How much does wallpaper cost in Australia?

A roll of designer wallpaper in Australia costs about $320. Most of the range sits between $244 and $520, the entry point is $106, and the widest and most elaborately printed papers pass $1,000. Wallpaper sold by the square metre runs $81 to $265, most commonly $127. These figures come from Wallpaper Trader's own range of 405 designs across eleven houses.

Why is wallpaper so expensive in Australia?

Ninety-two per cent of the designer wallpaper sold in Australia by Wallpaper Trader is made in Europe: 42 per cent in Sweden, 30 per cent in France, 19 per cent in Britain. Each roll carries international freight, import duty and GST, and Australian orders are counted in dozens where European ones are counted in pallets, so the volume that makes European domestic pricing possible does not exist here.

How should I compare wallpaper prices?

Compare by the square metre rather than by the roll, because roll sizes are not standard. A standard European roll is 10.05 metres by 53 centimetres, about 5.3 square metres. Divide the price by the coverage figure to compare like for like.

Can I get all my wallpaper rolls from the same dye lot?

Usually yes. European mills record a dye lot for each print batch, and two rolls from different lots can differ visibly on a wall. Wallpaper Trader holds the batch information for its stock and will confirm the batch before shipping if you ask when you order.

How much does a wallpaper sample cost?

Every design is available as an A4 sample for $10 plus $5 postage within Australia.

The Australian Wallpaper Report 2026

Q: Is it cheaper to order wallpaper from the UK?

Usually not. British sites can show lower roll prices, but shipping a single order to Australia runs to about $130, with duty and GST charged on arrival. If a roll is damaged in transit or you need one more from the same dye lot, you are typically eight weeks and another shipping charge away from finishing the wall.

Published by Wallpaper Trader, Australia's annual study of what the nation is putting on its walls.

After ten years of helping customers and designers find and choose their perfect wallpaper, I’ve seen a lot of it. Year after year I’ve been struck by how much choice has grown, and even more by the growing artfulness of it, more artists and craftspeople being brought in to create genuinely stunning wallpaper and murals.

All these years in, I still love the immediate effect wallpaper can have on a space, and how much delight, whimsy and beauty a single change like this can bring into someone’s home.

This is the first Australian Wallpaper Report we’ve put together, and I hope it becomes a yearly habit. It’s my chance to put some real data behind what I already believed from watching our own customers: that Australians are far more adventurous with pattern than the industry gives them credit for. This year it’s been art deco and heritage prints finding homes we didn’t expect; next year it’ll be something else, and I’d rather track it properly than just notice it in hindsight.

I’m proud to keep playing a small part in bringing more art, craft and beauty into people’s homes.

, Mary Nguyen, Founder, Wallpaper Trader

Walk into an Australian home built before 1960 and the picture rails are still there, waiting for something more interesting than paint. This year, a lot of owners finally obliged. Searches for “art deco wallpaper” grew more than 5,000% here in the past twelve months (Google Trends calls anything past 5,000% from a low base a Breakout; we won't define it again after this). It's the single biggest number in twelve months of Australian wallpaper search data, social platform analysis and community research, and it's the thread running through everything below: after a decade of grey paint and bare plasterboard, Australians want their walls to do something.

What Australians are searching for

The clearest pattern in the data is local intent. “Australia” is the dominant word shoppers attach to wallpaper queries. It's the first or second autocomplete suggestion for peel-and-stick, removable, floral, nursery, bathroom, vintage and grasscloth wallpaper alike, alongside “buy wallpaper online australia” and “wallpaper samples australia free”. People want to know their wallpaper is stocked here, ships from here, and can be sampled on their own wall before they commit to it.

The second pattern is that Australians shop by room and by colour, not just by style. “Peel and stick wallpaper for bathroom” jumped 350% in a year, coming with “waterproof” attached almost every time. Colour-led searches, white, green, blue, black and pink wallpaper, all rank among the country's top related queries, and “wallpaper near me” doubled: people want to see paper in person again, not just on a screen.

