UK Trade Day Rates by Region 2026: Price Guides vs Job Adverts

Key Findings: UK Trade Day Rates by Region in 2026

• Price guides sit about £81 a day above adverts. The median guide figure outside London is £265, against a median advert of £184.
• Adverts barely move by region. 92% of the adverts we found paid between £150 and £250 a day, whether in London, Doncaster or Belfast.
• London electricians are the starkest example. A guide puts a self-employed London electrician at £400 to £700 a day. The two London electrician adverts we found paid £184 and £192 to £208 (hourly rates converted at 8 hours).
• Some London adverts pay less than the regions. A London tiling advert paid £255 a day against £300 for a CIS tiler in Doncaster, and a London decorating advert paid £175 against £200 to £220 in Belfast.
• Earnings data agrees with the adverts, not the guides. ONS puts London skilled-trades employee pay just 3% above the UK median, and Hudson Contract’s self-employed construction earnings put London 7% above the national average, with the South East higher than London.
• The floor is £131.20 a day. That is the CIJC craft rate for directly employed building operatives from 20 July 2026. A self-employed rate close to it means working for less than an employee once a van, tools and insurance are paid for.

Why Price Guides and Job Adverts Disagree

They measure different things. A price guide usually describes what a homeowner pays a self-employed tradesperson who finds their own work, quotes, invoices and carries the risk. A job advert usually describes what an agency or main contractor pays for labour on their site, often hourly, with the work found for you. Neither is wrong, and the gap between them is the margin a tradesperson earns by winning direct work. Averaging the two would give a number that is true of neither, so we keep them apart.

Two cautions. Most adverts quote an hourly rate, which we converted at 8 hours; a 9 or 10 hour site day pays more. And the advert samples are small, from the adverts that stated a rate on Reed and ContractorUK in September and October 2026, so treat a single advert as one data point, not the going rate.

Pay Floors and Earnings Data

• CIJC Working Rule Agreement: craft rate £16.40 an hour (£131.20 a day at 8 hours) and general operative £13.18 an hour (£105.44 a day) from 20 July 2026, for directly employed operatives in Great Britain. NASC, 7 Jul 2026
• JIB electrical grades 2026 (from 5 January 2026, with transport provided): Approved Electrician about £161 a day nationally and £180 inside the M25. We could only confirm these on a secondary summary, not the JIB’s own PDF. elec.training
• ONS ASHE 2025 (provisional): median employee pay in skilled trades is £16.67 an hour UK-wide, from £16.01 in the North East to £17.24 in London. ONS, 23 Oct 2025
• Hudson Contract, November 2025: self-employed construction subcontractors in England and Wales averaged £1,070 a week, from £820 in the North East to £1,182 in the South East (London £1,149). Hudson Contract, 11 Dec 2025

Day Rates by Trade and Region

Each table shows the published guide ranges and the individual adverts we found for each region. Where a source only publishes a combined figure, such as “Midlands”, we show it under each region it covers and say so. A blank means we found no figure we could verify, not that the trade is not in demand there.

Electricians

No verified figures yet for electricians: East of England, Northern Ireland.

More on pricing: Electrician day rate guide.

Plumbers

No verified figures yet for plumbers: Northern Ireland.

More on pricing: Plumber day rate guide.

Gas engineers

No verified figures yet for gas engineers: East of England, Yorkshire and the Humber, North East, Northern Ireland.

More on pricing: Gas engineer day rate guide.

Builders

No verified figures yet for builders: East of England, Yorkshire and the Humber, North East, Wales, Northern Ireland.

More on pricing: Builder day rate guide.

Bricklayers

No verified figures yet for bricklayers: East Midlands, West Midlands, North East, Northern Ireland.

More on pricing: Bricklayer day rate guide.

Groundworkers

No verified figures yet for groundworkers: West Midlands, North East, Wales, Northern Ireland.

More on pricing: Groundworker day rate guide.

Joiners and carpenters

No verified figures yet for joiners and carpenters: South West, East of England, North East, Northern Ireland.

More on pricing: Joiner day rate guide.

Roofers

No verified figures yet for roofers: South West, East of England, Yorkshire and the Humber, North East, Wales, Northern Ireland.

More on pricing: Roofer day rate guide.

Plasterers

No verified figures yet for plasterers: South West, East of England, North East, Northern Ireland.

More on pricing: Plasterer day rate guide.

Painters and decorators

More on pricing: Painter and decorator day rate guide.

Tilers

No verified figures yet for tilers: South West, East of England, Northern Ireland.

More on pricing: Tiler day rate guide.

Kitchen and bathroom fitters

No verified figures yet for kitchen and bathroom fitters: South West, East of England, East Midlands, West Midlands, Yorkshire and the Humber, North West, North East, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland.

More on pricing: Kitchen fitter day rate guide.

Landscapers

No verified figures yet for landscapers: South West, East of England, North East, Northern Ireland.

More on pricing: Landscaper day rate guide.

Tree surgeons

No verified figures yet for tree surgeons: South East, South West, East of England, East Midlands, West Midlands, Yorkshire and the Humber, North West, North East, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland.

More on pricing: Tree surgeon day rate guide.

How We Built This Data

In October 2026 we searched job boards (Reed, ContractorUK and others), published price guides, trade bodies and earnings data for day rates in each trade and region, collecting 504 data points in total. On this page we only include figures that we read on the source page itself, dated 2025 or 2026. We left out:

• Figures we only saw in search results because the page was blocked or the advert had expired
• Permanent and employed job adverts, so the advert column only compares subcontract, agency and contract work
• Figures worked out from something else, such as a whole bathroom job cost divided by days
• Directory averages that changed between visits
• Sleepless Tradesman and Tradehand, which both publish regional rate tables, because TradeStack HQ has a business relationship with them. Some of Sleepless Tradesman’s tables are also calculated from a national average rather than observed.

Hourly rates are converted at 8 hours and labelled. Adverts expire within weeks, so we will refresh this data regularly and update the date at the top. Spotted an error or have a source we missed? Tell us.

Using This Data

Journalists, trade bodies and other sites are welcome to use these figures with a credit to TradeStack HQ and a link to this page. For the full dataset, email hello@tradestackhq.com.

FAQs

TradeStack HQ helps UK tradespeople find the best tools to run smarter businesses. All figures were checked at source on 17 October 2026 and are shown with their publisher and date. They are a guide, not advice on what you should charge. See how we test and check.