Day rate, per room or per metre? How to price a decorating job

Three decorators price the same bedroom. One says £220 a day and it'll be a day and a half. One says £390 for the room. One measures up and says £10.40 a square metre.

They may all be charging the same money. What differs is who pays if the walls turn out worse than they looked.

That's the real choice between the three, and it's worth making on purpose rather than out of habit.

Three units, three places to put the risk

A day rate puts the risk on the customer. If the job runs over, they pay for it. You can't lose, but you can't gain either. Finish early and you've earned less.

A fixed price, per room or per job, puts the risk on you. Hidden prep comes out of your pocket. So does the gain when a job goes quicker than you priced it.

Measured rates, per square metre and per linear metre, put the risk in the measuring. Get the quantities right and the price follows. Price from someone else's measure and you inherit their method.

None of these is the proper way. They suit different jobs.

What customers are told about day rates

It helps to know what the other side has been reading.

Citizens Advice tells householders that a quote should include "a fixed total price - not a daily rate". Its reason is blunt: with a daily rate there's a risk the trader strings the work out. If they're offered one anyway, it tells them to get three things in writing. How many days the work will take. How many hours count as a day. And when the trader needs their go-ahead to work more days.

MyJobQuote tells its readers to agree a fixed price rather than a daily rate, so costs don't spiral if the work takes longer.

So a bare day rate now starts from a position of suspicion. That's worth knowing before you offer one.

What a day rate has to come with

A day rate is perfectly lawful. Two pieces of law shape how you offer it. This is my reading of them, not legal advice.

The first is older. Before a customer is bound, you have to give them the total price including taxes. Where that can't reasonably be worked out in advance, you give "the manner in which the price is to be calculated". Agree the job at the customer's house and it counts as an off-premises contract. There the information has to be on paper, unless they agree to another format.

The second is new. It has been in force since 6 April 2025. Where a total can't reasonably be calculated in advance, the information you give must be "such that it enables the consumer to calculate the total price". It also has to be as prominent as any price you do give.

"£220 a day" on its own doesn't let anyone calculate a total. A day rate with an expected number of days, the hours in a day, the cost of materials and a stop-and-ask point does. That happens to be the list Citizens Advice gives customers.

I found no official guidance applying this to a decorator's day rate in so many words. The competition regulator's guidance does accept that home improvement traders often quote a firm price only once they've seen the job.

One more thing, because it catches people. What you say about the job can become a term of the contract if the customer relies on it. "About three days", said to someone who then says yes, is not a throwaway remark unless you qualified it when you said it.

The trade's own code points the same way. The Painting and Decorating Association says members quote in writing unless the work is too intricate to quote fairly. Only then is day work suggested, and the client is told the rates for labour and materials before any work starts.

How painting is actually measured

If you've never priced by the metre, the rules exist and they're free. RICS publishes its measurement rules, NRM2, as a download.

For decoration they come down to this:

• Over 300mm girth: measured in square metres. Walls, ceilings, doors.
• 300mm girth or less: measured in linear metres. Skirting, rails and other narrow runs.
• Isolated areas of a square metre or less: counted, not measured.
• You measure what's actually covered. Openings aren't paint, so they come out.
• Ceilings above 3.5 metres are kept separate.
• Frames are girthed from one edge to the other, over the architraves and stops.
• Deemed included: cutting to a line, different colours on different surfaces, and rubbing down between coats.

That last line matters. On a measured rate, cutting in is in the price. You can't add it afterwards.

For paint, the manufacturers publish coverage, and it varies more than people assume. Dulux Trade Vinyl Matt is rated at up to 17 square metres a litre. Leyland Trade Vinyl Matt is about 14. Water-based satinwood from Dulux Trade is up to 12, against 17 for its solvent version. Those are best-case figures on smooth surfaces.

The labour is the part you can't look up. BCIS and Spon's hold labour times for painting, and both are paid products. I found no UK body that publishes them free.

Which brings us to the number everyone quotes. "A decorator covers about 40 square metres a day" comes from one marketplace's price guide. It gives no source. It doesn't say one coat or two, or whether prep is in. It may be roughly right for a finished wall on sound plaster. It isn't a standard.

One room, three ways

Take a room 3.3 metres by 3, which is the medium room Which? uses in its price survey. Give it a 2.4 metre ceiling, one standard door and a window 1.2 metres square.

• Walls: 12.6 metres round by 2.4 high is 30.2 square metres. Less the door and window, about 27.3.
• Ceiling: 9.9 square metres.
• Total: 37.2 square metres.

Now price it from the published guides.

• Per square metre. Checkatrade gives £10 to £20 for walls and ceilings. That's £372 to £744.
• Per room. MyBuilder gives £260 to £400 for a standard bedroom, walls and ceiling. Checkatrade gives £350 for a small room and £450 for a medium one.
• By the day. MyBuilder says a day to a day and a half, at £150 to £250 a day. That's £150 to £375, plus paint.