Then there's the term Australia made its own: the feature wall, out-searching “peel and stick wallpaper” roughly four to one here, an idiom with no equivalent overseas weighting. The joke of 2026 is that it's peaking as a search term at the exact moment the thing it describes starts to look dated (more on that below).

One more signal worth sitting with: “how to remove wallpaper glue” and “how to get wallpaper off walls” both hit Breakout growth this year too. Australians aren't just buying wallpaper. They're stripping the old stuff off first. “The way to strip wallpaper easily involves a lot of water, so turn off the electrics and use those beach towels to soak up as much as possible,” says Perth installer Matthew Williams of MWD Interiors, who's been decorating interiors since 1994. A redecoration cycle is properly underway, and it starts with a scraper.

The rising styles

The mural, bought by the wall

“Wall mural” now runs at roughly 83% of the search volume of peel-and-stick wallpaper in Australia, and spiked to five times its normal level in February. On Instagram, #wallmural carries 595,000 posts, mostly before-and-afters: kids' bedroom transformations, chinoiserie-style botanical panels, oversized blooms. Picture something closer to Alice's Garden's full-height florals than a repeat pattern peeking out from behind the sofa: a scene, not a swatch, printed to fit one specific wall. The palette leans eucalyptus grey, ochre and dusty olive; the mood sits somewhere between a gallery and a garden.

The mural is 2026's feature wall. It's bought by the wall, not by the roll.

Heritage pattern, and the Neo Deco breakout

“Morris and Co wallpaper” hit Breakout status this year too. So did “vintage wallpaper,” rebounding after sitting flat through 2024 and 2025 (Google Trends). Graham & Brown is up 400%, Laura Ashley 190%, Arte 150%. Pinterest called the shape of it early, naming Neo Deco for 2026: “crisp chevrons, fan arches and other geometric hits, edged in chrome or brass.” In a design as direct as Tourmaline's gilt fan-arch print or the confident lines of Auteuil Stripe, it's easy to see why: this is pattern built for houses whose proportions were designed to frame it in the first place. In a Federation cottage or a Queenslander, a heritage print doesn't read as nostalgia. It reads as the house finally getting its picture rails back.

Arts and Crafts florals, Art Deco fans and Victorian damasks, recoloured in sage, terracotta and burgundy: 2026's fastest-growing wallpaper styles in Australia, and arguably its most honest, since none of them are new ideas dressed up as trends.

Texture as the new neutral

Flat, single-colour walls are starting to read as unfinished rather than clean. Houzz's 2026 Emerging Summer Trends Report puts linen wallpaper up 104%, seagrass 94%, Venetian plaster 94%; Australian searches for grasscloth and seagrass wallpaper climbed 130% over the same period (Google Trends). Etsy crowned Washed Linen its first-ever Texture of the Year and named Patina Blue its 2026 Colour of the Year. In our own Textured & Grasscloth collection, it's the woven pieces, Raffia Weave, Woven Linen, that get the most sample requests right now. Easy to see why once you've held one: texture photographs badly and sells well in person, which is exactly why a screen was never going to be enough to judge it by.

The palette is shifting with the material: rust up 178%, chocolate brown 153%, mushroom 69%, sage 55%, taupe 50%, warm and earthy tones that simply survive harsh Australian light better than pale grey ever did.

In 2026, texture is doing the job colour did in 2016.

Wallpaper that isn't afraid to leave

Peel-and-stick search volume has grown roughly six-fold in Australia over five years and is still climbing, while the older term “removable wallpaper” has all but vanished from search: people didn't stop wanting it, they just stopped calling it that. “Renter friendly wallpaper” is up 140% this year alone (Google Trends).

