Painter and decorator day rate UK 2026: what to charge
Ask a hundred UK decorators how they quote and most will say by the room, because it is the number the customer asks for and the number every price guide publishes. It is also the reason the same decorator can earn £225 a day in one house and £150 in the next, for work that felt identical while they were doing it.
The awkward truth is that a room is not a unit of anything. Two rooms with the same floor plan can differ by twelve square metres of wall before you have opened a tin, because one of them has a Victorian ceiling and the other has a 1990s one. A flat room price charges both the same. Only one of them pays properly.
Here are the 2026 bands, the geometry that decides which side of that line a job lands on, and a way to set a per metre price off your own day rate instead of off a national table.
A UK painter and decorator day rate in 2026 is typically £180 to £280 for a self-employed decorator working alone, rising to £240 to £320 in London and falling to £165 to £220 in the North of England. A two person team is £320 to £480 a day combined. A single room repaint runs £380 to £650. All labour only, before materials and VAT.
Day rate, per room, per metre: three prices for the same wall
Decorators use three pricing models and they are not interchangeable: a day rate sells your time, a room price sells a guess at the geometry, and a per metre price sells the actual surface, which is the only one of the three that corrects itself when the ceiling is high.
| Model | Typical 2026 figure | Where it works | Where it costs you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day rate | £180 to £280 | Prep heavy period work, occupied houses, anything open ended | Every year you get faster |
| Per room | £380 to £650 | New build and modern stock where rooms are genuinely alike | High ceilings, cornice, stairwells |
| Per square metre | £8 to £11 a m² | Anything you can measure, which is most interior work | Small fiddly rooms with heavy woodwork |
Most decorators in Britain end up using all three without deciding to: a day rate for the builder, a room price for the domestic customer who asked "how much for the lounge", and no per metre rate at all. That third gap is the expensive one, because per metre is the model that quietly protects you from the rooms that are bigger than they look.
What UK painters and decorators actually charge in 2026
The national baseline for a self-employed decorator working alone in 2026 is £180 to £280 a day, and the spread from the North of England to London is about £100 a day for the same work.
Published 2026 bands for one self-employed decorator, labour only, before materials and VAT. Bars are scaled to the top of each band.
Two numbers underneath the headline matter more than the headline does. A two person team charges £320 to £480 a day combined, which is less than two solo rates, so putting a second decorator on the job only pays if the pair finish in materially less than double the speed. And an apprentice alongside a senior decorator is £100 to £140, which is the cheapest way to buy back the sanding and the masking that is eating your billable hours.
Sources: 2026 regional day rate bands, room prices and team rates from Best Builders, with per square metre figures for ceilings and woodwork from Bark's 2026 price guide. All figures labour only, excluding materials and VAT.
Why a room price loses money on a high ceiling
The same floor plan at a 3.2 metre ceiling carries about twelve square metres more wall than at 2.4 metres, a third more paintable surface, and a flat room price charges nothing for any of it.
The maths is not complicated, which is what makes it so easy to skip on a first visit. Wall area is the perimeter multiplied by the height. A four metre by three and a half metre room has a fifteen metre perimeter. At a modern 2.4 metre ceiling that is 36 square metres of wall. In a Victorian or Edwardian room at 3.2 metres it is 48. The floor plan a customer shows you is identical. The job is not.
Two "medium rooms", one flat £450 price
| Room A: 36 m² wall, 14 m² ceiling, 2.4 m high | 50 m² |
| Days at 25 m² a day with prep and two coats | 2 days |
| £450 quoted, so you earn | £225 a day |
| Room B: 48 m² wall, 14 m² ceiling, 3.2 m high | 62 m² |
| Plus cornice, picture rail and platform work above 2.7 m | 3 days |
| £450 quoted, so you earn | £150 a day |
| Cost of one flat price on one period room | £210 |
Built from published 2026 UK room prices (£380 to £650 for a single room repaint at one and a half to two and a half days) and a mid band day rate. Your coverage rate will differ. The direction of the error will not.
Two rooms like that a month is £5,000 a year, given away to houses that were, on paper, the same as the ones that paid. And the customer never notices, because the sting sits entirely on your side of the quote.
Set your per metre rate from your own day rate
Your per square metre price is your own day rate divided by 25, because 25 square metres of wall and ceiling a day is what prep, cutting in and two coats actually allow, which puts a £220 a day decorator at about £9 a square metre.
Every published per metre table in Britain has the same flaw: it is somebody else's day rate divided by somebody else's speed. Derive your own and it stays right when you move house, raise your rate or get quicker.
The arithmetic is one line. Take the day rate you want. Divide it by the square metres you genuinely cover in a day including prep. Published UK figures put a single room repaint of walls, ceiling and woodwork at one and a half to two and a half days for roughly 50 square metres, which lands almost exactly on 25. At £180 a day that is £7.20 a metre. At £220 it is £8.80. At £280 it is £11.20.
Then two adjustments, both of which are the difference between a rate and a quote. Add about 15 per cent to anything worked above 2.7 metres, because platform work is slower and the cutting in around cornice is slower again. And price woodwork separately at around £15 a square metre, since doors, frames, skirting and window reveals take far longer per metre than an open wall does.
Which leaves the part that decides whether the rate ever gets applied correctly: what you write down on the first visit.
A carpenter faces the same choice between selling hours and selling a measured scope, and it resolves the same way, which is covered in what carpenters charge per day. Plumbers are the outlier, because their unit is genuinely the hour, and that comparison is in the plumber hourly rate breakdown.
Prep is half the job and no room price pays for it
Filling, sanding, washing down and masking routinely take as long as the painting, and they are the one part of decorating a customer cannot see when the job is finished, which is exactly why a fixed room price never covers them.
The customer is buying two coats of colour. You are selling a surface. On a sound modern wall those are nearly the same thing. On a 1930s British semi with hairline cracking, old blown paper and thirty years of gloss on the skirting, they are not, and the gap is where the day disappears.
The fix is to quote the prep as its own line rather than burying it. "Fill and sand throughout, one day" is a line a customer will accept and even respect. The same day hidden inside a single number reads as you being expensive.
When the rate is right and the diary still is not full
A price rise on eight jobs a month is worth less than a ninth job, and for most decorators the ninth job is blocked by nobody being able to see the work rather than by the price of it.
When I audited 100 real UK trade websites by hand, decorators among them, 47 of the hundred showed no genuine reviews and no photographs of their own finished work. Several were still running stock images of somebody else's living room. For most trades that is careless. For a decorator it is fatal, because the finished surface is the entire product, and a photograph of it is the only proof that exists.
The second pattern was scope. Interiors, exteriors, wallpapering, spraying and commercial work are five different searches at five different budgets, and a site that says only "painting and decorating services" answers none of them. Naming the work and the towns is how you stop being asked to do a single bedroom when what you want is the whole house. There is more on that in whether painters and decorators need a website.
If the enquiries are the problem, not the rate
I build websites for UK painters and decorators that show the finished rooms, name the jobs you want and the towns you cover, and put your reviews where a customer reads them. 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 painter and decorator website design or apply at sitework.uk/#apply.