Doing the work yourself does not delete a cost. It swaps money for your own days, and the exchange rate is a trade day rate: £150 to £250 a day for a painter outside London, £150 to £200 a day for a tiler, £150 to £300 a day for a floor fitter. Tiling the walls and floor of a medium bathroom is 4 days of that, so £600 to £800 of labour. Three things stay closed to you whatever your budget: gas work, notifiable electrics, and anything holding the house up.
Painting and decorating a room
£150 to £500
One room repainted, from two coats over sound walls to a 4 by 3 m room with all its woodwork and coving: 1 to 2 days of a painter and decorator at £150 to £250 a day. That is the rate outside London. In the capital the same guide puts a painter at £250 to £350 a day.
Both ends of that day count come from the guide itself. Its table puts a standard two coat job at one day, and its worked example puts a regular 4 by 3 m room, including all the woodwork and coving, at 1 to 2 days and roughly £300 to £500 of labour. So one day is the floor for the plainest version of this job rather than the expectation for a whole room, and the £300 to £500 sits inside the range above. The good news sits in the other half of the split: paint and supplies are often as little as 10 to 15 per cent of the total on a standard job with budget or mid-range paint, rising to a third or more with premium paint or extra coats. Almost everything else is the labour you are taking on.
Source: MyJobQuote, Painter and Decorator Cost Guide, last updated 20 July 2026 on the page, checked 13 August 2026.
Tiling a bathroom
£600 to £800
Fully tiling the walls and floor of a medium bathroom: 4 days of a tiler at £150 to £200 a day.
The guide also gives £20 to £40 per square metre for the same labour. Work from the days rather than the square metres: the per square metre figure is the day rate divided by daily output, so it is the same number in a different coat, and it moves as soon as the room has cuts, niches or a window in it.
Tiling is yours. The bath, basin and shower that go back in front of it are not, and neither is any circuit change in a room with a bath or shower.
Source: MyJobQuote, Bathroom Tiling Cost Guide, last updated 24 June 2026 on the page, checked 13 August 2026.
Tiling a floor
£300 to £600
Tiling a floor of 15 to 30 square metres: 2 to 3 days of a tiler at £150 to £200 a day.
A tiler lays 8 to 12 square metres a day, and the guide derives its £15 to £25 per square metre labour rate straight from that output. Adhesive needs 12 to 24 hours to cure before you can grout, which is why grouting usually lands on a separate day. A single free weekend is one day of tiling and one day of waiting, not two days of progress.
Source: MyJobQuote, Floor Tiling Cost Guide, last updated 20 July 2026 on the page, checked 13 August 2026.
Laying laminate flooring
£300 to £375
A medium room of 25 square metres, the one size the guide prices in full: 2 to 3 days of a floor fitter at £150 to £300 a day.
That headline is the guide's own arithmetic for this room, not mine. Days times day rate would span £300 to £900, which is what its rate band allows rather than a figure its own worked example ever reaches.
This is the only job on the page where the guide works a whole room through itself, so the headline is its figure and not a multiplication of mine. That is worth noticing in both directions: the top of a published day rate band is a ceiling somebody somewhere charges, not the rate an ordinary room gets priced at. The same example keeps £100 to £175 for underlay, threshold and door trims outside the labour, and those you still buy.
Source: MyJobQuote, Laminate Flooring Cost Guide, last updated 9 July 2026 on the page, checked 13 August 2026.
Almost every figure above is the same calculation: the number of days a cost guide gives for the job, multiplied by the day rate the same guide gives for that trade. The exception is the job where a guide prices a whole room itself. There its own figure is the headline and my multiplication sits underneath as a check, because a source that shows its working outranks my arithmetic with the top of its rate band. Either way, this is the only method these sources can actually support, and it is why the page prices four jobs rather than every job in the house. Where a guide gives days but no rate, or a rate but no days, there is no honest sum to publish, so there is no block for it here.
The number you land on is the labour you take off the bill, not money in your pocket. What comes off it is set out further down, and the biggest item on that list has no number at all: nobody publishes a defensible figure for how much slower a first-timer is than a professional, so I do not apply one.
Each rate above is the one its own guide prints beside its own day counts, which is the only reason those sums add up. It is not the going rate. Other guides print different numbers for the same trades: across them a tiler runs £170 to £350 a day and a painter and decorator £127 to £350 a day, and a single publisher manages four different painter rates across its own site. So read the figures above as one guide's arithmetic, and check a quote against the spread before you argue with it. Day rates sets out what each guide prints per trade, with the two that matter most here in tiler day rate and painter and decorator day rate.
