How to price a job: a 2026 guide for NI tradespeople

How should you price a job?

Price from your cost, not from the competition. Add up the materials, your labour time at a rate that covers your overheads, the travel and access, then put a profit margin on top. The single biggest mistake is treating a day rate as take-home pay when it has to cover the van, the insurance, the tools, the unpaid hours spent quoting, and the days you cannot work. Get the cost base right and the rest of this guide is detail.

Day rate vs fixed price vs cost-plus: which should you use?

There is no single right method. The job decides. Use a day rate when the scope is genuinely open, a fixed price when it is well defined, and cost-plus when a big job is too uncertain to quote firm. The table below is the quick version.

One warning on day rates: they quietly punish the good. The faster and tidier you are, the less you earn for the same job, because you are selling hours instead of outcomes. As you get more experienced, move the well-defined jobs onto fixed prices so your skill pays you back instead of costing you.

What are typical day rates for NI trades in 2026?

Skilled NI trades in 2026 broadly sit between £200 and £360 a day, with electricians and heating engineers near the top and painters and labourers lower. Northern Ireland runs roughly 10 to 20 per cent below the GB mainland average, so a rate lifted from an English guide will usually be too high for the local market. Use the table as a sanity check, never as your price.

Source: UK day-rate datasets (Checkatrade and trade pay surveys), adjusted for the documented NI discount of roughly 10 to 20 per cent below the GB mainland and cross-checked against Indeed Northern Ireland salary data. Ranges are indicative starting points, not recommended prices. Your real rate is cost plus overheads plus margin.

How do you work out what to charge? The pricing formula

Every solid price is built the same way: materials, plus labour, plus overheads, plus margin. Skip a layer and you are working for less than you think.

• Materials at cost, listed separately, with a markup (see below).
• Labour: the hours the job will really take, at a rate that already includes your overheads.
• Travel and access: time on the road and any parking, skip hire or scaffolding.
• Margin: a profit percentage on top of all of the above. This is what funds slow months and growth, and it is the first thing trades drop when they feel they need to win a job.

Know the difference between markup and margin, because confusing them loses real money. A £100 cost with 20 per cent markup sells at £120, but that is only a 16.7 per cent margin. If you want a 20 per cent margin you need to sell at £125. On a big job that gap is the difference between a profit and a favour.

What overheads should you build into your price?

Your day rate is not your wage. Before a penny is profit, the rate has to cover everything it costs to run the business. These are the ones sole traders most often leave out.

• Van: finance or lease, fuel, insurance, tax, servicing and tyres.
• Insurance: public liability, and employer’s liability if you have anyone working with you.
• Tools: purchase, replacement, calibration, hire of anything big.
• Phone, fuel, and the time spent quoting jobs you do not win.
• Accountant, software, bank charges and certification or registration fees.
• Non-billable time: holidays, sick days, bad weather, admin, and the quiet weeks.

A useful test: take everything the business costs you in a year, divide by the number of days you can realistically bill (not 365, more like 200 to 220 after holidays, weather, admin and quiet spells), and you have the daily overhead you must clear before you earn anything. Most trades who do this sum for the first time discover their real rate needs to be higher than they have been charging. HMRC sets out which of these you can claim against tax in its guide to expenses if you are self-employed, and the free NI business support service nibusinessinfo.co.uk runs guidance on pricing and cash flow for Northern Ireland traders.

How much should you mark up materials?

A 10 to 20 per cent markup on materials is normal and fair. It pays for the time you spend sourcing, collecting, storing and guaranteeing them, and for the risk when something is faulty and has to go back. Passing materials on at exact cost means you work for free on a real part of the job. Be open about the markup if a customer asks; most expect it.

Do I need to charge VAT? The £90,000 threshold

You must register for VAT once your taxable turnover crosses £90,000 in any rolling 12-month period, the threshold that has applied since April 2024 and still stands in 2026. Below it, registration is optional. The trap for a busy one-person trade is sailing past £90,000 without noticing: you have 30 days to register, and you owe HMRC the VAT on your sales above the line whether or not you added it to your invoices.

If you work mainly for other VAT-registered contractors, the VAT domestic reverse charge for construction usually applies, which means you do not charge them the VAT and they account for it instead. It is easy to get wrong, so this is the point to get an accountant rather than guess.

Source: gov.uk VAT registration and the House of Commons Library VAT registration briefing. The £90,000 registration threshold (and £88,000 deregistration threshold) has been unchanged since 1 April 2024 and remains in place for 2026. Confirm the current figure on gov.uk before you act.

How does CIS affect what you get paid?

If you subcontract to a contractor in construction, the Construction Industry Scheme means they deduct tax from the labour part of your invoice and pay it to HMRC as an advance on your bill. The rate is 20 per cent if you are registered for CIS, 30 per cent if you are not, and 0 per cent with gross payment status. It is taken off labour only, never materials, so always itemise materials separately or you will have tax deducted on them needlessly.

CIS does not change your profit, but it does change your cash flow: that 20 per cent is money you get back against your tax bill later, not money you have lost, but you wait for it. Price and plan around the gap, especially in your first year.

Source: HMRC Construction Industry Scheme subcontractor guidance (gov.uk). Rates of 20 per cent (registered), 30 per cent (unregistered) and 0 per cent (gross payment status) apply for the 2026/27 tax year and are deducted from the labour element only.

Quote vs estimate: what is the legal difference?

A quote is a fixed price you commit to. An estimate is a best guess that can change. The words matter: a customer who accepts a written quote can hold you to it, while an estimate leaves room to move if the scope shifts, a distinction Citizens Advice spells out for the customers reading the other side of it. Whichever you give, put it in writing, label it clearly, and spell out what is included and what is not. Most pricing arguments are really scope arguments, and a clear written quote is the cheapest way to avoid them.

The mistakes that leave NI trades underpriced

The same handful of errors show up again and again, and they all end the same way: a trade who is busy but somehow never has any money.

• Pricing to match the cheapest competitor instead of to your own cost.
• Treating the day rate as wages and forgetting the overheads underneath it.
• Quoting verbally, then absorbing every change the customer asks for.
• Passing materials on at cost and giving away the markup.
• Confusing markup with margin and quietly under-earning on every job.
• Not building in a margin at all, so a single bad job wipes out the profit on three good ones.

The Northern Ireland angle

Two NI-specific pressures squeeze pricing. First, the market sits below GB rates, so you cannot simply import English numbers. Second, in border counties you are sometimes quoting against trades working in euro, which makes a clear, itemised, well-explained quote matter more than a low headline figure. Add the travel time that rural NI jobs eat up, and the lesson is the same: compete on clarity and reliability, not on being the cheapest. The trades who win steadily are the ones whose quotes the customer actually understands and trusts.

How NI Trades fits in

Pricing well only pays off if the right jobs reach you in the first place. NI Trades is a Northern Ireland-only directory with a flat monthly fee and no per-lead charges, so winning a better-priced job does not cost you a slice of the margin. When a homeowner posts a job, only three tradespeople are shown it, so you are quoting against two others, not twenty. See our plans and pricing, the Fair Billing Pledge, and sign up your trade when you are ready.

Frequently asked questions