Almost every plastering price you can find online is the whole job, and the labour inside it is the part nobody publishes.
Skimming the walls and ceiling of a 4 by 4 metre room is £257 to £385 of a plasterer's time.
That is labour and nothing else.
It comes from published production rates divided into a measured room, at the £230 plasterer day rate this site publishes.
The 5 guides further down publish the whole job instead, and the distance between the two numbers is plaster, boards, waste and margin rather than a disagreement about plastering.
What a room costs in labour
Three room sizes, in the bands the price guides themselves use, with the walls measured at 2.4 metres less a door and a window.
The range on each is the slow and fast rate published by Methvin rather than a margin we have added.
Every figure here is ours.
None of it is materials.
A plasterer pricing this job would start from nearly this arithmetic and then add the plaster, the boards, the beads, the waste, the travel and a margin, which is why the guide prices further down the page are several times larger without either number being wrong.
| Room | Walls | Walls only | Ceiling only | Both |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small, 3m by 3m | 25.8m² | £116 to £139 | £55 to £110 | £171 to £248 |
| Medium, 4m by 4m | 35.4m² | £159 to £191 | £97 to £195 | £257 to £385 |
| Large, 4.5m by 4m | 37.8m² | £170 to £204 | £110 to £219 | £280 to £423 |
Labour only, and that matters here
Our figure does not carry plaster, beads, boards, skip hire, scaffold or anybody's margin, and the room prices the guides publish carry all of those.
It is the labour half of their number shown on its own, which is exactly what a plasterer quoting a job has to work out first and what almost nobody publishes.
Your next step
For the plasterer, the next step is the square metre price your own day rate gives for rooms like these.
The Rate Sorted calculator opens on plasterer and turns your day rate into a price per square metre you can quote from.
Type a town and land on what a room of plastering comes to at that town's own plasterer rate.
All 30 towns, by regionWhat plastering costs by the square metre
The audit behind this page read 29 competitor pages and found six of them pricing per square metre.
Every one of those six priced the whole job.
None separated the labour out.
The data from Methvin is published in square metres an hour, so a labour rate per square metre falls straight out of it, which is the one number this page can publish that the rest of that page one cannot.
| Task | In a day | Labour a square metre |
|---|---|---|
| Skimming, internal walls under 2.5 m | 46m² | £5.00 |
| Skimming, internal walls over 2.5 m | 42m² | £5.48 |
| Ceilings, topcoat skimming | 22m² | £10.45 |
| Ceilings, one bonding coat and one skim | 11m² | £20.91 |
| Browning undercoat, walls under 2.5 m | 19m² | £12.11 |
| Browning undercoat, walls over 2.5 m | 18m² | £12.78 |
| Plasterboard to ceilings | 31m² | £7.42 |
How to work out the labour in a plastering job
- 01Measure the walls and the ceiling separatelyA ceiling skims at less than half the speed of a wall, so putting the two areas together loses the difference that decides the day.
- 02Divide by the published rateAccording to Methvin, skimming walls under 2.5 metres runs at 46 square metres in a 7 hour day on average.
- 03Multiply the days by a day rateAt the £230 benchmark that gives labour, and the plaster, boards, waste and margin all still have to go on top.
A ceiling is 2.1 times the labour of a wall per square metre, because it is skimmed overhead.
That single fact is why a small room with a ceiling in it is close to a full day and the same room's walls alone are not.
How many rooms a plasterer can skim in a day
Google asks this question on the results page for plastering costs, and it is answerable from the register rather than from opinion.
The answer is about one.
The ceiling is what decides it.
Walls in a day
46m²
At the register's average rate for walls under 2.5 metres.
A small room has 25.8 square metres of wall, so its walls alone are well inside a day.
A whole small room
0.7 to 1.1
Days, walls and ceiling, at the fast and slow published rates.
So roughly one small room a day, and the ceiling is what uses the second half of it.
A whole large room
1.2 to 1.8
Days for a 4.5 by 4 metre room.
Which? publishes 2 days for skimming over the existing plaster in a medium room, which is its own figure and covers more than the skim.
The full production rate register, with the labourer column that must never be added to the plasterer's hours, is on how long plastering takes.
The £230 day rate these figures are multiplied by, with the spread the price guides publish behind it, is on the plasterer day rate page.
What the guides charge for the whole job
19 readings published by Checkatrade, MyJobQuote, MyBuilder, HaMuch, Which?, taken off the live pages on 5 September 2026.
The scope column is the one to read, because 16 of these prices cover materials and prep as well as the plasterer, and only 3 are labour on its own.
Only the labour rows compare directly with the figures above.
The rest are a different measurement.
