How much does an app redesign or UX design cost in Australia? (2026)

Refresh, redesign or rebuild?

A visual refresh changes how an app looks, a UX redesign changes how it works, and a rebuild replaces the code underneath. Each has a different budget, and quotes are often hard to compare because the buyer asked for one and the agency priced another.

We found no published Australian rate card for UX design, so the figures on this page are worked estimates: typical effort multiplied by an assumed agency day rate of $1,100 to $1,500 ex GST. That assumption is set from Re:Sourced’s 2026 figures for senior software contractors in Sydney ($800 to $1,100 a day) plus the management, testing and continuity an agency day carries. Re:Sourced doesn’t publish design rates, and senior designers can price differently, so treat it as a yardstick for comparing quotes.

	Visual refresh	UX redesign	Redesign with rebuild
What changes	Colours, type, icons, spacing, components	Flows, navigation, information structure, key screens	Everything, including the platform
When it fits	The app works but looks dated or off brand	Users get stuck, drop out or call support	The code can’t support the new design or the business
Design effort	8 to 18 days: $8,800 to $27,000	25 to 50 days: $27,500 to $75,000	Part of a new app budget
Build effort	10 to 30 days: $11,000 to $45,000	30 to 80 days: $33,000 to $120,000	See the app cost guide

For a rebuild, Wave Digital’s 2026 guide puts Australian app builds at around $50K to $250K+, and our app development cost guide covers that budget in detail. Whether to rebuild at all is a separate decision; our guide to rewriting or refactoring helps with it.

What does a UX audit cost, and what should it produce?

A UX audit of an existing app is typically 3 to 8 days of work, or about $3,300 to $12,000 at the assumed rate, and it should end with a ranked list of problems, not a redesign. It is the cheapest way to stop a team redesigning the parts that were fine.

A useful audit report contains:

1. The three to five tasks that matter most to users and the business, and how well the app supports each.
2. Evidence: analytics drop off points, support tickets, app store reviews and a few recorded user sessions.
3. A heuristic review against usability principles and an accessibility check against WCAG 2.2.
4. Each problem rated by impact and by rough effort to fix.
5. A recommendation: refresh, targeted fixes, redesign of named flows, or rebuild.

If an audit ends with “redesign everything”, ask which findings support that.

What does UX design include, and how does fidelity change the cost?

UX design covers understanding users, structuring the app, designing the screens and testing them; prototype fidelity is the biggest lever on cost. Higher fidelity costs more but answers more questions before code is written.

Fidelity	What you get	Typical effort	Worked estimate (AUD, ex GST)
Low: wireframes	Grey box layouts of key flows, clickable or static	3 to 6 days	$3,300 to $9,000
Medium: clickable prototype	Realistic Figma screens for an MVP’s main flows, linked so people can tap through	8 to 18 days	$8,800 to $27,000
High: tested prototype with design system	Research, two rounds of usability testing, full screens, reusable components	25 to 55 days	$27,500 to $82,500
Enterprise product discovery	Several user groups, workshops, service mapping, testing	70 to 140 days	$77,000 to $210,000

Design work at the top of the table overlaps with scoping. If you are still deciding what to build, our guide to the software discovery phase covers that step; this page stays on what the design itself costs.

User research and usability testing costs

A round of usability testing with five participants costs roughly $3,800 to $6,500 in this worked estimate, and two rounds usually catch the problems that matter. The assumptions: $100 incentive per participant (check current rates with your recruitment channel), plus 3 to 4 days of a researcher’s time to plan the tasks, run sessions and write up findings.

Costs go up when participants are hard to reach, such as clinicians, tradespeople on site or senior executives, and when sessions must be in person. They go down with remote, unmoderated tests for simple flows. Recruiting from your own customer base is often cheapest, as long as you also test with people who haven’t used the app before.

The engineering cost of shipping a redesign into an old codebase

Implementing new designs in an existing app often costs more than designing them, and the state of the codebase decides how much more. A redesign is cheap to build when the app already has a shared component library, consistent styles and automated tests. It is expensive when every screen has its own hard coded styles.

What pushes engineering cost up:

• No shared component library, so every button and form field is rebuilt screen by screen.
• Two frameworks in one app, such as old native screens alongside newer cross platform ones.
• Little automated test coverage, so every change needs manual regression testing.
• Business logic mixed into screen code, so moving a field means touching logic.
• A need to release gradually behind feature flags to avoid disrupting existing users.

Plan time for the release itself too: new store screenshots and listing text, staff training, help articles and support scripts. A short code audit before the redesign can tell you which of these applies.

Accessibility as part of a redesign

A redesign is the cheapest moment to fix accessibility, because the components are being rebuilt anyway. WCAG 2.2 is a W3C Recommendation and the current version of the guidelines. Building it into the new design system (colour contrast, focus states, touch target sizes, labels for screen readers) costs a little more design time and far less than retrofitting later. Our guide to app accessibility in Australia covers the legal side and testing in depth.

How a tested prototype changes the build quote

A tested prototype makes the build quote narrower and the build less likely to change halfway through. Developers estimate from screens that real users have already worked through, so fewer assumptions sit in the quote. It doesn’t make features free: if the prototype shows twelve screens, the build still includes twelve screens.

A prototype also helps outside the build. Founders use one to show investors what the product will do, and some grant and funding applications ask for evidence of user research or a proof of concept. Check each program’s own criteria; our guide to government grants for software development lists the main Australian programs, and our startup MVP page covers early stage builds.

Three year cost of a UX redesign

Over three years, upkeep of the design system and ongoing testing add a meaningful share to the redesign itself. A worked example with stated assumptions, for a UX redesign of an existing app’s core flows:

Cost line	Assumption	Three year total (AUD, ex GST)
Design	25 to 50 days	$27,500 to $75,000
Build	30 to 80 days	$33,000 to $120,000
Usability testing after launch	Two rounds a year in years 2 and 3	$15,200 to $26,000
Design system upkeep	1 day a month for 24 months	$26,400 to $36,000
Figma	2 Full and 4 Dev seats on Professional at US$16 and US$12 a month, about AU$4,200 at the RBA’s 6 November 2026 rate	about $4,200
Total		about $106,000 to $261,000

At the time of writing, Figma lists Full seats at US$16 a month on Professional, US$55 on Organization and US$90 on Enterprise, with Dev seats at US$12, US$25 and US$35; Organization and Enterprise are billed annually.

How to avoid redesigning the wrong thing

Fix what the evidence says is broken, and leave what works alone. Before approving a redesign:

• Name the tasks you want users to complete faster or more often, and measure them now.
• Read the last three months of support tickets and app store reviews.
• Watch five people use the current app.
• Decide what success looks like after launch, and how you’ll measure it.

How AWLabs approaches redesigns and UX design

We start with evidence: analytics, support data and watching people use the app. Then we recommend the smallest change that solves the problem, whether that is targeted fixes, a redesign of named flows or a rebuild. For software we build, design is priced inside the same fixed price as development, so there is one number for the product. Senior engineers lead every build.

It starts with a Development Consult, a 15 minute call. A paid Discovery Audit then reviews the current app and its codebase, and you receive a fixed price Schedule of Work with three options: The Minimum, The Recommended and The Complete. Our UI and UX design service has more.