How to Price a Job as a Tradesman: The UK Guide to Quoting Properly

By Pro Playbooks | September 2026 | Trades

There is a moment every tradesperson knows. You are standing in someone's kitchen and they ask: "So what sort of money are we talking?" Your brain grabs a bit of what the last job went for, a bit of what the customer looks like they will accept, and out comes a number built in four seconds, defending work that will take four days.

That number is probably wrong, and not slightly. Industry evidence across UK trades keeps pointing the same way: underquoting by 20 to 30 per cent is normal, not for cowboys, but for good, busy trades who have never worked out what an hour of their time actually costs. On a £75,000 turnover, a 20 per cent underquote is roughly £15,000 a year, and it is pure margin, because your costs would have been identical either way.

This guide walks through the system that fixes it: your true hourly cost, a day rate built from the ground up, markup on materials, quoting versus estimating, and the mistakes that quietly drain trade businesses. It is drawn from our book How to Price a Job as a Tradesman: Price It Right, and every figure below is a worked illustration, not a rate card. Your costs and your market should always drive your final numbers.

The Underquoting Mistakes Almost Every Trade Makes

Underquoting is not one mistake, it is a stack of them. Five show up again and again:

• Invisible costs. Price a job at £250 a day in your head and you are pricing labour and nothing else, but you are selling the output of an entire small business: van, tools, insurance, fuel, phone, accountant, training, software.
• Invisible time. You get paid for hours on the tools, not for quoting, driving, merchant runs, chasing invoices or doing the books. A working week might hold 50 hours of effort and 30 you can actually bill.
• Pricing to your own wallet. If money is tight for you, £3,000 sounds like a lot, so you struggle to say it even when the job is worth £3,800. Your customer is not you, and they have usually budgeted more than you think.
• Fear of the gap. A lost overpriced job costs you a site visit. A won underpriced job costs you real money every day you are on it.
• Copying the going rate. Most trades around you are underquoting too. The going rate is not a calculation, it is a rumour that has been rounded down for thirty years.

Know Your Number: What an Hour of Your Work Actually Costs

Ask a tradesperson what they charge an hour and they answer instantly. Ask what an hour costs them and you get a guess, always miles out. The true cost of your working hour has three ingredients.

Your wage. A real annual figure you need to earn before tax, as a skilled trade, not survival money. Say £42,000 for a worked example.

Your overheads. Everything the business spends whether you are on the tools or not. Run an honest labour cost calculator across the van, fuel, insurances, tools, certification schemes, training, phone, accountant, software, advertising, tip fees, even a bad debt reserve. Most one-van trades who do this line by line land between £12,000 and £25,000 a year and cannot believe it. Our example plumber lands at £23,100.

Your real billable hours. This is the killer. The head sum is 8 hours, 5 days, 52 weeks: 2,080 hours. Reality is holidays, illness, dead patches, quoting, driving and admin; a well-run one-person trade business converts something like 60 to 75 per cent of working time into billable time. A realistic build is 44 working weeks, 4 billable days a week, 7 chargeable hours a day: about 1,250 billable hours a year, not 2,080.

Now the arithmetic. £42,000 of wage across 1,250 hours is £33.60. £23,100 of overhead across the same hours is £18.48. Break-even: roughly £52 an hour, about £365 a day, with not one pound of profit in it yet. When a customer says "£300 a day seemed like a lot", this is the sum they have never seen.

Tradesman Day Rate UK: Building Yours From the Ground Up

A defensible day rate stacks five layers: wage, overheads, profit, risk and market position.

Profit is not greed and it is not your wage; you already counted your wage. Profit is the fund that replaces the van in cash, absorbs a bad debt and carries you through a dead February. For a small trade firm, 10 to 20 per cent on top of total cost is a sane band. At 15 per cent, our example builds £60 an hour, £420 a day at 7 chargeable hours.

