VanlyYou are out on your own, the work is coming in, and a customer asks your hourly rate. Search how much should a joiner charge per hour in the UK and you get two useless answers: what a joiner earns employed, or what a joiner costs a homeowner. Neither is your rate. Your rate is the number that pays you properly once the workshop, the van, the tax and the hours nobody sees are covered. Here is how to find it.
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What joiners actually charge in the UK in 2026
Know the market, then move past it. Here is the shape of UK joinery pricing in 2026, from the cost guides your customers read before they ring you.
| What | Typical 2026 figure |
|---|---|
| Employed joiner, hourly | around £14 to £15 |
| Self employed, national average | around £27 |
| Self employed, experienced domestic work | £30 to £45 |
| Full spread across the UK | £20 to £50 |
| Day rate, general joinery | £200 to £400 |
| London and the South East | add roughly 20 to 30 per cent |
One thing worth noticing first. The day rate sources disagree by about £150, which is not a rounding error, it is the difference between a good year and a bad one. Some guides say £200 to £350, others say £250 to £400. Checkatrade's own carpentry price guide sits in the middle of that.
That spread is not sloppiness. It is the sound of two different trades being averaged into one number.
Joiner or carpenter, site or workshop
This is the bit every ranking cost guide skips, and it is the reason the averages are so wide.
The words joiner and carpenter get used interchangeably, but the two businesses underneath them price completely differently.
Site carpentry. First fix and second fix on somebody else's build. Often a day rate, often for a main contractor, often several weeks in one place. Predictable, steady, and someone else carries the risk of the job going wrong. You will usually be paid under CIS, so 20 per cent comes off before it reaches you. Our guide to the CIS scheme covers how to get that back.
Workshop joinery. Bespoke staircases, fitted wardrobes, alcove units, sash windows, a one off door. Usually priced as a whole job rather than by the hour, usually direct to a homeowner, and every hour of it is yours to organise and yours to carry.
These are not variations on a theme. A site carpenter's overheads are a van and a bag of tools. A workshop joiner's overheads include rent on a unit, dust extraction, a table saw, a planer thicknesser, and blade sharpening that never stops. If you do both, and plenty of joiners do, you need two numbers, not one.
Work out which one you are pricing before you quote anything.
Why the market rate is the wrong place to start
The going rate tells you what other joiners are willing to accept. It does not tell you what your business costs to run.
There is a specific reason joinery gets undercut harder than the gas and electrical trades. There is no mandatory registration. A gas engineer cannot legally touch a boiler without Gas Safe, and an electrician needs to notify certain work, so both trades have a floor under them. Anyone can call themselves a joiner tomorrow. That is not a complaint, it is just the market you are pricing into, and it means the bottom of the range is set by people who have not done this sum.
Start from your costs and your target income. Then check the market to see whether the number you arrived at is sellable in your area. That order matters. Market first is how you end up busy and skint.
The billable hours trap, and the workshop hours nobody sees
Here is where joiners lose more money than any other trade.
A working year looks like 52 weeks. Take off holiday, bank holidays and the week you are ill, and you are at about 46. Say 8 hours a day, five days, and that is roughly 1,840 hours.
You will not bill 1,840 hours. Nobody does.
Off that number come quoting and site visits, sourcing and collecting timber and ironmongery, travel, chasing invoices, the tax return, and the Saturday morning spent sorting the workshop out. For most trades that lands you somewhere near 60 to 65 per cent billable.
Joinery has an extra one that the other trades do not, and it is the big one. Workshop hours are invisible to the customer.
If you build a set of fitted alcove units, the customer sees two days of you in their living room fitting them. They do not see the three days in the shop machining, jointing, assembling and spraying. If you price that job on the two days they watched, you have just worked five days for two days' money. It happens constantly, because the customer's mental model of what they are buying is the bit they can see.
Every workshop hour is billable time. It just does not arrive as an hourly invoice, it arrives inside a priced job. Which means if you price the job wrong, the shop time is what you have given away.
Assume roughly 1,150 to 1,250 genuinely productive hours a year and you will be close.
Work out your own number in five steps
Do this with real figures. Five minutes.
Step one. Your target take home. What do you actually need to live on, after tax? Be honest, not modest. Say £38,000.
Step two. Add tax and National Insurance. As a sole trader, roughly a quarter to a third of your profit goes. To clear £38,000 you need to earn somewhere near £50,000. If you are weighing up trading structures, our post on sole trader versus limited company covers which one leaves you more.
Step three. Add your business costs for the year. Everything the business swallows before you are paid:
- Workshop or unit rent, plus power and heating
- Van, fuel, insurance, tax, servicing
- Public liability and tool insurance
- Machinery, hand tools, blades and sharpening, consumables
- Dust extraction and workshop maintenance
- Phone, accountant, software
- Waste and offcut disposal
A site carpenter might come in around £7,000 to £9,000. A joiner running a workshop is realistically £14,000 to £22,000 once rent is in it. Use your own numbers. Say £16,000.
Step four. Add it up and divide by billable hours. £50,000 plus £16,000 is £66,000. Divide by 1,200 billable hours and you get £55 an hour.
Step five. Sit with that number. It is higher than the £27 average, and that is the point. The average includes people not covering their costs. If £55 will not sell in your area, your options are to cut overheads, lift billable hours, or accept a smaller take home. What is not on the list is pretending the sum says something else.
