Calculator
Roofing cost per m², built up properly
The record
- Checked by
- Carl Winson
- Built from
- CIJC Working Rule Agreement
- Wage date
- 20 July 2026
- Grades
- craft rate and general operative
The working
- 2 × tradesperson at £16.40
- £32.80
- Gang wage, per hour
- £32.80
- + 35% on top of wages
- £44.28
- × 8 hours on the tools
- £354.24 a day
- Strip tiles and battensoff and away to the scaffold£354.24 ÷ 35 m² × 1.20 = £12.15/m²
- Felt and battenbreathable underlay, battens to gauge£354.24 ÷ 50 m² × 1.20 = £8.50/m²
- Re-tile - interlocking concrete10.5 tiles to the m²£354.24 ÷ 35 m² × 1.20 = £12.15/m²
- Re-tile - plain tile or slate60 to the m² - pick one tile typeslid to zero - out of the price
Benchmark
£32.80/m² labour
CIJC rates · tradesperson £16.40/hr · gang of 2 · 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 - £425.09 - 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.
Why roofing prices as four operations rather than one rate
Because you are rarely asked for all four. A roof that has been stripped already needs felt, batten and tile. A sound felt under slipped tiles needs the tiles off and back on and nothing else. A re-roof needs the lot. One blended “per square metre for a new roof” figure prices the job you were not asked to do.
Slide any operation to zero and it leaves the price - that is the whole reason the card is built that way. Strip and re-tile with the felt left alone is two operations, not four, and about a third off the labour.
The tile you are laying is the biggest number on the job
Interlocking concrete tiles run around 10.5 to the square metre; plain tiles and natural slate run around 60. That is six times the handling, six times the fixing, and it shows up as a two-person team covering 30 to 40 m² a day on interlocking against 15 to 25 on slate.
The labour roughly doubles, and it is not a skill difference - it is a units-per-hour difference. If somebody has quoted you a rate without telling you which tile they assumed, that rate means nothing yet.
What moves the day, once the tile is decided
- Pitch and access. A steep roof slows everything - the material has to be carried up rather than walked across, and a roofer on a steep pitch is working from the batten rather than standing on the roof.
- Cut and detail. Hips, valleys, dormers and abutments are where the day goes. A simple gable roof of the same area is a different job from a hipped roof with three dormers, and the square metres do not say so.
- Weather. Roofing is the trade that stops completely. You cannot leave a roof open in rain, so a wet week is not a slow week - it is a week where the strip does not start at all, because starting it commits you to closing it.
- Stripping into a skip. Old concrete tiles are heavy and there are a lot of them. Where the skip stands, and how far it is from the scaffold, changes the strip rate more than most people expect.
Scaffold is not in this rate, and should not be
Scaffold is priced by lift and elevation with a hire period, not by roof area, so a small roof on a three-storey house carries more scaffold than a big roof on a bungalow. Folding it into a per-square-metre rate makes the rate wrong on every job whose shape differs from the one you assumed.
Put it in the job section as a lump sum. A roofer looking at a job usually knows the scaffold number before anything else, and that instinct is worth more than an average.
Pricing a re-roof end to end
Open the job section, put the roof area in, and the included operations spread across it. Add the scaffold and the skips as lump sums, and the minimum charge holds the floor if the job is under a day - which a small strip-and-re-tile often is, even though the gang still turns up, unloads and sets up.
Materials sit outside it all: tiles, battens, felt, ridge, nails, mortar or a dry ridge system. The card gives you the labour to price against, honestly, and leaves the rest where you can see it.
Questions people ask
How many roof tiles are there in a square metre?
Around 10.5 for interlocking concrete tiles at a 345mm gauge, and around 60 for plain tiles or natural slate at a 100mm gauge. That six-fold difference in units is why slate and plain tile roofs take roughly twice the labour per square metre of an interlocking concrete roof.
How much roof can two roofers strip and re-tile in a day?
A two-person team typically strips 30 to 40 m² of tiles and battens a day, felts and battens 40 to 60 m², and re-tiles 30 to 40 m² in interlocking concrete or 15 to 25 m² in plain tile or slate. A full strip and re-tile is therefore about three operations' worth of days on the same area.
Should a roofing quote include scaffold?
Usually as a separate line rather than inside the per-square-metre rate. Scaffold is priced by lift, elevation and hire period, not by roof area, so a small roof on a tall house carries far more scaffold than a large roof on a bungalow. Carrying it inside the rate makes the rate wrong whenever the building is not the shape you assumed.
Why is a slate roof so much more expensive to lay than concrete tiles?
Mostly units per square metre rather than skill. Slate and plain tiles run around 60 to the square metre against 10.5 for interlocking concrete, so there is roughly six times as much handling and fixing. Daily output falls from 30–40 m² to 15–25 m², which about doubles the labour cost per square metre.
Can you re-tile a roof without replacing the felt?
Yes, and it is a common job - tiles off, tiles back on, felt and battens left alone where they are sound. It is roughly a third less labour than a full re-roof. On the calculator, slide felt and batten to zero and price the strip and the re-tile only.
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
- 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
- Coving£7.08/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?
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