CalculatorFree tool
Coving cost per m, built up properly
Start from the benchmark — published wages, a real gang, the costs on top of wages most people forget — then move anything you disagree with. The whole sum stays on the page.
The working
- 1 × tradesperson at £16.40
- £16.40
- Gang wage, per hour
- £16.40
- + 35% on top of wages
- £22.14
- × 8 hours on the tools
- £177.12 a day
- Fit and fillmitred, fixed and filled£177.12 ÷ 30 m × 1.20 = £7.08/m
Benchmark
£7.08/m labour
CIJC rates · tradesperson £16.40/hr · gang of 1 · 35% on top · overheads and profit 20%
Materials, scaffold and supervision are not included in this rate.
What’s in this?
- Employer's National Insurance — 15% above £5,000 a year
- Holiday pay — 12.07%
- Pension, auto-enrolment minimum — 3%
- CITB levy — 0.35% of payroll
- Sick pay, training and employer's liability insurance — the remainder
- At 0% this is a CIS subcontractor's labour price — National Insurance, holiday and pension are then theirs to carry, not the job's.
The location range is authored, not measured — our tender data says what was bought where, not what labour costs there.
Price a whole job with this ratePut in the job size and your lump sums — scaffold, plant, skip — and get the job total.
The minimum starts at a day of the gang, priced — £212.54 — because travel, unloading and setting up make a day the honest floor. Type your own, or 0 for none.
Put a job size in and the total appears here.
Coving is priced per metre, and the corners take the time
The run between corners goes up quickly. It is the mitres that take the day: measuring, cutting, offering up, adjusting and filling each internal and external angle so the profile runs through cleanly.
That is why a small room with four corners can price worse per metre than a long hallway with two. The metres are the same kind of measurement; the work behind them is not.
What changes the run rate
- Number of corners. The single biggest factor. A room with a chimney breast and an alcove either side has three times the mitres of a plain rectangle.
- Profile and material. Simple plaster or polystyrene coving is quick. Ornate plaster mouldings are heavier, need proper support while the adhesive grabs, and are far less forgiving to cut.
- How true the walls are. Coving finds every waver in a wall or ceiling line. Old properties mean packing, scribing and more filling than the same length in a new build.
- Access and height. A stairwell or a tall room is working off a tower rather than a hop-up, and everything slows down.
Finishing is part of the job, not an afterthought
Filling the joints and mitres, then sanding them so the profile reads as continuous, is what separates good coving from obvious coving. It is inside the benchmark output, and it is the reason 30 metres a day is realistic rather than the 60 you might get from fixing alone.
Painting is separate work, priced on the painting calculator. The coving, adhesive and filler are materials.
Set the rate to the rooms you have looked at
You know whether the job is four plain bedrooms or a Victorian front room with a bay, a chimney breast and picture rails to work around. Those are different days at similar metres.
Move the output to what you know it will run at, and the minimum charge will catch the small ones — a single room of coving is rarely a full day of work and always a full day of somebody turning up, setting out and clearing away.
Questions people ask
How much coving can be fitted in a day?
Around 30 metres a day for one person, including mitring, fixing and filling the joints. Rooms with many corners, ornate heavy profiles, uneven old walls or awkward access will all bring that down; long straight runs in plain profile push it up.
Why is coving priced per metre rather than per square metre?
Because it is a linear product following the junction between wall and ceiling — the area of the room is irrelevant to how much coving it needs. What the metres do not show is the number of corners, and the corners are where the time goes.
Why does a small room cost more per metre for coving?
Because the mitres do not scale with the length. A small room with four corners has as much cutting and fitting as a much longer hallway with two, so the same metre of coving costs more to fit. A day of somebody's time is also the practical minimum for any single room.
Does the coving price include painting?
No. Fixing and filling are this rate; decorating is separate work priced on the painting calculator. The coving itself, the adhesive and the filler are materials and sit outside every rate on this site.
Is ornate plaster coving slower to fit than standard?
Yes, noticeably. Heavier mouldings need supporting while the adhesive takes, are less forgiving to cut accurately, and show any error in the mitre far more clearly. Set the output lower than a plain profile rather than assuming the same run rate.
Where these figures come from
The wages are the national minimums agreed between employers and unions, republished each July. The costs on top of them are the statutory ones every employer actually pays. The outputs — how much a gang gets through in a day — are blended from published estimating guidance, and they are the part worth arguing with, which is why every one is a control you can move.
Other trades
- Bricklaying£35.68/m²
- Blockwork£23.84/m²
- Plastering£8.50/m²
- Rendering£38.34/m²
- Floor screed£2.83/m²
- Concreting£7.92/m²
- Tiling£17.71/m²
- Roofing£32.80/m²
- Block paving£25.56/m²
- Tarmac driveways£15.34/m²
- Resin driveways£16.61/m²
- Painting£14.17/m²
- Stud walls£17.71/m²
- Patios£31.95/m²
- Repointing£26.57/m²
- Plasterboarding£12.39/m²
- Decking£31.88/m²
- Fencing£25.56/m²
- Turfing£3.42/m²
- Loft insulation£4.27/m²
- External wall insulation£38.34/m²
- Soft strip£8.54/m²
- Hand excavation£85.41/m²
- Shuttering£8.50/m²
- Mesh and rebar£2.56/m²
Pricing a job like these?
HubTrack is where small construction firms keep their compliance documents, their jobs and their evidence trail in one place — method statements and risk assessments prepared for you to check and sign off, and a record of who signed what and when. The same engine that reads the contract documents behind this page reads yours inside HubTrack.