An hourly rate is a day rate divided by a day, and the argument is nearly always about the second number.
This site assumes 7 hours and prints the assumption rather than burying it.
On that day a plumber comes out at £38.57 an hour, an electrician at £40.00 and a painter and decorator at £28.57.
Those three figures are ours.
No guide publishes them.
What follows sets each of them against the hourly range the price guides publish for the same trade, and on every one of the 12 trades a guide covers, the arithmetic lands inside it.
What each trade works out at an hour
The day rate is published here, the hourly figure beside it is ours, and the range after that is published by HaMuch and Checkatrade.
The last column is the check.
All thirteen rows link to the trade.
A derived figure that fell outside its own published range would be a signal that either the day rate or the assumed day had drifted, which is the same test every benchmark on this site has to pass against the spreads on its own trade page.
| Trade | Day rate | An hour, ours | Published an hour | Inside it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Painter and decorator | £200 | £28.57 | £16 to £40 | yes |
| Carpenter and joiner | £240 | £34.29 | £20 to £45 | yes |
| Groundworker | £213 | £30.43 | nobody publishes one | no range to check |
| Drainage Engineer | £225 | £32.14 | £23 to £151 | yes |
| Decorative Plasterer | £225 | £32.14 | nobody publishes one | no range to check |
| Cladding Installer | £175 | £25.00 | nobody publishes one | no range to check |
| Suspended Ceiling Installer | £175 | £25.00 | nobody publishes one | no range to check |
| Plumber | £270 | £38.57 | £26 to £63 | yes |
| Electrician | £280 | £40.00 | £23 to £70 | yes |
| Plasterer | £230 | £32.86 | £15 to £50 | yes |
| Tiler | £229 | £32.71 | £16 to £75 | yes |
| Roofer | £239 | £34.14 | £29 to £45 | yes |
| General Builder | £253 | £36.14 | £16 to £46 | yes |
| Bricklayer | £260 | £37.14 | nobody publishes one | no range to check |
| General Labourer | £140 | £20.00 | £14 to £35 | yes |
| Gas and Heating Engineer | £259 | £37.00 | £30 to £75 | yes |
| Handyman | £188 | £26.86 | £10 to £45 | yes |
Your next step
You have the published hourly figures, so the next step is an hourly rate built on your own costs and working day.
The Rate Sorted calculator asks for your billable hours a day as well as your costs, and works the hourly figure out on your numbers.
The working day is the assumption
Nothing on this page is more load bearing than the number the day rate is divided by.
Change it and every figure moves.
A trade who starts at half seven and stops when the job reaches a sensible pausing point is not working the same day as somebody on a fixed shift, and no guide publishes what that day averages out at across the country, so the honest thing is to pick a number, print it beside every figure it produces and let a reader redo the sum on their own.
On 7 hours
£38.57
What this site assumes, and what the duration guides assume too.
So a plumbing hour and a decorating hour here are the same length of hour.
On eight hours
£33.75
The standard office day, which few trades work on site.
The same plumber, the same day rate, £5 an hour lower.
On ten hours
£27.00
A long day, and one plenty of trades put in.
The arithmetic falls by £12 an hour without a single price changing.
How to work out an hourly rate from a day rate
- 01Start from a day rate you trustThis site publishes one for each of the 17 trades, checked against the spread the UK price guides print.
- 02Decide how long your day isWe use 7 hours and say so, because a plumber's day at eight hours is £33.75 and at ten it is £27.00.
- 03Add the call out back onAccording to Checkatrade and HaMuch, published hourly rates run well above the arithmetic, because an hour of work still carries the travel to it.
Our assumption, stated
The 7 hour working day is our assumption, not a published figure.
We use it because tradespeople on MoneySavingExpert report decorator days of roughly 8.30am to 3.30pm.
Every hourly figure of ours is the published day rate divided by 7: arithmetic on a rate this site publishes, not a rate any guide quotes, and labelled that way wherever it appears.
What the guides publish, trade by trade
Two guides cover most of these trades.
Every range in the table above comes from one of the readings below, taken off the live page on 5 September 2026 and attributed to the guide that published it.
Where a guide prints an average and a range on the same page, the range is what sets the ends here.
According to HaMuch, a painter and decorator averages £24 an hour and runs £16 to £38 across the country, so £16 and £38 are the figures this page carries.
An endpoint only ever moves outward.
Adding a guide can widen a range.