A kitchen is not one job you either do or hand over, it is eight trades with eight day rates. Labour on a standard kitchen is up to around 30% of the total cost, and the total that share is taken from is the guide's own £6,000 to £20,000 or more for a new kitchen. The same guide publishes its labour line separately at £1,700 to £3,000 over 5 to 10 days. The useful question is not what percentage you save but which of these rows can be yours.
That percentage belongs to the guide's own total, so do not carry it across to the calculator on this site. A mid-range kitchen starts there at £10,000 to £18,000 including VAT, a different total from the one the guide is working from, and taking the same share off a calculator total lands well above the £1,700 to £3,000 the guide publishes as its own labour line. Days and day rates survive the move between two different totals. A percentage does not, which is why the rows below are the part worth using.
Kitchen fitter or carpenter
Partly yours£200 to £300 a day, 4 to 8 days
The longest single block of labour in the table. Nothing legal stands in your way, but the run has to end up level and square or every door and drawer front after it shows the error.
Electrician
Partly yours£250 to £400 a day, 1 to 3 days
A kitchen is not a special location, so work on an existing circuit is not notifiable. A new circuit for the oven or hob, or a new consumer unit, is. That part needs signing off whoever holds the screwdriver.
Plumber or Gas Safe registered engineer
Partly yours£250 to £400 a day, 1 to 2 days
Two trades on one line, and only one of them is closed. Gas work goes to a business on the Gas Safe Register, so a hob connection or a capped pipe is never a day you buy back. The water side is not gas work and not tied to that register, and in an all electric kitchen, with an induction hob and an electric oven, there is no gas in the visit at all. Whether this row is yours depends on which appliances you are fitting.
Plasterer
Partly yours£180 to £250 a day, 1 to 3 days
No notification, no sign-off. It is a finish skill rather than a permission problem, and it is the layer everything else gets judged through.
Tiler
Yours to take£200 to £300 a day, 1 to 3 days
The splashback is the smallest tiling job in the house and the usual place people start.
Flooring specialist
Yours to take£180 to £250 a day, 1 to 2 days
Same job as the flooring block above, priced by the kitchen guide at its own rate.
Decorator
Yours to take£160 to £220 a day, 1 to 3 days
The cleanest saving on the list, and the one that costs you least if you get it wrong.
Labourer
Yours to take£100 to £140 a day, 3 to 5 days
Stripping out, carrying and clearing. The cheapest day rate in the table, so the smallest saving per day, but it is the one every quote assumes somebody is doing.
Source: MyJobQuote, Kitchen Fitting Cost Guide, last updated 12 August 2026 on the page, checked 13 August 2026.
Read down the rates and the order of attack picks itself. The decorator and the tiler are the easiest rows to take, and the labourer is the row every quote quietly assumes somebody is doing. Note which rate you are buying back, though: the labourer carries the lowest rate in the table, so a day of stripping out is worth less than a day of tiling by some distance. Full project figures sit in kitchen renovation cost.
Labour is between 45 and 60 per cent of the final bill of a bathroom, £1,800 to £4,000 for the work of a bathroom fitter. That share is exactly why a single saving figure would mislead: the hours sit in first fix, second fix and the electrics, and those are the hours a homeowner cannot take.
Source: MyJobQuote, New Bathroom Cost Guide, last updated 20 July 2026 on the page, checked 13 August 2026.
What is genuinely yours is the strip-out, the tiling and the decorating. Tiling the walls and floor is £600 to £800 of the labour by the sum above, and it is real money. It is also not most of the bill. Anyone quoting you a bathroom saving of half the project has counted the plumbing as if you could do it.
The two guides behind that figure do not agree, and the gap is worth seeing rather than picking the flattering side of. The same publisher prices the wall tiling of a mid-sized bathroom at £950 to £1,250 in its bathroom guide, and the walls and floor together at £600 to £800 in its tiling guide, which is the lower figure for the larger job. Only the tiling guide shows its working, as days of a tiler at a stated day rate, so that is the one this page carries and the one you can check against your own room.
Source: MyJobQuote, Bathroom Tiling Cost Guide, last updated 24 June 2026 on the page, checked 13 August 2026.
Whole project ranges are in bathroom renovation cost, and the sequence trades work in is set out in the first fix checklist.
This is the part cost guides tend to skip. Gas, electrical and structural work each sit behind their own set of rules, and none of those rules care how confident you feel.
Gas: the register is the gate
Under the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 for a gas engineering business to legally undertake gas work that is within the scope of the Regulations they must be on the Gas Safe Register.
The register runs across Great Britain, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and Guernsey, and it covers piped natural gas as well as liquefied petroleum gas.
Moving a hob, capping off a pipe, taking out or resiting a boiler: none of it turns into a day you save. In the kitchen table that work shares a line with the plumbing, so the gas part of that line stays whatever else you take on. A kitchen with no gas appliance in it has no such part.
