium on top is roughly $11,700 for the season. It buys real things: recruitment, payroll, super, insurance, compliance and same-day replacements. Whether it’s worth it depends on how much of that you’re happy doing yourself, because doing it yourself and paying $79 for the ad is the same crew for about $11,600 less.

If you do go labour hire, use a licensed provider. Most states run labour hire licensing schemes and the penalties for using unlicensed firms apply to the farm too.

The free options, and what they cost you

Facebook groups cost nothing and work fast in season. They also cost you credibility tax and sorting time. The groups are saturated with fake job posts fishing for personal details, so real farms have to prove themselves: farm name, real town, phone number. And every reply lands in your inbox unfiltered, including the ones from the other side of the world.

Gumtree is low cost with paid extras to bump or feature. It reaches locals, which is genuinely useful for year-round farm hand roles, but there’s no farm work audience concentrated there and no filtering.

Workforce Australia and the Harvest Trail are free, government run, and worth listing on precisely because they’re free. Referrals come through providers and take time. Treat it as a background channel that occasionally delivers, not a plan.

Where we fit

Farm Work Australia is $79 flat for a 30-day listing. No tiers, no add-ons, no margin on wages. The board carries only farm and regional work, and the roughly 9,000 people browsing it each month are backpackers doing their 88 days, locals after seasonal work, and grey nomads following the harvest. That’s the whole audience, so a listing doesn’t fight city noise.

If you get no applicants in 30 days, we relist the job free. That’s the guarantee, and it exists because a board only works when farmers get workers from it.

Cheaper still: make the ad itself better

Where you post a farm ad matters less than what the ad says. Across our board, ads that show the pay rate, name the actual town and give a start date get clicked; ads that say “competitive rates” in a vague region don’t, on any platform, at any price. How to write a farm job ad that gets applicants has the template.

For the full channel-by-channel rundown beyond costs, see how to find farm workers in Australia.

Ready to price it against everything above? Post your job: $79, ten minutes, live for 30 days.