Calculator
Painter and decorator 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
Painter and decorators 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 should a self-employed painter and decorator charge an hour?
Start from what you need to earn and work upwards, because nobody is paying your holiday. If you want the equivalent of £20 an hour in your hand, you have to cover the four or five weeks a year you are not working, the days you are ill, a pension if you pay yourself one, and public liability cover - roughly a quarter on top - before any overheads or profit. That puts the charge-out at around £30 an hour.
For comparison, an employed decorator is graded at the construction craft rate of £16.40 an hour, which a firm charges out at nearer £26.57. A self-employed decorator charging less than that is working for less than an employee costs, and carrying more risk to do it.
Why preparation is where decorating quotes go wrong
Because preparation is most of the work and none of the visible result. Filling, sanding, caulking, masking and washing down take longer than putting paint on, and the customer is looking at the paint. A quote built around “two coats of emulsion” with the preparation assumed is a quote that pays for the easy half of the job.
It gets worse on old work. Stripping paper, making good blown plaster, dealing with nicotine or damp staining and sealing bare patches can be a day and a half before a finish coat goes anywhere. The reader knows their own job better than any published average - what the calculator is for is turning that knowledge into a number that stands up.
What decorators forget is inside the hourly rate
- Access equipment. Steps, towers, hop-ups and occasionally a scaffold for exterior work. Owned or hired, it is your money.
- Consumables. Brushes, rollers, sleeves, tape, dust sheets, filler and abrasives. Small individually, and a genuine percentage of turnover across a year.
- Drying time. A room needing three coats is three visits or a lot of standing about, and on exterior work the weather decides.
- Quoting time. The evenings spent measuring up and writing quotes for jobs you do not win are an overhead of being self-employed, and they are paid for by the jobs you do win.
Questions people ask
What is a painter and decorator's day rate?
An employed decorator at the construction craft rate costs a firm about £212 a day charged out, built from £16.40 an hour in wages plus on-costs and margin. A self-employed decorator working from what they want to earn, plus their own holiday and cover, plus overheads and profit, commonly lands between £200 and £280 depending on the work and the area.
Should I charge by the day or by the room?
By the room or by the job wherever you can estimate it confidently, because you keep the benefit of working efficiently. Use the day rate to check it: divide the price by the days you honestly expect, including preparation and drying, and see whether it clears what a day costs you.
How much extra should I charge for exterior work?
Enough to cover access and lost days, both of which are real and neither of which is in an hourly wage. Exterior work carries ladders or towers, weather that stops you without notice, and preparation that is heavier than interior work. Price the access as a lump and the weather as fewer productive days rather than inflating the hourly rate.
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.