Termite Treatment Cost for Existing Homes in Delhi (2026) — What You’ll Actually Pay

Already have termites? That’s a different job — here’s why

First thing I tell people who call about deemak: the price you find online is often for the wrong service. There are two completely different jobs, and they cost different money. Pre-construction treatment is done when a plot is just foundation and soil — the soil under and around the building is soaked with termiticide before the floor goes down, so termites never get a path in. Post-construction treatment is what you need when the house is already built and lived in, and the termites have already found a way through a hairline crack in the floor or around a pipe. You can’t flood the soil under a finished house, so the job changes shape entirely.

For an existing home, a real crew builds the same chemical barrier — but from inside the finished house. They drill a line of small holes along the joint where the wall meets the floor, push termiticide into the soil underneath through those holes under pressure, treat any wood the termites are feeding on, and seal everything back up. No demolition. You don’t lose your flooring and you don’t move out. It is a more careful, slower job than soil treatment, which is partly why a brand-new builder floor in Dwarka can sometimes cost less to protect than an old kothi in Defence Colony with thirty years of cracks and wooden almirahs.

This matters because the cheap quotes you see — ₹500, ₹800 — are almost never this. They’re a man with a sprayer wetting the one wall you pointed at. That’s not post-construction treatment. That’s a temporary cover-up, and I’ll come back to why it always fails.

How to know it’s really termites (and a quick checklist)

Termites are quiet. By the time most Delhi families notice, the colony has been working for months. These are the signs I’d look for, in roughly the order people spot them:

• Mud tubes climbing the walls. Thin pencil-width lines of dried mud running up from the skirting, behind the fridge, along a beam. Subterranean termites build these tunnels to travel from the soil to the wood without drying out. This is the clearest sign.
• Hollow or sagging wood. Tap a door frame, a window panel, a wooden almirah back. If it sounds papery and hollow instead of solid, they’ve eaten it from the inside. Sometimes a finger goes straight through.
• Doors and windows suddenly tight. Wood that swells from termite moisture jams in its frame. If a door that opened fine all year is suddenly sticking, check it.
• Bubbling, rippled or blistered paint. Termites working just under the surface make the paint or POP look like it has tiny ripples or trapped air. People mistake it for a damp problem.
• Discarded wings near windows in spring. Around the first warm, humid evenings — roughly March to May in Delhi — winged termites swarm, fly to light, then shed their wings in little piles on the sill or floor. A heap of identical pale wings is a swarm, and a swarm means an established colony nearby.
• Fine, gritty dirt or frass. Small piles of what looks like sawdust or soil under wooden fixtures.

Found one of these? Don’t panic and don’t spray it yourself yet — spraying the visible spot just scatters them deeper. Note where you saw it and get the whole house looked at.

The post-construction process, step by step

Here is what an honest crew actually does in an occupied Delhi home — and what a ₹500 spray man skips:

1. Inspection and marking. Walk the whole house, tap the wood, find the active tubes, work out where the colony is getting in. The technician marks the drill line.
2. Grid drilling along the wall-floor junction. A line of small holes — roughly every 12 inches — is drilled into the joint where walls meet the floor, plus around door frames, pipe entries and any spot where the slab meets soil. This is the part people are nervous about; the holes are small and get sealed at the end.
3. Pressure injection of termiticide. A CIB&RC-approved chemical — usually imidacloprid or chlorpyrifos at the registered concentration — is injected through those holes under pressure so it spreads through the soil and forms a continuous treated zone. Termites crossing it die and carry it back, which is what knocks the colony down rather than just the foragers.
4. Treating the wood. Infested door frames, window frames, wooden almirahs and skirting get treated directly — drilled and injected or surface-applied where appropriate — so the bit you can see is dealt with too.
5. Sealing. Every drill hole is filled (usually with white cement / putty) so your floor and skirting look normal again.

The difference is the barrier. A surface spray wets one wall; the next morning it looks ‘done’ and three months later the deemak is back through the floor two feet away. The drill-fill-inject job puts a treated layer between the soil and your home, which is the only thing that actually stops subterranean termites for years rather than weeks.