One wording point that matters: a 15 per cent markup on cost is not a 15 per cent margin of the selling price. Marking up cost by 15 per cent leaves you about 13 per cent of the final price as profit. Whichever way you calculate, be consistent, and know which one your accountant is quoting back at you.

Risk is priced job by job on top of the base rate. Pre-war property, add 10 to 20 per cent, because nobody knows what is behind that lath and plaster. Fixed-price work, add, because you are holding the risk of overrun. Certification-heavy work where your signature carries legal weight, add. If your gut adds hassle, your price adds percentage.

Only then look outward at published labour rates for UK construction. The big trade directories put a typical skilled trade day outside London in the £200 to £350 band, electricians and gas engineers commonly £280 to £500, general building labour £200 to £300, with London and the South East running 30 to 45 per cent above the national middle. Treat those as weather, not instruction. If your built rate sits inside the local range, charge it without apology. If it sits below, you have headroom. What you never do is delete a layer to hit a rumour.

Two structures complete the engine. Set a minimum charge, because a one-hour job costs you half a day once travel, parking and paperwork are counted; a first-hour-plus-following-hours shape such as £95 then £55 works well. And a second person gets charged at 60 to 80 per cent of your rate, never at cost.

Day Rate vs Fixed Price: Who Carries the Risk

A quote is a fixed price for defined work, and once accepted you are generally held to it. An estimate is an informed prediction, expected to move as the real job reveals itself. The words you choose decide who carries the risk of the unknown: quote, you carry it; estimate, the customer does.

Fix the price when you control the variables: a boiler swap on a system you have inspected, a consumer unit change, a redec of an empty house. Certainty is worth paying for, so a fixed price sits above bare day-rate arithmetic; build in 5 to 10 per cent contingency on clean work and 10 to 20 per cent where there are mild unknowns.

Estimate when the job will not show its cards: floors up, walls out, groundwork, damp, fault-finding. Use a banded estimate ("expect £2,400 to £3,100, and I will confirm once the floor is up"), day rate plus materials with a stop-and-talk promise, or a two-stage price where the investigation is fixed and the repair is quoted once you can see it. And never send a bare number by text; "should be about £800" reads to a customer's selective memory like a fixed price of £800.

Markup on Materials UK: The Rules Nobody Teaches

Passing materials through at cost feels honest. It is actually a subsidy, because the ticket price is not what materials cost your business. You spend hours speccing, ordering, collecting and returning them, you finance them for weeks before the customer pays, you carry the warranty visit when the valve fails in month three, and you absorb the waste. So materials always carry margin. A workable ladder:

• Sundries and consumables under about £100: 30 to 50 per cent, or roll them into labour as one line.
• Typical job materials, £100 to £1,000: 20 to 25 per cent.
• Bigger packages, £1,000 to £5,000: 15 to 20 per cent.
• Major supply above £5,000: 10 to 15 per cent, with a clause protecting you on supplier price movement.

Mark up from trade price and keep your merchant discount; you earned it. Quote materials in sensible bundles, never elbow-by-elbow itemisation that invites an online price audit. And on long jobs, time-limit the prices: "Materials prices are held for 30 days from the date of this quote; beyond that, any supplier increases will be passed on at cost with evidence provided."

How to Quote for Building Work: The Document That Wins

Two firms price the same bathroom. One texts "£5,200, can start in 3 weeks". The other sends a clean one-page document and wins at £600 more, because the customer is really buying the answer to a frightened question: if I hand these people thousands of pounds, will this go well? A winning quote has nine parts: your full identity and registrations, their details with a quote reference, a plain English restatement of the job, the works itemised in short readable lines, the price broken into labour and bundled materials with one bold total, included and excluded lists, staged payments tied to milestones, the practicalities (start window, 30-day validity, changes priced and agreed in writing before extra work proceeds), and a guarantee and insurance block signed with a name.