A guide quoting a room covers the plaster, the boards, the beads, the tape, the skip, the travel and the margin along with the plasterer's hours, and none of those appears anywhere in the arithmetic at the top of this page, which is the single most important thing to understand before setting one against the other.
| Guide | What it prices | Published figure | Covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Checkatrade | Plaster a small room, 9 square metres | £1,100 | the whole job |
| Checkatrade | Plaster a large room, 18 square metres | £1,900 | the whole job |
| Checkatrade | Skim plaster a wall, per square metre | £24 a square metre | the whole job |
| Checkatrade | Plasterer labour, a day | £300 | labour only |
| MyJobQuote | Plaster a room, average | £630 | the whole job |
| MyJobQuote | Plaster a small, medium and large room | £450 to £650, £600 to £850 and £850 to £1,150 | the whole job |
| MyJobQuote | Skim over existing plasterboard, per square metre | £15 to £25 a square metre | the whole job |
| MyJobQuote | Plaster a ceiling, average room | £390 | the whole job |
| MyJobQuote | Plasterer day rate, labour only, by region | £180 to £250 in the north, £200 to £275 in the Midlands, £250 to £350 and above in London and the south east | labour only |
| MyBuilder | Plaster a small, medium and large room | £350 to £750, £430 to £1,000 and £570 to £1,800 | the whole job |
| MyBuilder | Wall skimming, per square metre | £6 to £12 a square metre | the whole job |
| MyBuilder | Ceiling plastering, per room | £250 to £750 | the whole job |
| HaMuch | Skim a room | £550 | the whole job |
| HaMuch | Plaster a medium sized room, walls only | £600 | the whole job |
| HaMuch | Skim a 10 square metre ceiling | £180 | the whole job |
| HaMuch | Plasterer day rate, UK average and range | £170 on average, £120 to £400 | labour only |
| Which? | Skim over existing plaster, small room walls, 2.1m by 2.2m | £300 to £1,000 over 1 to 2 days | the whole job |
| Which? | Skim over existing plaster, medium room walls, 3.3m by 3m | £400 to £1,250 over 2 days | the whole job |
| Which? | Plaster a medium ceiling, 3.3m by 3m, overboarded | £350 to £1,200 over 1 day | the whole job |
On the labour rows alone, the guides put a plasterer's day between £120 and £400.
This site's £230 benchmark sits inside that, which is the only straight comparison on this page.
Every other row is a job price, and reading one of those against our labour figure would be comparing a shopping bill with a wage.
What this page does not publish
Two figures a plastering page ought to carry and this one will not invent.
Both gaps are real.
Neither is filled here.
How long plaster takes to dry
This register says nothing about how long plaster takes to dry before it can be painted, and this site holds no sourced UK drying figure for it either.
A fresh skim is not ready for a decorator the same day.
How much longer it needs, this page will not invent.
What jobs took
The decorating guide can put published labour constants beside real job durations reported by a named professional decorator.
No plastering equivalent exists, so every day figure on this page is arithmetic on the constants alone, which is what the work should take rather than what jobs are reported to take.
Which? is the exception and it is quoted as Which?.
Its plastering page publishes job times of its own, and they sit in the readings table above rather than being folded into our days.
Heads up
Production rates are shown as Methvin publishes them, and the plasterer day rate is this site's published benchmark.
Hours, days and money are derived from those two on an assumed 7 hour working day.
Figures are modelled estimates for guidance, never quotes.
Common questions
The same answers the structured data on this page gives a search engine, word for word.
How much does it cost to plaster a room?
The labour in skimming the walls and ceiling of a 4 metre by 4 metre room works out at £257 to £385 on published production rates and the £230 plasterer day rate.
That is labour on its own and it is our arithmetic.
MyBuilder publishes £350 to £750, £430 to £1,000 and £570 to £1,800 for small, medium and large rooms, and prices like those carry plaster, boards, waste and margin as well as the plasterer's time.
How many rooms can a plasterer skim in a day?
About one, on the published average rate, and the walls of two small ones if there is no ceiling in it.
According to Methvin, the average rate for skimming walls under 2.5 metres is 46 square metres in a 7 hour day, and a small room has 25.8 square metres of wall.
Adding the ceiling is what turns that into a full day, because a ceiling skims at less than half the speed of a wall.
How much is plastering per square metre?
In labour alone, and on data from Methvin, £5.00 a square metre to skim a wall and £10.45 to skim a ceiling.
Published per square metre prices run far higher because they are the whole job: MyBuilder publishes £6 to £12 for wall skimming and Checkatrade publishes £24.
The distance between those and ours is everything that is not the plasterer's time.
How long does plaster take to dry before it can be painted?
This register says nothing about how long plaster takes to dry before it can be painted, and this site holds no sourced UK drying figure for it either.
A fresh skim is not ready for a decorator the same day.
How much longer it needs, this page will not invent.
The decorating guide can publish manufacturer recoat windows because Dulux Trade publishes them, and no plaster equivalent exists in this repo.
So the honest answer here is that a fresh skim is not ready the same day and this page will not put a number on how much longer.
Take the working
The labour figures here are ours and the room prices are the guides', and a table reproduced from this page should keep the scope column that says which is which.
The plastering card carries the labour figure for a room, and the link goes to this page.
<a href="https://thedayrate.co.uk/plasterer/cost-to-plaster-a-room/"><img src="https://thedayrate.co.uk/og/what-does-plastering-cost.png" alt="What plastering costs in labour, from published production rates, The Day Rate Report" width="1200" height="630"></a>
The labour 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.