Real termite treatment cost for existing homes in Delhi (2026)

Let’s talk numbers. Post-construction termite treatment in Delhi is priced two ways — a flat rate by home size, or per square foot of built-up / affected area. As a rough rule in 2026 it works out to about ₹5 to ₹9 per sq ft of the area being treated, and GST at 18% is extra on every quote. Bigger homes get the lower per-foot rate; small flats sit at a minimum charge. Here is the honest range I’d quote:

A few real-world notes from doing this around Delhi: a fresh builder floor in Dwarka or Rohini with tiled floors and almost no wood often lands near the bottom of its band. An old kothi in Karol Bagh, Daryaganj or a Defence Colony bungalow with wooden frames, parquet, and decades of micro-cracks lands near the top — there’s simply more junction to drill and more wood to treat. Don’t trust a fixed price quoted over the phone for a big house; a real company surveys first.

What actually changes the price

If two quotes for ‘the same’ flat differ, it’s usually one of these:

• Built-up area. The biggest lever. More square footage means more drilling and more chemical. Per-foot pricing keeps it fair.
• How far it’s spread. One door frame is a small job. Termites in three rooms, the kitchen platform and the staircase means more wood treatment and more entry points to seal off.
• Chemical chosen. Imidacloprid-based termiticides cost more than older chlorpyrifos; some homes (kids, pets) prefer the low-odour option, and you pay a little more for it.
• Number of wooden fixtures. Lots of wooden almirahs, panelling, window frames and skirting all need individual treatment — that’s labour and material.
• Ground floor vs upper floor. Ground-floor and basement rooms sit on the soil where the colony lives, so they need the full soil barrier. A third-floor flat with no direct soil contact is often cheaper.

The warranty — what’s real and what’s a sales line

This is where most people get misled, so I’ll be blunt. For an existing home, an honest post-construction warranty is usually 1 to 5 years, and the longer ones almost always need an annual top-up or renewal — a yearly inspection and a refresh of the barrier — to stay valid. That’s normal and fair: a chemical barrier in soil weakens over time.

When a salesman promises a flat ‘10-year warranty’ for your already-built house, be careful. The well-known 10-year term comes from pre-construction soil treatment, where the whole plot was treated before the slab was poured — a far more complete barrier than anything you can put into a finished home. Quoting that figure for post-construction work is either a misunderstanding or a sales trick. Ask exactly what the warranty covers, whether re-treatment is free if termites return, and whether you must pay for annual top-ups to keep it alive. Get it in writing. Nobody can honestly promise ‘100%’ or ‘permanent’ — termites are persistent, and any company that says otherwise is overselling.

Why DIY and local ‘deemak wale’ sprays keep failing

Every week someone tells me they already ‘did’ the termites — bought a bottle from the hardware shop, or paid a local fellow ₹500 to spray. And every week the termites are back. Here’s why it never holds:

Subterranean termites — the ones eating Delhi homes — don’t live in your wall. They live in the soil under and around your foundation, sometimes a colony of lakhs of insects, and they send foragers up through cracks to feed. When you spray the visible wall, you kill the few hundred you can see. The colony underneath is untouched. There’s no barrier between the soil and your home, so within a few months they simply find another crack and come back — often a couple of feet from where you sprayed. Worse, a bad spray can make them avoid that area and quietly spread to a new room, so you think it’s gone while it’s actually getting wider.

The whole point of proper treatment is the soil barrier — the drill-fill-inject step that a sprayer can’t replicate. That’s the difference between ‘they came back in three months’ and ‘clear for years.’

Is it safe with the family at home?

For an occupied house, yes — with normal sense. The termiticides a licensed crew uses are CIB&RC-approved for treatment of buildings in use, and they go into the soil and the wood, not sprayed into the air you breathe. You almost never need to move out for post-construction work. Practical points I tell every family:

• Open windows and keep rooms ventilated during and for a couple of hours after the work.
• Keep small kids and pets out of the treated room until the surfaces and sealed holes are dry — usually a few hours.
• Tell the technician if anyone in the house is pregnant, asthmatic, or you have fish/birds, and ask for the low-odour imidacloprid option.
• Cover or move open food and utensils in the kitchen before they treat the platform.

A good crew will tell you all of this without being asked. If a ‘pest control’ man can’t name the chemical he’s using or won’t talk about safety, that’s your answer.

Where we treat termites across Delhi

We do post-construction termite treatment across Delhi — the old construction belts where deemak is worst included: Daryaganj, Karol Bagh, Lajpat Nagar, Greater Kailash, Defence Colony kothis and Civil Lines, as well as the newer flats and builder floors in Dwarka, Rohini, Saket, Janakpuri and across South, West, East and North Delhi. If you’ve seen mud tubes or hollow wood, call 95603 66362 for an inspection — treatment starts at ₹2,499 for a 1–2 BHK (GST extra). Coming soon: Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad and Ghaziabad.