The two questions that show up in almost every comment section on a rental-transformation video are the same two questions every landlord and every renter is quietly asking each other: will it fall off? and will I get my bond back? The most-liked comment (195,000 likes) under one 20.5-million-play kids' mural video put the whole category's appeal in one line: “to be 7 picking a wild crazy theme… to be 16 hating it.” That's the entire renter-decorating pitch in a sentence: commitment without the commitment. #kidsroomdecor now carries 2.14 million Instagram posts, “childrens wallpaper” hit Breakout growth in Australian search, and the brands that win this category in 2026 will be the ones that can actually prove a wall comes back to bare paint, not just promise it.

What wallpaper costs in Australia, and why

A roll of designer wallpaper in Australia costs about $320. Most of the range sits between $244 and $520, the entry point is $106, and the widest and most elaborately printed papers pass $1,000. Some wallpaper is sold by the square metre instead. Priced that way it runs $81 to $265, and most commonly $127. Those figures come from our own range: 405 designs across eleven houses, counted design by design.

Why Australia pays more

Ninety-two per cent of what we sell is made in Europe. Forty-two per cent comes from Sweden, thirty per cent from France, nineteen per cent from Britain. Each roll is printed and finished on the other side of the world, then sent here in quantities a European mill would think small.

That is where most of the difference sits. A roll costing £45 in London arrives carrying freight, duty and GST, and behind those is the quieter cost of a small market. Australian orders are counted in dozens where European ones are counted in pallets, so we simply do not buy at the volume that makes London pricing possible.

Ordering direct from Britain is worth understanding before you try it. The rolls can look considerably cheaper, and then shipping a single order runs to about $130, with duty and GST charged on arrival. If a roll is damaged in transit, or you find you need one more from the same batch, you are usually eight weeks and another shipping charge away from finishing the wall.

We are not going to pretend our prices are low. They are high, and what follows is what sits inside them.

What the money buys

Most of our range is non-woven, a composite of paper and textile fibre that holds its dimensions when it gets wet. That is why it hangs paste-the-wall: the adhesive goes onto the wall and the paper goes up dry, so it will not stretch while you work or shrink back at the seams overnight. Years later it comes off in whole lengths, which makes the next redecoration a great deal easier.

Then there is colour. European mills print in batches and record a dye lot for each one, and two rolls from different lots can differ enough to read across a wall in afternoon light. We hold the batch information for our stock, so we can supply a whole room from a single lot and tell you plainly when we cannot. If it matters to your project, ask us when you order and we will check before anything ships.

And someone drew these. Our range comes from houses with archives and named designers behind them: Sandberg in Sweden, part of a group that has specialised in wallpaper since the 1920s; Casamance in Paris; and MinaLima, the London studio that made the graphics for the Harry Potter films. That drawing is a real share of the cost.

One caution. Wallpaper is not a single material, and substrates, inks and finishes vary by house and by collection. Every product page carries the specification for that particular paper, and when a detail matters to a project, that is where to check it.

How to compare prices properly

Compare by the square metre rather than by the roll. Roll sizes are not standard, and two papers at the same shelf price can cover quite different areas.

A standard European roll is 10.05 metres long and 53 centimetres wide, which is about 5.3 square metres. Wherever you are shopping, look for the coverage figure and divide the price by it. Our own range works out between $60 and $100 a square metre for a paper priced by the roll, and $81 to $265 for one priced by the metre.

Repeat matters for the same reason. A large pattern, and a half-drop especially, uses more paper at every drop, so two papers at the same price per roll can differ by a whole roll across one wall. Our calculator works this out design by design, including the repeat, so you are not estimating.

Materials and where they come from

Different houses publish different standards, so this is worth reading brand by brand.

Sandberg state that their printing inks and pigments are “carefully selected to be non-toxic and harmless”, and that their papers are “free from toxins, heavy metals, and environmentally harmful and allergenic substances”. They source materials from “responsibly managed forests” and recycle all of their production waste. Sandberg also publish a fire classification on their Mattic papers, EU Fire Class B-s1, d0 and US Fire Class A. One qualification in their own words: their papers are “free from heavy metals, detergents, plasticizers, and PVC”, though “the commercial grade contains a discreet PVC top layer for added protection”. If you are ordering Commercial Vinyl rather than Paste the Wall, that last point applies to you.

