Calculator
Roofer 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
Roofers 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 does a roofer charge a day?
An employed roofer costs £16.40 an hour in wages at the construction craft rate, charging out at around £212 a day for one person once on-costs and margin are added. Roofers almost always work in pairs, so a realistic day on site is two of those, and the labourer or apprentice loading out makes it more.
Whole roofs are usually priced as a job or per square metre. The day rate is what repairs, chasing leaks and storm work get sold at, and it is also the number that tells you whether a fixed price on a re-roof was ever going to work.
Why weather belongs in a roofing price rather than in an excuse
Because a roofer cannot work in the wet or the wind, and the wage still gets paid. Across a British winter a roofing gang loses days it has no control over, and those days are either priced in somewhere or they come out of the margin on the jobs that did run.
The honest way to handle it is fewer productive days rather than a higher hourly rate. A job you would finish in eight working days might take eleven calendar days in February, and pricing it as eight is how a fair rate becomes a losing job. The reader knows their own weather and their own roof better than any published average - the calculator is for turning that into a figure.
What sits outside the roofing rate entirely
- Scaffold. On a domestic re-roof the scaffold can approach the cost of the labour, and it is priced by lift and elevation, never by roof area. It belongs on the quote as its own line.
- Skips and tipping. A strip produces a substantial amount of heavy waste with a disposal cost attached to it, and a transfer note to go with it.
- What is found underneath. Rotten battens, failed felt or a broken rafter are not visible when you quote. Say what is included and what is not, in writing, before you strip.
- Working at height. Edge protection, harnesses and the training behind them are real standing costs that only get paid for through the rate.
Questions people ask
How much does a roofer charge per day?
An employed roofer charges out at around £212 a day, built from £16.40 an hour in wages plus employment on-costs of about 35% and a margin of about 20%. Roofers work in pairs on most jobs, so a day on site is usually two of those plus whoever is loading out, and scaffold is separate again.
Why is scaffold quoted separately from roofing work?
Because it is priced by lift and elevation rather than by roof area, so it does not fold sensibly into a per-square-metre or per-day rate. A rate that averaged scaffold into it would be wrong on every job that is not the shape the average assumed. Price it as its own lump sum.
How should I allow for bad weather when pricing a roof?
By allowing fewer productive days, not by putting the hourly rate up. Work out honestly how many working days the job takes, then how many calendar days that becomes in the season you will be doing it, and price the gang for the time it is genuinely committed.
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.