Guide · tiling · rates 18 August 2026, prices read 7 September 2026
£20.82 a square metre
the labour in standard ceramic wall or floor tiling, worked from published production rates at the £229 tiler day rate, with not one tile in it.
Ask what tiling costs per square metre and almost every answer you get is the tiles.
The labour in standard ceramic tiling is £20.82 a square metre.
That is the £229 tiler day rate this site publishes over the 11 square metres a day the published production rates give.
Not one tile is in it.
Tiles are the expensive half.
The 4 guides further down publish £15 to £95 a square metre for the same labour, and £80 to £130 once the tiles and the adhesive go back in.
Every rate the register publishes, turned into money at the £229 tiler day rate.
The wide column is the slow and fast end of the published rate rather than a margin we have added.
All of it is ours.
None of it is materials.
A tiler who lays the register's average of 11 square metres in a day earns the £229 once, however many tiles that turns out to be, which is the whole of why a per square metre labour figure exists at all.
| Work | Square metres a day | Labour a square metre | Fast rate to slow |
|---|---|---|---|
| 150 x 150 mm ceramic, under 1.5 m2 per room | 7 | £32.71 | £28.63 to £38.17 |
| 150 x 150 mm ceramic, 1.5 to 2.5 m2 per room | 11 | £20.82 | £17.62 to £25.44 |
| 150 x 150 mm ceramic, over 2.5 m2 per room | 11 | £20.82 | £16.36 to £22.90 |
| 108 x 108 mm ceramic, under 1.5 m2 per room | 9 | £25.44 | £22.90 to £32.71 |
| 108 x 108 mm ceramic, 1.5 to 2.5 m2 per room | 12 | £19.08 | £16.36 to £20.82 |
| 108 x 108 mm ceramic, over 2.5 m2 per room | 13 | £17.62 | £15.27 to £20.82 |
| Grouting, on fixed tiles | 17 | £13.47 | £12.72 to £15.27 |
The register files every ceramic tiling rate under the area tiled per room, in three bands.
A splashback of under 1.5 square metres lays slower per square metre than a full bathroom wall, because the setting out and the edges dominate a small area.
Averaging the bands into one figure would overstate speed on the small jobs, so this page never does.
Cutting and edge tiles are published per tile as extra over, not per square metre, so the rates above are laying whole tiles on a prepared surface.
A wall with many cuts runs slower.
The smallest area is the dearest.
Fixing 150 mm ceramic on a splashback of under 1.5 square metres works out at £32.71 a square metre against £20.82 on a bathroom wall.
Grouting is published without an area band and works out at £13.47 a square metre, which is why the bathroom further down takes longer than its fixing rate alone suggests.
Your next step
For the tiler, the next step is the square metre price your own day rate gives rather than the one in the table above.
Put your day rate into the Rate Sorted calculator, already on tiler, and it works out the tiling price per square metre to quote.
Type a town and land on what a tiled bathroom comes to at that town's own tiler rate.
All 30 towns, by regionEvery derived figure on this page, with the production rate and the day rate it came from, in one file.
The labour figures here are free to use in a quote, a story or a fact check, and a credit with a link back is all we ask, under CC BY 4.0.
The tiling card carries the labour figure per square metre, and the link goes to this page.
<a href="https://thedayrate.co.uk/tiler/tiling-cost-per-m2/"><img src="https://thedayrate.co.uk/og/what-does-tiling-cost.png" alt="What tiling costs in labour per square metre, from published production rates, The Day Rate Report" width="1200" height="630"></a>Five tiled areas, three of them the size a named guide itself prices so the comparison further down is a comparison.
Every one of them is under two days.
The money is labour at the £229 day rate.
| The job | Area | Days | Labour | Fast rate to slow |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A splashback | 1.5 m2 | 0.2 | £49 | £43 to £57 |
| A shower enclosure | 2.5 m2 | 0.2 | £52 | £44 to £64 |
| A small bathroom floor | 5 m2 | 0.5 | £104 | £82 to £115 |
| A kitchen floor | 12 m2 | 1.1 | £250 | £196 to £275 |
| A bathroom's walls | 20 m2 | 1.8 | £416 | £327 to £458 |
A splashback
£49
A shower enclosure
£52
Three of those five areas are not ours.
Where an area is somebody else's, the row says so: this site, the same bathroom as the tiling duration guide.
A tiler pricing any of these would start from nearly this arithmetic and then add the tiles, the adhesive, the grout, the trim, the waste, the travel and a margin.
The published production rates give 11 square metres of standard ceramic in a 7 hour day.
3 of the 5 speeds the guides publish contain that figure.
The other two describe slower work.
| Guide | Surface | What it publishes | Ours sits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Checkatrade | Wall tiles | 10 to 15 square metres a day | inside it |
| Checkatrade | Floor tiles | 8 to 12 square metres a day | inside it |
| MyJobQuote | Floor tiles | 8 to 12 square metres a day | inside it |
| Pricing Penguin | Straightforward wall tiling | 5 to 8 square metres a day | above it |
| Pricing Penguin | Floor tiling | 4 to 6 square metres a day | above it |
The guides do not agree with each other either.
Where ours sits above a published speed, that guide is describing slower work than the register does rather than contradicting it, and the honest reading is that a tiler's day covers somewhere between 4 and 15 square metres depending on the job.
