What is the average cost of leak detection?

There is no average worth quoting, because leak detection is a search rather than a product, and searches vary with what has to be searched. What is stable is what the visit consists of and what makes it longer or shorter.

What you are paying for

A detection visit is time plus equipment plus interpretation. In practice it is:

• The isolation work. Shutting sections off, reading the meter, and establishing whether the leak is on the supply, the waste, the heating loop or the pool circuit. Half of the value of a survey is often here, before any instrument comes out of the van.
• The instruments. Acoustic listening equipment for pressurised pipes, a thermal camera for warm water lines and for damp patterns, moisture meters for mapping the spread, tracer gas for the awkward cases, and a camera for drains. Which ones are needed depends on the answers from the first step.
• The interpretation. Water travels. It appears at the lowest point it can reach, which is regularly a different room from where it started, and reading that correctly is the difference between opening one tile and opening five.
• The report. Where the leak is, what failed, and what the repair involves, in writing, with photographs. If you may claim on insurance, this is the part that matters most.

What changes the price

What changes	Which way it moves the price
Property size	More pipe, more zones to isolate, more to survey
Accessibility	A visible run under a sink is quick; pipe under a tiled floor or chased into a wall is not
Which system	Fresh water, waste, hot water loop, pool circuit and irrigation each need a different approach
Methods needed	An acoustic survey alone is one visit; tracer gas is another level of work
How clear the symptom is	A steady drip narrows the search fast; an intermittent one may need a return visit
Access to the property	An empty house needs someone to open it, and out of hours costs more anywhere

Why there is no euro figure here

Because a survey is priced on the property in front of it. The leak detection prices that circulate online are national at best and are often written for other markets entirely, and a figure from a different country tells you nothing about a survey of a villa on a hillside outside Loulé. Rather than borrow one, this page explains what determines it, and the quote for your own property is free. For what the survey covers and how a request is handled, see leak detection in the Algarve.

Do this before you book

The meter test costs nothing and changes the visit:

1. Turn off every tap and appliance that uses water.
2. Read the meter and note the figure and the time.
3. Wait an hour with nothing used, and read it again.
4. If it moved, close the stopcock to the house and repeat.

Movement with everything off means water is escaping on your side. Movement that continues with the house isolated points at the run between the meter and the building, which in this region is often a buried pipe crossing a garden. Send both readings with the request, along with photos of the damp and a note of when it appeared. It genuinely shortens the search.

The reason not to wait

A small leak on the supply side runs continuously, and in a house that is empty for part of the year it can run for weeks. Two things follow from that: the water bill is often the first evidence, so it is worth reading rather than filing, and the damage is rarely the water itself but what it does to plaster, to timber and to a wall that is then repainted over a problem that has not stopped. Finding it early is cheaper than the making good that follows finding it late.