Same room, same guides, and the per-metre figure comes out at roughly double the day-rate one. That isn't the market. It's the guides disagreeing with each other.

Now do it with your own numbers. Say your day rate is £224 and your records say this room is a day and a half.

• Labour: 1.5 days at £224 is £336.
• Paint: two coats on 37.2 square metres at 17 a litre is 4.4 litres, so one 5-litre tin. Allow £50, which is MyJobQuote's figure for a standard room.
• Fixed price: £386.
• Per square metre: £386 across 37.2 is £10.38.

Three ways of writing the same £386.

Then the walls turn out to need two days of filling and sanding, and the job takes two and a half. On the day rate you bill £560 plus paint. On the fixed price you've still earned £386. Take the paint off, spread the rest over the days, and that's £134 a day.

That is what the choice of unit decides.

What sits under your rate

The published day rates aren't a safe guide to your own. Checkatrade's page puts the UK day rate at £300 in its table and £325 in its summary box. MyJobQuote gives £150 to £250 a day for painting a bedroom and £100 to £200 a day for painting the outside of a house. None of them shows a method you could check, and the only guide that gives a sample is Which?, with nine traders.

There is a harder floor than any of them. The wage agreement between the Federation of Master Builders and Unite sets the craft rate at £16.76 an hour from August 2026. Its own sum then shows what that employee costs once holidays, National Insurance and pension are counted. It comes to £22.15 for every productive hour, before overheads.

Eight hours of that is £177.

So a decorator charging £150 a day is charging less than it costs a builder to employ one, before either has paid for a van. That's the test worth running on your own rate, and working out what to charge takes you through it properly.

For comparison, the Office for National Statistics puts the median for employed painters and decorators at £15.83 an hour, as of April 2025. I found no published figure for self-employed decorators.

Which unit for which job

• A standard repaint you can see. Fixed price. It's what the customer has been told to expect, and the gain is yours when it goes well.
• Anything hidden. Wallpaper over plaster you can't inspect, old distemper, water damage. Day work, with the days, the hours and the stop-and-ask point written down. Or a fixed price for what you can see, and a written variation for what you find.
• Large, plain, repetitive areas. Exterior masonry, commercial units, a run of identical rooms. Measured rates.
• Working to someone else's bill. Check how they measured before you price. One estimator points out that surveyors don't all measure a door frame the same way, so the same frame can show as very different lengths on two bills.
• Subcontracting to a builder. The Construction Industry Scheme applies, and the deduction comes off labour, not materials you paid for. Show the two separately.

Paint, VAT and deposits

Briefly, because each has its own traps.

Paint. I found no published data on how decorators charge for it. What I can tell you is list prices on 3 October 2026. A 5-litre tin of Leyland Trade Vinyl Matt in white was £26.99 at Toolstation. Trade-account prices are lower and aren't public. On day work, the association's code says to tell the client the materials rate up front.

VAT. If you're registered, the total you quote a householder has to include it. If you aren't, and the work is growing, the threshold is £90,000.

Deposits. Customers arrive with two different ceilings in their heads: Citizens Advice says no more than 25%, and Checkatrade says be wary above 10%. Which? says most decorating jobs are paid on completion. The Painting and Decorating Association's code doesn't set a figure.

Where grafter.ly fits

The price list a decorator starts with in grafter.ly has all three units on it. There's an hourly and a day rate, prices per room, and exterior masonry per square metre. Each one is a starting figure for you to replace with your own.

Labour on a quote can go in by the hour or as a fixed fee. On hourly lines, you confirm the hours you actually worked before the invoice goes out.

And it keeps what a job invoiced against what it cost you. That record is where your own rate per room and per metre comes from. Did you make money on that job? covers how to read it.

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Sources. Consumer law: the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, section 230; the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013, Schedule 2 and regulation 10; the Consumer Rights Act 2015, section 50; and the Competition and Markets Authority's price transparency guidance, paragraph 4.19. What customers are told: Citizens Advice on getting building work done; Which? on what decorators cost; and Checkatrade on paying a tradesperson. The trade: the Painting and Decorating Association's code of practice; RICS, NRM 2, work section 29; BCIS on its painting and decorating rates; and an estimator's note on door frames. Coverage, from the manufacturers' data sheets: Dulux Trade Vinyl Matt, Leyland Trade Vinyl Matt, and Dulux Trade's solvent and quick-dry satinwood. Wages: the BATJIC rates for August 2026 to March 2027 and the sheet itself; and the Office for National Statistics, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, Table 14, 2025 provisional. The price guides, each as it stood on 3 October 2026: Checkatrade's decorating guide; MyBuilder's room guide; and MyJobQuote on bedrooms and exteriors. The paint price is Toolstation's. All checked 3 October 2026.

This is general information about pricing and consumer law, not legal advice on a particular quote.