Every figure below is printed as its guide publishes it, on the date that guide states.
Read the scope column first.
The scope column is the whole point: 12 of these 19 figures are labour, 6 are the job with materials in, and 1 is the tiles on their own.
| Guide | Dated | What it prices | Figure | Covers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Checkatrade | June 2026 | Tiling 1 m2 of floor, labour only | £50 a square metre | Labour only |
| Checkatrade | June 2026 | Labour to tile 1 m2 of wall | £50 | Labour only |
| Checkatrade | June 2026 | Total cost to tile a floor or a wall | £110 a square metre | Labour and materials |
| Checkatrade | June 2026 | Tiling labour, a day | £200 to £350, average £300 | Labour only |
| Checkatrade | June 2026 | Fully tile the walls and floor of a bathroom | £800 to £1,200 | Labour and materials |
| Checkatrade | June 2026 | The tiles themselves, floor and wall | £20 to over £400 a square metre, average £50 | Materials only |
| MyBuilder | 21 August 2026 | What tilers charge per square metre | £20 to £40 a square metre | Labour only |
| MyBuilder | 21 August 2026 | Tiling per square metre including adhesive and grout | £80 to £130 a square metre | Labour and materials |
| MyBuilder | 21 August 2026 | Tiler labour, an hour | £20 to £40 an hour | Labour only |
| MyJobQuote | 20 July 2026 | Tiler labour, a day | £150 to £200 a day | Labour only |
| MyJobQuote | 20 July 2026 | Floor tiling labour, per square metre | £15 to £25 a square metre | Labour only |
| MyJobQuote | 20 July 2026 | A typical bathroom floor of around 5 m2 | £300 to £450 | Labour and materials |
| MyJobQuote | 20 July 2026 | A typical kitchen floor of around 12 m2 | £500 to £650 | Labour and materials |
| MyJobQuote | 20 July 2026 | Labour only, by floor area, 8 m2 to 30 m2 | £120 to £200 at 8 m2, up to £450 to £750 at 30 m2 | Labour only |
| Pricing Penguin | April 2026 | Standard wall tiling labour, ceramic | £25 to £50 a square metre, average £35 | Labour only |
| Pricing Penguin | April 2026 | Standard floor tiling labour, ceramic or porcelain | £30 to £60 a square metre, average £45 | Labour only |
| Pricing Penguin | April 2026 | Mosaic and detailed pattern labour | £50 to £95 a square metre | Labour only |
| Pricing Penguin | April 2026 | Tiler labour, a day, on a small job | £180 to £280 | Labour only |
| Pricing Penguin | April 2026 | A bathroom retile of 5 m2 of walls and 4 m2 of floor | £1,300 to £1,900 | Labour and materials |
Every labour figure this site derives lands inside the £15 to £95 a square metre those guides publish for tiling labour, which is worth saying because the two were worked out in completely different ways.
Two different methods landed in one range.
HaMuch was attempted three times on 7 September 2026 and returned an empty document each time, so it is recorded here as unread rather than as publishing nothing. Those are two different facts about a source and this site does not treat them as one.
Three things are missing here.
Inventing any of them would be easy and wrong.
Each one is a figure a reader might reasonably expect a page called what does tiling cost to carry, and each is left out because this site holds no named dated UK source for it rather than because it did not occur to anybody.
What the tiles cost
This site publishes no tile price, no adhesive price and no grout price, because it sources labour and nothing else.
Checkatrade alone puts tiles between £20 and over £400 a square metre, so the materials left out here can cost several times the labour left in.
How long adhesive needs
This register says nothing about how long tile adhesive needs before the joints can be grouted, or how long grout needs before a shower is used, and this site holds no sourced UK cure figure for either.
A tiled wall is not finished the hour the last tile goes up.
How much longer it needs, this page will not invent.
What real jobs took
The decorating guide can put published labour constants beside real job durations reported by a named professional decorator.
No tiling 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.
The same answers the structured data on this page gives a search engine, word for word.
Checkatrade, MyBuilder, MyJobQuote, Pricing Penguin publish between £15 and £95 a square metre for tiling labour, depending on the tile and the surface.
This site's own figure for standard ceramic wall or floor tiling is £20.82 a square metre, which is the £229 tiler day rate over the 11 square metres a day the published production rates give.
That figure is ours and the range is theirs, and neither includes a single tile.
On the published production rates this site cites, 11 square metres of standard ceramic in a 7 hour day, and 10 to 14 across the slow and fast ends of the same register.
3 of the 5 speeds the guides publish contain that figure and the rest are slower.
A wall with many cut tiles runs slower than any of them, because cutting is published per tile rather than per square metre.
Because it is labour and theirs is the job.
Of the 19 published figures on this page, 6 cover materials as well as labour and 1 is the tiles on their own.
Checkatrade alone puts tiles between £20 and over £400 a square metre, so the gap between the two numbers is the tiling, not a disagreement about tilers.
The labour in 20 square metres of bathroom walls is £327 to £458 at the £229 day rate, which is about 1.8 days of work.
Checkatrade publishes £800 to £1,200 for a whole bathroom and Pricing Penguin £1,300 to £1,900 for five square metres of walls and four of floor, both including the tiles.
This site publishes no whole bathroom price, because it holds no sourced figure for what tiles cost.
