How much do Plumbers, Joiners & Electricians charge in 2025?

How much do plumbers, joiners and electricians charge, and how to calculate labour rates and materials cost in construction in a single cost?

Residential Construction Cost Calculator

Here, I’ll explain my residential cost calculator spreadsheet for self builders and small builders, which you can download for free, to use for your own house builds, house extensions and self build projects. 

Break it down into 3 sections

The first thing I’ll do, after I’ve figured out what I actually want to build, size shape etc, is split my price into 3 sections. Today I’m going to focus on the first part of that puzzle, and the bit that seems to cause the most difficulty. I’m going to talk about Labour rates, another way of saying, how much to employ tradesmen such as bricklayers, carpenters and joiners for your project, how do you begin to estimate that? Let’s explain my method.

Labour Rates

Assuming an 8 hour day including travel, your can get a feel by first considering what the cost per hour might be for your chosen trade, and then, by multiplying by the number of hours, remembering to include travel time to your project.

Then you can get your day rates for

• Labourer rates in construction
• Tradesman Labour rates 
• You can adjust these for different trades and travel times

Example Tradesman Labour rates

Here are some suggestions for rates, this would be what currently, as the date of the post noted above, would be what I see as an average for the uk as a whole. Areas such as the South East are going to be more.

• Plumber £300 per day
• Roofer £400 per day
• Heating engineer £300 per day
• Joiner £280 per day
• Mason £350 per day
• Plasterer £350 per day but may work on square metre basis for skim.
• Tiler – usually they price on a square metre basis including grout and adhesive

You can then start to add in building materials

Building Materials 

• Cost per linear metre 
• Cost per square meter
• Pack numbers
• Sheet sizes
• Wastage

If you’ve had a look at the download section of my website, you’ll see there’s a few pricing templates, and you will see I’ve populated the day rate boxes in the Labour section for tradesmen and labourers based on a figure that I think could be said to be an average for the country. 

If you’re reading this in another part of the world, it might be a little bit less, or it might be a little bit more, and usually dependent on supply of labour, but I’ve noticed that rates in Australia, North America and Western Europe are pretty similar, once you convert the currency. 

The uk has a chronic labour shortage in the building industry, and that’s why rates continue to go up. . 

Estimating build costs – only 2 variables to worry about

I receive many questions, when I talk about estimating build costs for construction projects in my videos, saying specifically that something I have broken down in my costing is usually far too expensive. My answer to them is always the same, I ask them which of the two variables, would they adjust, 

1. Cost per day, or 
2. Time taken.  

Just alter the box in the spreadsheet and you’ll get the figure you’re looking for. If you think the time I have allowed is too short it too long, you can adjust that too. 

I’ve had comments on my channel with people saying £250 a day is crazy expensive.  Rather than try to argue with them, I suggest the need to work backwards from whatever the correct day rate figure they think should be entered is, £350, £250, £150,

Overheads

Then we need to list out and subtract from the day rate all the overheads a tradesman would have, 

• Van
• Diesel
• Parking
• Insurances
• Tools
• Wear and tear
• Admin
• Time wasted Unsuccessful quotes
• Training 
• Holidays

………and so on….

What’s left over would be the equivalent of their actual salary over 365 days. Then you say, what in your opinion, based on your own salary and career, is a fair salary for a tradesman, £50k, £35k, £20k? Same for a labourer, perhaps you think that labour should be earning the minimum wage. Up to you! Then you have your answer with some context for what is too expensive or too cheap.

Just remember, you have to find someone to actually agree to those rates as you’re trying to get prices for your build project.

Example cost calculation

The Labour and materials calculator here uses the comparison of suspended timber floor and concrete ground bearing slab, to see which is cheaper. You can watch the the full comparison, Concrete Slab v Timber Floor – Cost Compare & What’s Best.. here. 

Top download the cost templates, go to my resources page, and hope it helps you create more accurate costing estimates for your build projects.