How to price a decorating job in 2026

Price a decorating job as measured days at your day rate, plus materials with a stated markup. The day rate is built from the wage you need, your running costs and a margin, not guessed: industry surveys suggest £150 to £350 a day for a self-employed decorator; the method below decides where in that band your number sits.

How do you work out your day rate from your own costs?

Add up the wage you need, the running costs and a margin; the day rate is the output, not a number you pick. Running costs means the van, insurance, fuel, consumables and the quiet weeks between jobs. For the shape of it, take one decorator’s published build-up: £140 a day in wages, £30 a day running costs and £10 profit, charged out at £250 a day. Copy the arithmetic, not the figures. Then sanity-check the wage line: BATJIC rates put employed, qualified decorators at £15 to £22 an hour, and a rate that pays you less than employment is set wrong. Where you work moves the number too; build from your own overheads. If turnover is heading past the GOV.UK VAT registration threshold of £90,000, as of Jul 2026, settle where VAT sits first. Done right, the output lands inside the national band; industry surveys suggest £150 to £350 a day, and the full benchmarks sit on the day-rates guide.

How do you estimate how many days a job will take?

Walk the job before you price it; the scoping visit is where the days are won or lost, and no number leaves your mouth before it. As a base, a straightforward room runs one to two days end to end. Prep is what moves it: flaking paint, blown plaster, wallpaper that fights the stripper, making good where the last trade got carried away. None of that shows in a photo and all of it eats days, so judge the surfaces by hand and count the days you can defend, not the days you hope for. There is no honest multiplier for bad walls; there is your eye, on the wall, before the number. Where the prep cannot be judged until the surface is opened up, price it under the quote-or-estimate rule further down rather than guessing a fixed figure.

How do you cost materials, and what markup goes on them?

List the materials off the scope you measured, price them at what they cost you, and put a stated markup on top. Paint is the big line: a 10L tin of trade vinyl matt retails around £55, as of Jul 2026, and the quote should name the product, not ‘paint’. Then the small stuff that never makes the list but always leaves the van: filler, caulk, abrasives, tape, dust sheets. As an allowance, around £30 a room covers sundries, per trade commentary; price it rather than donate it. Markup is where the published advice splits: trade commentary puts materials markup anywhere from 10% to 30%; insurer trade guidance suggests 10 to 20%. Pick a figure inside those ranges and hold it on every job; the markup pays for the time and the risk of supplying, not padding.

What should a painting and decorating price list include?

A price list covers the work you repeat: walls, ceilings and papering, each carrying a per-m² rate you have back-calculated from your own day rate and speed. Per-m² pricing fits repeatable interiors and straight repaint work, where the surfaces are sound and the prep is predictable; day-rate pricing fits everything that is not. The table below is the shape of a decorator’s own list, not what the market charges. For calibration, insurer trade guidance puts interior walls at £8 to £16/m², ceilings £7 to £10/m², and wallpapering £12 to £16/m², or £350 to £500 a room. Where your back-calculated rate falls in each band is your business; that it is written down before the phone rings is the point of the list.

How do you price a room from measurements to the final figure?

Measure first, then let the arithmetic carry it. This room is 4m x 3.5m with 2.4m ceilings, two coats throughout, and the walls and ceiling work out as the table shows. For paint, say one 10L tin of trade vinyl matt at around £55; for litres and tins on a different spec, run your own room through the paint calculator. From earlier, a straightforward room runs one to two days end to end, so call this one a day and a half with the prep priced in, at £200 a day.

The 15% is a chosen point inside the markup ranges above, and the total lands where insurer trade guidance prices a medium room repaint around £400; when the build and the market agree, the number goes in writing.

What extra goes on for exterior work?

Price exterior work off its own, higher m² band; the premium lives in the gap between the exterior and interior lines, never in a percentage on top. For the band, the same guidance puts exterior work at £15 to £25/m², with the whole exterior of a 3-bed semi at £1,100 to £1,500. The gap is there because exterior days are harder to bank. Weather decides when you work, and a job priced with no slack pays for the rained-off days out of your margin. Access decides how fast you work: what a ladder reaches in a morning, a tower reaches by the end of the day. Height adds kit and handling time. The premium is not padding; it is the cost of days the weather and the building control.

Should you give a quote or an estimate?

The rule is quote what you can measure, estimate what you cannot. A quote is a fixed price on a measured scope: walls you have taped, surfaces you have judged by hand, days you can defend. An estimate is your best read on work that will not show itself until it is opened up, and it moves when the job does. Say which one you are giving, in the document, because the customer hears both words as ‘the price’. The trade body backs this: the Painting and Decorating Association’s Code of Practice expects a written quotation, or disclosed daywork rates where a fair quote is impossible, with the rates disclosed before the work starts, not argued afterwards. None of it is about pricing high or low; as the PDA’s code puts it, a fair price yields a reasonable profit for a fair job.

What goes in the written quotation?

Six components: the scope in writing, the price against that scope, daywork rates disclosed where daywork applies, deposit terms, timings, and what the guarantee says. Scope is the one that saves you: the rooms, the surfaces, the coats, the product, and what is excluded, because the excluded line is the one that gets argued. Deposit terms are stated, whatever you set them at. On guarantees, PDA members guarantee their workmanship for six months, and saying so in the document reads as confidence, not small print. C&F quoted in WhatsApp messages for longer than it should have, and the arguments about what was included only stopped when every price went out as a written PDF quote. A written quote gets read differently, and disputes die in writing. The same components are what a quoting app assembles; Pherox’s decorators page shows the decorator’s version.

Is your rate in line with what decorators actually earn?

Your rate is in line if, after the running costs come out, it pays you at least what you could earn employed. GoConstruct puts decorator salaries at £26,000 newly trained rising to £53,000 experienced, which is the employment spread to hold your build-up against. Those are salaries; self-employment stacks the overheads and the risk on top, which is what the margin line in the build-up was for. Earning less than the band you left means the rate is subsidising your customers; earning above it is the margin doing its job. For the full benchmark picture by region and by business stage, the day-rate numbers live at painter and decorator day rates UK. This page owns the method; that one owns the benchmarks; your price is the two agreeing.