Go to SendWork
— Free for 7 Days
Full access
Full access
The customer said yes before you finished the sentence. No pause, no haggle, no “let me think about it” — just yes, and a handshake, and a date in the diary. It is the best feeling in the trade and the most expensive one, because you almost certainly set that price too low. Which is the moment most people go looking at published UK trade rates for a second opinion.
That is where the trouble starts. The 2026 figures run from £112 a day to £700 depending on which trade and which guide you open, and the spread is not regional noise. Each figure measures something different and calls it the same thing. Benchmark against the wrong one and you will not find out for a year.
Figures below were checked in July 2026 against published 2026 UK rate data. Rates move; treat every number here as a market range to test your own costs against, not a price list.
Why UK trade rates guides disagree with each other
A published day rate averages whatever the publisher could count. Some of those figures are employed wages, where holiday and pension sit on top and somebody else pays them. Others are subcontract rates, where none of that exists. A third group records what customers actually paid, which includes materials, travel and the bits of the job nobody itemised.
Three honest surveys can therefore produce three incompatible numbers for the same trade in the same month. The question worth asking is never “what is the going rate”. It is “which of these three things am I selling, and to whom”.
UK trade rates 2026: five trades, five different questions
One row per trade. The fourth column is the useful one — it names the reason each trade’s rate goes wrong, and the reason to read further.
| Trade | Published 2026 spread | What that spread is actually measuring | What decides your number |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electrician | £200–£400 a day | Three separate pay systems — a negotiated employed wage, a subcontract day rate and a domestic charge-out rate — filed under one label | Which of the three you are quoting, then an honest count of the days you are genuinely on the tools |
| Plumber | £45–£85 an hour · £250–£500 a day | Hourly work where some figures include the call-out and some quietly do not | Whether the call-out fee covers travel and the first hour, or you are donating both |
| Gas engineer | £300–£430 a day | A day rate that a diary full of annual services never actually reaches | An annual registration cost that arrives whether or not gas work does — divided by how tightly your route is packed |
| Painter and decorator | £127–£700 a day | Two different trades — straightforward repaint and full decoration — averaged into a single job title | Which of the two you are selling, and whether the quote itemises the preparation or absorbs it |
| Builder | £112–£400 a day | One noun covering everyone from a labourer to a main contractor running other trades | Whether you defined the scope before you named the number, which is where builders lose most |
Read across a row and the published spread stops being confusing. Read down the fourth column and something more useful appears: none of these trades has a pricing problem. They have five different measurement problems, each producing the same symptom.
Which of your numbers is actually wrong
Start from the symptom rather than the average. Four branches cover almost every case.
If the diary was full and the year still did not pay, your rate is probably fine and your divisor is not. Most sole traders bill nearer 180 days than 250 once quoting, materials runs, holiday and illness all take their share. The rate is not too low; you are spreading it across days that never existed.
When small jobs keep you busy and poor, the problem is the first fee rather than the hourly rate. A twenty-minute fault find that costs you a morning is not a cheap job. It is an unpriced one.
When the number was never the real problem
If one kind of work quietly funds another, you are selling two products at one price. Every trade has a version of this — the interesting job subsidised by the dull one, or the reverse. It stays invisible until you price the two separately.
And when the customer said yes immediately, the number was never really the issue. The scope was. A price nobody questions usually attaches to work nobody has defined yet — which is why the fastest yes and the worst job are so often the same booking.
None of those four gets fixed by finding a better average. They get fixed by knowing which question your trade is actually asking.
ON THE YES THAT CAME TOO FAST
Your rate is a decision. Right now it is probably a habit.
The trades that raise their rates with a straight face are the ones that can see what last quarter actually paid — by job, by customer, by month.
Every trade above has its own guide with the arithmetic worked through properly. The wider set sits under UK pricing and market rates, and the obligations that sit behind the numbers — registration, certification, site cards — are under UK licensing and regulations.