A note on VAT. State your VAT position explicitly on every quote, whichever way it goes: "Total: £5,800. No VAT is charged." or "Total: £5,800 plus VAT at 20 per cent: £6,960." Ambiguous VAT is one of the great avoidable rows of the trade, and if you are anywhere near the registration threshold it deserves a proper conversation with your accountant before you price big jobs. Getting your records in shape first? Our Making Tax Digital guide for sole traders covers what is changing.

Then follow up. Quote within 24 to 48 hours of the visit, send one no-pressure message on day 2 or 3, one call around day 7 to 10, one closer with a genuine reason around day 14, then stop. Never reopen the price in follow-up; if they have not said it is too dear, discounting is money set on fire.

Holding the Price, and Charging for Extras

"That's too expensive" is not a verdict, it is the opening line of a conversation. The first move never changes: agree with the feeling and hold the number. "I understand, it's a serious amount of money. It's the right price for doing this properly, and I'll happily walk you through what's in it." Then be quiet. If the budget is genuinely short, change the scope, never the rate: strip the decorating, keep the existing radiators, park phase two until spring. Your hourly rate never moves.

Mid-job extras get the same discipline. "While you're here" favours do not buy gratitude, they set precedent, and a £150 unpriced extra can be most of a day's entire profit. The habit takes sixty seconds: acknowledge warmly, price it on the spot or the same evening, get agreement in writing (a fifteen-second text and their reply is your paperwork), and log it on a running variations list that goes on the invoice.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a typical tradesman day rate in the UK?

Published UK trade cost guides put a typical skilled trade day outside London somewhere between £200 and £350, with electricians and gas engineers commonly £280 to £500 and general building labour £200 to £300. London and the South East run roughly 30 to 45 per cent above the national middle. Treat those ranges as a reference, then build your own rate from your real costs.

How do you quote for building work?

A winning quote restates the job in plain English, itemises the works in short readable lines, breaks the price into labour and bundled materials with one bold total, states the VAT position, lists what is included and excluded, sets staged payments tied to milestones, and confirms the quote is valid for 30 days with any changes priced and agreed in writing before extra work proceeds.

How much should you mark up materials in the UK?

Use a sliding scale: around 30 to 50 per cent on sundries under about £100, 20 to 25 per cent on typical job materials between £100 and £1,000, 15 to 20 per cent from £1,000 to £5,000, and 10 to 15 per cent on major supply above that. Mark up from trade price, keep your merchant discount, and quote materials in sensible bundles rather than component by component.

What is the difference between a quote and an estimate?

A quote is a fixed price for defined work, and once accepted you are generally held to it, so you carry the risk of overrun. An estimate is an informed prediction of cost that is expected to move as the real job reveals itself, so the customer carries the risk. Quote when you control the variables; estimate when the job cannot show you its cards, such as opening up old fabric or groundwork.

How much profit should a tradesman add to a job?

A sensible profit margin for a small trade firm is 10 to 20 per cent on top of total cost, and that is after paying yourself a proper wage. Newer businesses or brutal markets sit nearer 10 per cent; an established firm with a full diary should run nearer 20, because a full diary is the market telling you that you are cheap. Profit funds the van replacement, bad debts and quiet months.

Price It Once, Then Keep It Priced

Fixing your pricing does not need new skills, new customers or a marketing budget. The work you already win, priced correctly, is the raise, and the system takes about one evening to set up. Then service it once a year: rerun the overhead worksheet against real bank statements, audit your billable hours honestly, rebuild the rate and send a short, warm price rise letter to your regulars four to six weeks ahead. Small and annual beats big and occasional every time. For the full worksheets, scripts and templates, Price It Right has all five ready to fill in.

Related Guides

• How to Claim CIS Tax Back, because pricing properly is only half the job if HMRC is holding your refund.
• Making Tax Digital for Sole Traders, what UK sole traders need to have in place.
• Redundancy Pay in the UK, useful if you are weighing up going out on your own after a payout.