Note what happens if you do the same maths as a site carpenter with a £8,000 overhead: £58,000 over 1,200 hours is about £48. Lower, because the workshop is not in it. Two businesses, two numbers.
The method is the same one we ran for electricians and plumbers. The overheads change, the sum does not.
The employed benchmark you have to beat
An employed joiner sits around £14 to £15 an hour, and every recruitment page will tell you so.
It is tempting to look at that, look at your £55, and feel like you are taking the mickey. You are not. The employed joiner gets holiday pay, sick pay, a pension, someone else's tools, someone else's van, someone else's insurance, and no unpaid Sunday doing the books. Strip all that out and £14 employed is worth roughly £28 to £32 self employed before you have made a penny more than they do.
So £28 is not your target. It is your break even against just getting a job. Anything below it and you would be better off employed, with your evenings back.
Hourly, day rate, or priced work
Three ways to charge, and joinery uses all of them properly.
Hourly suits repairs, snagging, hanging a door, easing a window. Short jobs where the scope is genuinely unknown until you are in it. Set a minimum charge, usually one or two hours, or the twenty minute jobs will eat your diary.
Day rate suits site work and longer fits where you are somewhere for a stretch. It is simpler to sell and easier for a contractor to budget. Our builder day rate post works through the same maths from the day rate end.
Priced work is where most workshop joinery should live, and where the money is. You quote the job, not the hours. If you are quicker than you estimated, that gain is yours, which is the reward for being good at this. Two rules make it safe. Price the shop time explicitly in your own workings, even though the customer only sees a total. And put a timber clause in, because you are quoting now and buying materials weeks later, and prices move. How to write a quote as a tradesman covers what that document needs to say to hold up.
Your hourly number underpins all three. Even on a fixed price job, you are checking the total against hours times rate before you send it.
Charging the right rate only works if you collect it
Here is the part that undoes good pricing.
You can do this sum perfectly, quote at £55, win the job, build it beautifully, and still have a terrible year. Because joinery money arrives in an awkward shape. A homeowner balance sits unpaid while they enjoy the wardrobes. A main contractor pays on their terms, not yours, and a fitted kitchen's final payment turns up two months after the last handle went on.
The rate on the quote is not what you earn. What lands in the bank is what you earn.
Two habits fix most of it. Take a deposit that genuinely covers your timber before you buy any, so you are never funding someone else's job out of your own account. And invoice the same day you finish, every time, because an invoice sent on the day gets paid weeks earlier than one sent when you get round to it. Our post on chasing late payers has the escalation ladder for when they still do not pay.
The reason most joiners do not invoice on the day is not laziness, it is that at six o'clock, after a day machining and fitting, sitting down to type an invoice is the last thing anyone does. That is the actual job Vanly is for. You speak the job into your phone on the way home, it writes the invoice, you check it and it goes from your own email. If you want the wider picture of what does and does not earn its place, we went through it in AI for joiners.
FAQ
What is the average joiner hourly rate in the UK in 2026?
Around £27 an hour nationally for self employed joiners, with most experienced ones charging £30 to £45 and the full spread running £20 to £50. London and the South East run roughly 20 to 30 per cent above. Treat the average as market context, not as a target, because it includes plenty of people who have not costed their business.
What should a newly self employed joiner charge per hour?
Do the five step sum with your own overheads rather than copying a figure. If you are starting without a workshop, your costs are lower so your honest number will be lower, often £30 to £38. Do not go below the employed break even of roughly £28, because under that you are working for less than a job would pay you and carrying all the risk yourself.
Should I charge for workshop time separately?
Not as a separate line to the customer, they are buying a finished staircase and not an itemised timesheet. But you must price it in your own workings. Count every shop hour at your full rate when you build the quote. The most common way joiners lose money is pricing a job on the days the customer sees them and giving away the days in the workshop.
Is a day rate better than an hourly rate for joinery?
For site carpentry and long fits, usually yes, it is simpler to sell and easier for a contractor to budget. For short repairs, hourly with a minimum charge protects you. For bespoke workshop work, neither is ideal and a priced job is better, because it pays you for skill and speed rather than for hours spent.
How does CIS affect what I charge on site work?
It does not change your rate, it changes when you see the money. Under the Construction Industry Scheme a contractor deducts 20 per cent from your labour before paying you, or 30 per cent if you are not registered, and it counts toward your tax bill. Register, because the extra 10 per cent is your cash sitting with HMRC for a year. The gov.uk CIS guidance sets out how it works.
Will charging more than the going rate lose me work?
You will lose some, and it will mostly be the work you want least. Price shoppers ringing five joiners for the cheapest number are the same ones who query the invoice and pay late. Being slightly dearer and turning up when you said you would beats being cheapest. Photograph everything you build, because in joinery the work sells itself.
The bottom line
Your rate is not the average, and it is not what the joiner down the road charges. It is your costs plus the living you need, divided by the hours you can genuinely bill.
For most self employed joiners doing domestic work with a workshop, that lands somewhere between £45 and £60 an hour. Higher than the guides suggest, because the guides are averaging site carpenters and workshop joiners together and quietly ignoring the shop time.
Work out your number. Charge it. Then make sure you actually collect it, because a great rate on an unpaid invoice is just a nice piece of paper.
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