Rebel Walls state that their wallpapers are “non-toxic and free from heavy metals, detergents, plasticizers, and PVC”, that their Rebel Mattic finish is water-based, and that they use “only materials from responsibly managed forests”. They also state their papers are tested to European fire regulations with a pass mark of B-s1, d0.

Långelid/von Brömsson print locally in western Sweden, at Ulricehamns Tapetfabrik, using water-based inks and a PEFC-certified non-woven backing.

Emma Hayes commercial-grade lines are PVC-free.

We only repeat what each house publishes about its own product. Where a brand does not make a claim, we do not make one for them. If you are specifying for a commercial space and need documentation, tell us what the specifier wants and we will request the certificate from the mill.

What a wall costs

A standard Australian feature wall, three metres wide and 2.4 metres tall, is about 7.2 square metres.

Two rolls at the median $320: $640
Two rolls at the entry price $106: $212
Adhesive: allow for one tub
Installation: quoted by your installer

A room of the same proportions usually takes three to four times the paper of a single wall. What moves the figure most is whether you hang it yourself and how large the repeat is. We do not quote for installation and we take no margin on it. Installers quote you directly, so the price you are given is theirs. We keep a directory of installers by city.

Samples

Every design is available as an A4 sample, $10 plus $5 postage within Australia. Colour on a screen is never quite colour on a wall. A north-facing room, a warm bulb and the paint already on the adjacent wall will each shift it. Fifteen dollars to see the paper in the actual room, at the time of day you will be in it, is money well spent before committing to a whole wall.

Common questions about cost

Is wallpaper more expensive than paint?
By the square metre, several times over. Across the life of the wall the gap closes, because good wallpaper does not want recoating every few years and it is forgiving of small imperfections in the wall beneath. The two are different purchases.

Why do two rolls of the same design cost different amounts?
Because they are usually different substrates. One design is often produced on more than one material, and each carries its own price.

How many rolls do I need?
It depends on the wall and the repeat, and our calculator handles both. We would gently suggest ordering the extra roll, because coming back for one later can mean a different dye lot.

Can I get all my rolls from the same dye lot?
Usually yes, and we are happy to check. Ask when you order and we will confirm the batch before anything ships, or tell you if we cannot.

Do prices include GST?
Yes, on every price on the site.

What's fading

Grey, greige and the all-neutral scheme, edged out by warm earth tones and dusty mineral blues.
The single, lonely feature wall, dissolving into colour drenching, wallpapered ceilings and four-wall commitment.
2018-era pastel palm and flamingo prints, replaced by moodier, painterly botanicals: oversized leaves in deep green and terracotta rather than flat tropical pastel.
Flat, untextured walls, which increasingly read as unfinished rather than clean.
Both extremes of minimalism and maximalism, settling into confident pattern instead of either bare walls or chaos.

The wallpaper calendar

Every major wallpaper search term in Australia spiked in the same week: 8–15 February 2026, when peel-and-stick hit its annual peak and wall-mural searches ran at five times their normal level. The late-January-to-April window is the country's redecorating high season, as post-holiday plans finally turn into action; December is the annual trough. If you're planning a project of your own, order samples in January. February is when the whole country has the same idea.

Methodology

Researched and produced by Wallpaper Trader, drawing on twelve months of Australian Google search trend data (five-year context, linked inline where a live query exists), TikTok/Instagram engagement figures at time of research (hashtag counts move on, follow the links above for current totals), and 2026 forecasts published by Pinterest, Houzz and Etsy, all linked inline at first mention. All third-party statistics are attributed to their original publisher.

Media enquiries: hello@wallpapertrader.com

Order samples in January, or start now: browse Art Deco and Textured & Grasscloth, or read our wallpaper guides before you commit to a wall.