Carpenter day rate UK 2026: what should you charge?

Two carpenters in the same UK town, same qualifications, same van. One charges £240 a day. The other quotes no day rate at all: he prices kitchens by the unit and second fix by the room, and on an identical six-day kitchen he takes roughly £500 more. Nothing in the timber explains that gap. It was decided before either of them picked up a tool, in how the job was priced.

That is the awkward part of carpentry rates. Carpentry is not one trade with one number. It is three jobs sharing a job title, first fix, second fix and kitchen fitting, and a day rate genuinely suits only one of them. The published bands still matter, because they tell you whether you are in the right ballpark for your region. But a band is the start of the pricing conversation, not the end of it.

Here are the 2026 figures, then the arithmetic that decides what you actually keep.

What UK carpenters actually charge in 2026

The UK midpoint for a carpenter day rate in 2026 is around £255 to £300, inside a working range that starts at £180 for general carpentry and reaches £450 or more for specialist joinery in London.

Region does most of the work in that spread, and it moves the number further than experience does. A general carpenter in Newcastle and a general carpenter in London are doing the same job for a difference of about £100 a day.

Sources: published 2026 rate bands from BookaBuilderUK and labour-only kitchen figures from Best Builders. All figures labour only, excluding materials and VAT, and assuming a self-employed carpenter on a seven to eight hour day.

Do not stop at the table. The single most useful twenty minutes you can spend on your own pricing is ringing the three nearest carpenters as a customer and asking what they would charge to hang six internal doors. A real local number beats any national band, this one included.

First fix, second fix and kitchen fitting are three different rates

First fix is a day rate trade, second fix is a per-room trade and kitchen fitting is a per-unit trade, and running one flat day rate across all three underprices two of them.

First fix: you are selling days, and someone else sets the price

Studwork, joists, roof timbers, door linings. It is programme work on a builder's site, the scope changes weekly, and nobody can honestly quote it in advance. A day rate is the right instrument here. It is also the one part of carpentry where your rate is capped by somebody else, which is the next section.

Second fix: the room is the unit

Doors, skirting, architrave, stairs, flooring. This is measurable, repeatable and yours to price. Published 2026 figures put hanging an internal door at £70 to £120 each, skirting and architrave at £180 to £300 per room, and timber flooring at £25 to £45 per square metre.

Six doors at £95 is £570. That is a comfortable day and a half for a carpenter who has done it a thousand times, so on the day rate it would have been about £360. The customer is not being overcharged: they are paying for the fact that your six doors close properly in January and in July.

Kitchen fitting: a different customer entirely

Kitchen work is priced as a project, not a shift, and the customer expects it that way because that is how every showroom quotes. Bespoke fitted joinery goes further again, with wardrobes and units running £1,500 to £5,000 and beyond on a one to three week build. Quoting either of those by the day is the fastest way to be the cheapest carpenter in a British market that is not shopping on price.

The subcontract ceiling nobody mentions

A main contractor's day rate is a ceiling rather than a rate: the builder prices the job to the customer and pays you a slice of it, so no amount of speed or skill moves your number on that job.

Site work is steady, and steady is worth something. But understand what you have agreed to. The builder carries the risk, holds the customer relationship, and keeps the difference between what the job sold for and what the trades cost. You cannot out-earn that structure from inside it.

Most carpenters who lift their income meaningfully do not do it by negotiating with builders. They do it by shifting the mix, so that a bigger share of the year is direct domestic work they price themselves. Plumbers face the identical structure with letting agents and it plays out the same way, which is covered in what plumbers charge per hour. The rate is not the lever. The customer is.

A medium kitchen, priced two ways

Priced per unit with the extras itemised, a ten-unit kitchen fit comes to about £2,100 in labour against £1,560 for the same six days at £260 a day, a difference of roughly £540 for identical work.

The second invoice is also the harder sell, oddly. A customer reading "six days at £260" starts counting your hours. A customer reading a priced kitchen with the strip-out and the worktop listed is reading a scope, and scope is what people say yes to.

Which pricing model does this job take?

Price per job whenever the work can be measured before you start, keep a day rate only where the end genuinely cannot be seen, and never let the customer pick the model for you.

The days a carpenter does not bill

A £260 day rate is not £67,600 a year: most self-employed UK carpenters bill nearer 200 days, which is £52,000 of turnover before the van, the tools and the timber runs come out.

Every trade loses days to holiday, illness and quoting. Carpentry loses a few extra that are specific to the work, and they rarely make it onto anyone's spreadsheet.

There is the measuring or templating visit that happens weeks before the fit and gets billed to nobody. There is the morning collecting timber, ironmongery and the one hinge the merchant did not have. There is the kitchen delivery that arrives short or damaged and costs you the day you had allocated to it. And there is standing time, waiting on a plasterer or an electrician to clear a room you cannot work in yet.

Four of those a month is roughly 45 days a year, and at £260 that is £11,700 you never invoiced. Recovering half of it is worth more than a £20 rate rise, and it comes from quoting faster and writing standing time into the terms, not from working Saturdays. The same arithmetic run for electricians is in what electricians charge per day.

When the rate is right and the diary still is not full

A rate rise on eight jobs a month is a smaller number than a ninth job, and for most carpenters the ninth job is blocked by being hard to find rather than by being expensive.

When I audited 100 real UK trade websites by hand, carpenters among them, 58 of the hundred named no town, postcode or service area anywhere a customer or Google could read it. They were not losing work on price. They were not eligible to be found for it. A carpenter whose site never says "fitted kitchens and second fix across Horsham and Crawley" is competing for nothing.

The other pattern was scope. Kitchens, wardrobes, staircases and decking are four different searches and four different budgets, and a site that says only "carpentry services" answers none of them. Naming the jobs is how you stop being asked to hang doors when what you want is the kitchen. There is more on where the work actually comes from in how carpenters get more work.

If the enquiries are the problem, not the rate

I build websites for UK carpenters and joiners that name the jobs you want, the towns you cover and the work you have actually finished. I will make a free mockup of your real business before you pay anything. If you want it, it is £600 to build, split £300 to start and £300 on final approval, then £20 a month for hosting, SSL, security, domain renewal and unlimited small edits, rolling and cancellable any time. Live in about a week. See carpenter website design or apply at sitework.uk/#apply.