It can never narrow one.
| Trade | Guide | Dated | What it publishes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Painter and decorator | HaMuch | 2026 | average £24 an hour, varying from £16 to £38 |
| Checkatrade | April 2026 | £30 to £40 an hour | |
| Carpenter and joiner | HaMuch | 2026 | average £27 an hour, £20 in Belfast to £36 in London |
| Checkatrade | April 2026 | £30 to £45 an hour | |
| Drainage Engineer | HaMuch | 2026 | average £41 an hour, from £23 to £151 |
| Plumber | HaMuch | 2026 | average £42 an hour, varying from £26 to £63 |
| Checkatrade | April 2026 | £40 to £60 an hour | |
| Electrician | HaMuch | 2026 | average £34 an hour, varying between £23 and £49 |
| Checkatrade | April 2026 | £40 to £70 an hour | |
| Plasterer | HaMuch | 2026 | average £25 an hour, varying from £15 to £50 |
| Checkatrade | April 2026 | £37.50 an hour | |
| Tiler | HaMuch | 2026 | average £26 an hour, £16 to £75 |
| Checkatrade | April 2026 | £40 an hour | |
| Roofer | HaMuch | 2026 | average £29 an hour |
| Checkatrade | April 2026 | £35 to £45 an hour | |
| General Builder | HaMuch | 2026 | average £29 an hour for small jobs, ranging £16 to £46 |
| Checkatrade | April 2026 | £38 an hour | |
| General Labourer | Checkatrade | April 2026 | £14 to £35 an hour |
| Gas and Heating Engineer | HaMuch | 2026 | average £43 an hour, £30 to £75 |
| Handyman | HaMuch | 2026 | average £27 an hour, ranging from £10 to £45 |
Checkatrade also states on the same page that typical tradesperson hourly rates run £15 to £70 across all trades.
That is a whole market sentence rather than a figure for any one trade, so it sets no end of any range above and is quoted here only as context.
Neither guide publishes an hourly rate for groundworkers, decorative plasterers, cladding installers, suspended ceiling installers and bricklayers, so those 5 rows carry our arithmetic and nothing else.
All 12 of the derived figures land inside their own published range on this reading, which is the check the table's last column prints.
Why an hour usually costs more than this
The arithmetic is honest and it is still not a quote.
Here is the gap it leaves.
Call outs are priced differently.
One hour is never one hour
An hourly rate is what a short job gets priced at and a day rate is what a full day gets priced at, and the two are rarely the same number in practice.
A trade called out for one hour has to cover the travel and the rest of a day that is now hard to fill.
So treat the hourly figure here as the day rate expressed differently rather than as what an hour of work would be quoted at.
Which is visible in the ranges
In the ranges reported by HaMuch and Checkatrade, the top sits above the derived figure for every trade, often well above.
A plumber's published top is £63 against £38.57 of arithmetic.
That distance is the call out, not a disagreement about the day rate.
Across the 17 trades the derived hour runs from £20.00 for a general labourer to £40.00 for an electrician, on the same assumed day throughout.
Priced as a job rather than by the hour, the same arithmetic is worked all the way through on what plastering costs, by room and by the square metre.
Heads up
Rate estimates blend the national decorator day rate benchmark, published against the spread named UK trade price guides print, with official ONS regional earnings and local house price data.
Figures are modelled estimates for guidance, not quotes.
Sources: ONS ASHE 2025, UK House Price Index April 2026.
Common questions
The same answers the structured data on this page gives a search engine, word for word.
How much does a plumber charge per hour in the UK?
According to HaMuch and Checkatrade, a plumber charges between £26 and £63 an hour.
This site's own £270 day rate works out at £38.57 an hour over a 7 hour day, which lands inside that range.
The hourly figure is ours and the range is theirs, and the page keeps the two apart everywhere.
How do you turn a day rate into an hourly rate?
Divide the day rate by the number of hours in the day, which is the whole calculation.
The second number is the one nobody agrees on.
This site assumes 7 hours and says so rather than hiding it.
At 7 hours a plumber's day comes out at £38.57, at eight hours it is £33.75, and at ten it is £27.00.
Is an hour of work priced at a day rate divided by the day?
Usually not, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
A trade booked for one hour still travels there and back, and still has the rest of a day that is now hard to fill.
So a call out hour is normally dearer than the arithmetic, which is why the published ranges here run higher at the top than any of the derived figures do.
Which trades have no published hourly rate?
Neither guide publishes one for groundworkers, decorative plasterers, cladding installers, suspended ceiling installers and bricklayers.
Those 5 rows show the derived figure on its own and say that nothing sits behind it.
The other 12 carry a range from HaMuch and Checkatrade, dated and linked.
What is a self employed painter and decorator hourly rate?
This site publishes one painter and decorator figure and it is £28.57 an hour, from a £200 day over 7 hours.
There is no separate self employed figure here, because the rate on this site is what the work is charged at rather than what any one person takes home.
HaMuch and Checkatrade publish £16 to £40 an hour for the trade, and what an employed decorator is paid instead is on the earnings page.
Take the hourly table
The hourly figures are our arithmetic on a published day rate and the ranges beside them belong to the guides named on this page, and a table reproduced from here should keep those two apart the way this one does.
The hourly card carries the headline figure, and the link goes to this page.
<a href="https://thedayrate.co.uk/hourly-rates/"><img src="https://thedayrate.co.uk/og/hourly-rates.png" alt="UK trade hourly rates, derived from published day rates, from The Day Rate Report" width="1200" height="630"></a>
The hourly working on this page is free to reproduce, derived and labelled so, and a credit with a link back is all we ask, under CC BY 4.0.