What tradesmen charge in Sussex
Sussex sits inside the South East band, and the South East runs roughly 30 to 45 per cent above the national midpoint. That is the single most useful fact for anyone setting a rate between Chichester and Brighton, and it is also where most published guidance stops. What it does not tell you is why a sparky in Hove and a sparky in Horsham can both be correctly priced at numbers £15 an hour apart.
It is not affluence. It is housing stock, access, and how far you drive between jobs. Those three things explain almost all the variation across the county, and they are worth understanding before you decide you are underpaid.
Tradesmen in Sussex charge within the South East band, roughly 30 to 45 per cent above the national midpoint. That puts electricians at £70 to £100+ an hour or £300 to £400 a day, and plumbers at £65 to £100 an hour. Call-out fees add £50 to £80. These are regional figures, not a town-by-town price list.
The South East bands, and what they are not
Published 2026 rate data covers the South East as a region, so any figure quoted for a specific Sussex town is an inference from that band rather than a measured local rate.
| Trade | South East hourly | National comparison |
|---|---|---|
| Electrician | £70 to £100+ | £50 to £85 |
| Plumber | £65 to £100 | £45 to £75 |
| Electrician, day rate | £300 to £400 | £250 to £400 |
| Call-out fee | £50 to £80 | £60 to £120 |
Be careful with this: these are South East regional bands from published 2026 rate guides, applied to Sussex. Nobody publishes a verified Brighton-versus-Chichester survey, and any article that shows you one has almost certainly made it up. Use the band as your floor and ceiling, then price the job in front of you. The national picture by trade is in electrician day rates for 2026.
Why Brighton and Horsham price differently
The difference between Sussex towns is housing stock and access, not affluence: dense terraced conversions produce short awkward jobs, while detached period property produces longer jobs that can be fixed-priced.
Brighton and Hove is conversions, terraces and flats. Lots of jobs, mostly small, with parking that eats twenty minutes at each end and a fair chance the stopcock is in a neighbour's cupboard. That pushes the effective hourly rate up because the billable proportion of the day is lower.
Horsham and Chichester run to detached and period housing with driveways. Bigger jobs, more of them fixed-priced, less dead time. The headline hourly rate can look lower while the day earns more. Worthing, Shoreham-by-Sea and Lancing sit between the two, which is exactly why they are the most competitive patch in the county.
The same split runs through how customers find you, not just what they pay. Density changes the search as well as the housing stock: people in Sussex search in two distinct patterns, with Brighton typing "near me" and the market towns naming the town outright, which is why a Horsham page earns its keep and a Brighton one often does not.
Price the conditions, not the postcode
Charging more for a job because the town looks wealthy is how a tradesperson loses repeat work, because neighbours compare numbers and the reason for the difference has to survive being said out loud.
If a job costs you an hour of parking, a permit and two trips to the van, that hour belongs in the price and you can say so. If it costs you nothing extra and you have added twenty per cent because the house is nice, that is a conversation you cannot have honestly, and in a county where people recommend trades over the fence it will find you eventually.
The practical version: set a base rate, add a travel band beyond a stated radius, and add access costs where they are real. Then the quote explains itself without you having to.
This also settles the awkward question of what to do when a good customer moves house. If your pricing is built from conditions rather than postcodes, the answer is simply the new conditions, and nobody has to feel they are being penalised for moving to a nicer street. Trades who price by area end up quietly avoiding that conversation, which is how long relationships get dropped for no good reason.
The coastal seasonality nobody prices for
The coastal strip from Brighton through Shoreham-by-Sea to Worthing carries a landlord and holiday-let cycle that concentrates work into spring and late autumn, which is a scheduling problem long before it is a pricing one.
Rental stock turns over between tenancies, and holiday lets get their remedial work done before the season and after it. If a decent slice of your book is landlords along that strip, your year is not flat, it is two humps with a hollow in the middle of the summer and a longer one after Christmas.
Most trades respond by discounting into the quiet weeks, which trains customers to wait. The better answer is to sell something different in those weeks: planned maintenance, safety certificates, the jobs a landlord has to do eventually and would rather do cheaply than urgently. That is a rate conversation you win, because you are the one offering. The wider version of this is in what to fix before the quiet months.
What the band means for a newly self-employed trade
Starting at the bottom of the South East band is sensible for the first six months, but staying there past a full diary is the most expensive mistake a new Sussex trade makes.
The first version of the mistake is understandable. You have no reviews, no photographs and no reputation locally, so you price to win work and build a base. Fine. The second version is the costly one: the diary fills, the reviews arrive, and the rate never moves, because moving it feels like a risk you cannot afford while you are busy.
The test is simple. If you are turning work away, or booking more than three weeks out, the market is telling you the number is low. Put it up on new enquiries only and watch the win rate. If it barely moves, you were leaving money on every job for months. If it drops slightly, that is the market working properly and you are now earning more for less time on the tools.
The real Sussex problem is not the rate
Between Brighton, Worthing, Shoreham-by-Sea, Lancing, Horsham and Chichester a homeowner can gather four quotes inside a ten-mile radius, so being found early matters more than being cheapest.
This county is dense with good trades. The customer is not short of options and is not working very hard to find them. What decides it is usually who came up first, who answered, and who looked like a real business when they were checked at nine at night.
Which means the tradesperson quietly losing money here is rarely the one priced £5 an hour under the band. It is the one who is fourth in the search and second to reply, taking whatever is left. Fixing that is a different job from fixing your rate, and usually a more profitable one.
Worth being concrete about the size of it. If four trades quote and you win a quarter of the time, going from fourth-seen to first-seen does not move you from 25 per cent to 30. It moves you closer to being the quote the others get compared against, which is a materially different position: you set the number, and the customer has already decided they like you before the alternatives arrive. That is worth more than any rate rise you would dare put through in one go.
The counter-argument I hear is that word of mouth covers it. In Horsham or Chichester, over a long enough career, it partly does. But a recommendation in 2026 does not go straight to the phone. It goes to the name, typed into a search, to check the person is real before ringing. If nothing sensible comes back at that moment, the recommendation quietly does not convert, and you never find out it happened.
What a local customer actually checks
A Sussex homeowner comparing trades looks for the town named in plain words, a real phone number, recent photographs and a business that looks like it will still exist next year.
Naming the towns matters more than people expect, because it is literally what gets typed. "West Sussex" is weaker than "Worthing, Shoreham and Lancing" for the simple reason that nobody searches for a county when they want someone this week. The same goes for the small professional signals: a business email address on your own domain reads differently from a Hotmail address, on a quote for four thousand pounds.
If you are paying to shortcut the visibility problem, the economics of that are worth checking first in Google Local Services Ads for UK trades, because in a compact county the organic and map-pack routes are often cheaper than they look.
If you want to be the first quote, not the fourth
I build websites for trades across Sussex that name the towns you cover and say plainly what you do. I will make a free mockup of your actual business before you pay anything. If you want it, £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, cancel any time, live in about a week. See trade website design in Sussex or apply at sitework.uk/#apply.