There’s a moment every decorator has had. You’ve quoted a job at three days, you’ve smashed it in two because you’re good at this, and you’ve just paid yourself a third less than the bloke who took his time.
That’s not a work-rate problem. It’s a pricing-unit problem, and it’s the biggest single decision you’ll make about how you charge.
Day rate, per room, or per m²?
Day rate is the easy one to explain and the worst one to earn from. It caps your income at hours worked, punishes you for being quick, and invites the customer to think about your speed rather than their walls. Useful for one thing only: open-ended work where nobody can see the end.
Per room is what most customers actually want to hear. It’s a number they can picture, it’s comparable, and it puts your efficiency back in your pocket. The catch is that “a room” hides enormous variation. A box room and a stairwell are not the same job.
Per m² is the honest unit for larger spaces and the one that scales properly. £10–£20 per m² for interior walls is the going labour-only rate. It’s less intuitive for a customer, so it works best as your internal maths that surfaces as a per-room price.
The practical answer for most decorators: measure in m², quote per room. Do the arithmetic properly behind the scenes, present a number the customer can understand.
Work out what a day actually has to earn
Before you set any rate, do this once.
Decorating has better chargeable-hour ratios than the emergency trades — you’re not driving to three call-outs a day — but you’re still not billing everything. Quoting, picking up materials, dust sheets down and up, waiting for coats to dry.
Say you want to earn £45,000, and you work 46 weeks after holidays.
| Days available (46 weeks × 5) | 230 |
| Realistically chargeable (~80%) | ≈ 184 days |
Then take off what it costs you to turn up:
| Typical annual overheads | |
|---|---|
| Van (finance, fuel, servicing, tax) | £5,500 |
| Insurance (public liability, tools) | £500 |
| Brushes, rollers, sheets, sundries | £1,200 |
| Ladders, towers, sprayer depreciation | £800 |
| Phone, software, accountant | £1,600 |
| Total | ≈ £9,600 |
So you need £54,600 across 184 days, which is £297 a day.
That will look high against the £180–£280 you see quoted around. It should — that figure is what the day has to earn, not what you write on a quote. Price the room, hit that average, and you’re fine. Sell yourself a flat £200 day rate and you’ve agreed to a £30k year without noticing.
Price the prep separately. Always.
This is the one that quietly eats decorators.
Two jobs look identical from the doorway. One has sound walls and needs a fill and a sand. The other has blown plaster, three layers of woodchip and gloss that’s been painted over emulsion. Same square metres, wildly different days.
If prep is folded into your per-room price, you’re averaging across both — which means you’re overcharging the tidy customer and losing money on the neglected one. And the neglected one is more likely to say yes, because everyone else quoted properly.
Break it out: filling and sanding, wallpaper stripping, priming bare plaster, dealing with damp staining. Even a rough line item changes the conversation from “why are you more expensive” to “your walls need more work”.
Decide your materials position once
Either you supply the paint and add 15–25% for the cost and the running around, or the customer supplies it and you say so in writing.
What costs you money is deciding job by job. That’s how you end up on site with contract matt when the job needed durable, or three tins short on a Sunday.
If you do supply, say what grade you’re quoting for. “Two coats trade emulsion” and “two coats Little Greene” are not the same quote, and the customer comparing you to someone cheaper deserves to know which one they’re getting.
Have finish tiers
Standard, premium, specialist. Three options, priced apart.
This does something subtle and valuable: it gives the customer a decision that isn’t “is this too expensive?” Faced with one price, people negotiate. Faced with three, they choose. And it stops you doing hand-painted, lightly-sanded, three-coat work for standard roller money because you couldn’t face the conversation.
When to put your prices up
When your diary is full three weeks out. That’s not a badge, it’s a signal you’re too cheap. Add 10% and watch what happens — usually you lose the customers who were hardest work.
When you’re winning nearly every quote. Around half is roughly right. Winning everything means you’re the cheap option, and cheap customers negotiate hardest at the end.
Getting it down on paper
The decorators who do well aren’t the cheapest — they’re the ones who reply quickly with a number that makes sense and shows what’s included.
Our painter and decorator quote template has the structure already: number of rooms, wall area in m², finish tiers, and extras for ceilings, skirting and wallpaper removal. Swap in your rates and the maths is handled.
Free online, so customers price their own job on your website and the enquiry arrives already qualified. Or a £7 spreadsheet if you’d rather keep it offline, with a branded quote you export to PDF.
And if you want to sanity-check yourself against the market, here’s what painting and decorating costs across the UK in 2026.
Work the number out once. Then stop deciding it on the doorstep.