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Carpenter or joiner 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
Carpenter or joiners 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.
Is a joiner paid more than a carpenter?
No, not by the agreement. Both are graded at the construction craft rate, £16.40 an hour from July 2026, and the words are largely regional - joiner in the north and in Scotland, carpenter in the south, for work that overlaps almost completely on a building site.
Where a real difference exists it is between site work and bench work. A bench joiner making stairs and windows in a shop is doing a different job from a site carpenter fixing first fix, and shop work is usually priced by the item rather than by the day. If you are pricing bench work, the day rate here is a costing input rather than a quote.
Why first fix and second fix should not be priced at one rate
Because the work per day is completely different, and only one of them is measured in metres. First fix is joists, studs, noggins and roof timbers - heavy, fast, and the square metres pile up. Second fix is doors, architrave, skirting and ironmongery, where a day is spent scribing to walls that are not straight and a carpenter with thirty years in hangs perhaps six or seven doors properly.
A firm that prices a whole house at one blended day rate is averaging those two, and the average is only right if the mix on the job matches the mix in the head of whoever set the rate. It usually does not. Price the fix you are actually doing.
What a day rate hides on price work
Most site carpentry on housing is on price - so much a plot, so much a roof - and a fast fixer on price earns well above any day rate on this page. That is not an argument against working the day rate out. It is the argument for it, because the day rate is how you tell whether a price is worth taking.
- Divide the price by the days. If a plot pays £1,400 and takes six days, that is £233 a day. Against a charge-out of about £212 for an employed carpenter, that is thin once anything goes wrong.
- Count the days honestly. Including the half day at the end nobody counts, and the day lost because the plot was not ready.
- Materials and consumables. Fixings, glue and blades on price work are usually yours. They are not in any rate on this page.
Questions people ask
What is a carpenter's day rate in 2026?
Build it rather than quote a remembered figure. An employed carpenter at the construction craft rate costs £16.40 an hour in wages; with employment on-costs around 35% and overhead and profit around 20% that is roughly £26.57 an hour, or about £212 for an eight-hour day. Self-employed carpenters carrying their own holiday and insurance work from a different on-cost figure.
Should a second fix carpenter charge more than first fix?
The wage is the same, so the hourly cost is the same. What differs is how much work a day produces, which is why second fix priced per door or per metre comes out dearer than first fix priced per square metre. If you are quoting by the day the rate does not change; if you are quoting by the item, it must.
Is price work better than a day rate?
It can be substantially better and it carries all the risk. The test is simple: divide the price by the days you honestly expect it to take, including the ones lost to the site not being ready, and compare that against your worked-out day rate. If it does not clear it comfortably, the price is paying you to take somebody else's risk.
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.