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Bricklayer day rate: what you pay, and what you have to charge
The record
- Benchmark wage
- £16.40 an hour
- Charged out at
- £26.57 an hour, £212.56 a day
- Agreement
- CIJC Working Rule Agreement, 20 July 2026
What the 35% is made of
What the wage does not show, and none of it is optional.
- Employer's National Insurance15% above £5,000 a year
- Holiday pay12.07%
- Pension, auto-enrolment minimum3%
- CITB levy0.35% of payroll
- Sick pay, training and employer's liability insurancethe remainder
At 0% you are pricing a CIS subcontractor's labour - National Insurance, holiday and pension are then theirs to carry, not the job's.
Working for yourself is a different sum and the tool knows it: 25% rather than 35%. Lower than an employer's 35% because there is no employer's National Insurance on your own labour - that 15% is the whole of the difference.
Where the wage comes from
Bricklayers are graded under the CIJC Working Rule Agreement at the craft rate rate of £16.40 an hour, effective 20 July 2026. The same promulgation the cost-per-m2 cards price from - en-GB-rates.json holds it too, and the two must move together each July.
That is an agreement rate - the negotiated floor for a graded operative, not what the market pays. The market pays more, and how much more is the thing nobody publishes. It is what the figures contributed through this page are measuring.
What is a bricklayer’s day rate?
An employed bricklayer costs £16.40 an hour in wages at the construction craft rate, which charges out at roughly £212 for an eight-hour day once employment on-costs and margin are added. But a bricklayer’s day rate is rarely one person’s day rate, and that is the thing worth getting right.
A working gang is two bricklayers to one labourer, because one labourer keeps two trowels supplied with mortar, brick and ties and no more. Price the two bricklayers and forget the labourer and you have taken roughly a quarter out of the labour cost of the job - and the labourer still turns up, still gets paid, and comes straight out of your margin.
Why bricklayers are usually on price, and what that hides
Most site brickwork is paid by the thousand rather than by the day, and a fast gang on price earns considerably more than the day rate above. The rate per thousand is the industry’s way of paying for output rather than attendance, and it works well until the job is not straightforward.
The thing it hides is that not all bricks take the same time. Straightforward stretcher bond runs around 500 bricks a day; a decorative bond, or a wall full of openings, reveals, cills and arches, can take that to nearer 300. That is a forty per cent swing in the hours for the same thousand bricks, and a price agreed on the first assumption and worked under the second is a price paid at two-thirds of the intended rate.
What is not in a bricklaying day rate
- Scaffold. Priced by lift and elevation rather than by wall area, so it never folds sensibly into a rate. Put it in as a lump sum.
- Materials. On facing brickwork the bricks usually cost more than the labour. Nothing on this page includes them.
- Winter. Bricklaying stops in a hard frost and slows in the wet. Days lost to weather are days your gang is paid for and the job does not advance.
- Setting out. The first course and the first lift take disproportionate time, which is why small walls are dear per square metre and big straight ones are cheap.
Questions people ask
How much does a bricklayer charge per day in the UK?
An employed bricklayer costs a firm around £212 a day charged out, built up from £16.40 an hour in wages plus employment on-costs of about 35% and a margin of about 20%. A self-employed bricklayer on price commonly earns more than this on straightforward work and less on complicated work, which is the trade-off price work carries.
Do I need to include a labourer in the price?
Yes, on any real brickwork. The standard gang is two bricklayers to one labourer, because one labourer supplies two trowels with mortar and materials. Pricing the bricklayers alone removes roughly a quarter of the labour cost from the job while the labourer still turns up and still gets paid.
Why is decorative brickwork so much dearer?
Because output falls by around forty per cent. A gang laying straightforward stretcher bond gets through roughly 500 bricks a day; the same gang on Flemish or English bond, or on a wall full of openings and detail, gets nearer 300. The wage per hour has not changed, so the cost per brick rises by the same proportion the output fell.
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.