Source: HSE (Health and Safety Executive), Gas Safe Register, checked 13 August 2026.
Electrics: Part P, and a bathroom is the strict case
In England and Wales three things are notifiable: installing a new circuit, replacing the consumer unit, and any addition or alteration to an existing circuit in a special location. A room containing a bath or shower is a special location. That zone runs vertically from finished floor level to a height of 2.25 m, and horizontally in one of two ways: where there is a bath or shower tray, 0.6 m from the edge of it, and where there is no bath or shower tray, 1.2 m from the centre point of the showerhead where it is fixed to the wall or ceiling. Those are two separate cases and not a range, so a walk-in shower without a tray takes the wider 1.2 m. A room with a swimming pool or a sauna heater counts too. Everything else, including repair and maintenance outside those locations, is not notifiable.
Someone who is not registered with a competent person scheme has to get notifiable work signed off by a registered third party, and NAPIT is the only body currently authorised to operate third party certification. That is a fee, an appointment and a report. On a notifiable job the money moves rather than disappears, which is exactly why a bathroom rewire is a poor first project and a kitchen socket on an existing circuit is not.
Source: IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology), Part P, England and Wales, checked 13 August 2026.
Structure: an opening is building work, not decorating
Building work under the Building Regulations 2010 includes the material alteration of a building, and an alteration counts as material where the work would leave the building not complying with a relevant requirement where it did comply before. Part A, structure, is one of those relevant requirements.
So knocking a hole in a wall that holds something up is regulated work, not a weekend job with a bolster. A structural engineer or surveyor works out whether the wall is load bearing and designs a beam for the loads it was carrying. That beam normally needs at least 150 mm of bearing on each side of the opening, and padstones to spread the load into the wall below. The demolition is the cheap hour in that sequence. The calculation, the steel and the sign-off are the job.
Source: The Building Regulations 2010, regulation 3 (meaning of building work), checked 13 August 2026. Also: Planning Portal, Building Regulations: Load bearing walls, checked 13 August 2026.
The sign-off follows the work, not the worker
Building regulations approval attaches to what is being done. GOV.UK lists replacing fuse boxes and connected electrics, installing a bathroom that involves plumbing, changing electrics near a bath or shower, replacing windows and doors, replacing roof coverings, installing or replacing a heating system and adding extra radiators. You only skip applying yourself if the person doing it is registered with a competent person scheme, which a homeowner is not.
Skipping it is not a saving with a small risk attached, it is a debt with a date on it. The person doing the work can be prosecuted and fined for not complying, the council can make you pay to put faulty work right, and without approval you will not have the certificates of compliance you may need when you sell.
Source: GOV.UK, Building regulations approval, checked 13 August 2026.
The two jobs people most often try to squeeze into a DIY weekend are the two with the tightest rules. Prices for doing them properly are in consumer unit replacement cost, rewiring cost and new boiler cost.
The sum at the top of this page is a gross figure. These sit between it and what you actually keep, and being straight about them is the difference between a plan and a fantasy.
You are slower than the day rate assumes
These are professional days: someone who has done it a hundred times, with their own tools, working straight through. I could not find a single source that puts a credible number on how much slower a first-timer is, so this page applies no multiplier and invents none. Read every day count as a floor and add your own margin to it.
The materials stay yours either way
Only the labour leaves the bill. Paint and supplies are 10 to 15 per cent of a standard decorating job and more with premium paint, and the laminate example keeps £100 to £175 for underlay, threshold and trims outside the labour figure. Doing it yourself does nothing to those lines except remove the trade discount somebody else was buying at.
Tools, hire and getting rid of the old one are separate
A day rate is a person, not a van, a tile cutter, a floor saw or a skip. Price those as their own lines before you compare a self-build day against a quoted day.
Where the work is notifiable, sign-off is a cost
Third party certification for notifiable electrical work is a fee and a visit. On those jobs the honest sum is the trade day rate minus the sign-off, not the whole day rate.
Per square metre rates are not a second opinion
The floor tiling guide arrives at £15 to £25 per square metre by taking the day rate and dividing it by the 8 to 12 square metres a tiler lays in a day. Checking a day-rate figure against a per square metre figure from the same guide is checking a number against itself. Days are the honest unit here.
VAT sits on one side of this sum and not the other
None of these cost guides states whether its day rates and labour totals are before or after VAT. The painting guide gets closest, and only by telling you to check whether a quote includes VAT before you compare it with another one, which settles nothing about its own figures. The cost calculator on this site is explicit the other way: its project totals include 20% VAT. So pricing a whole job in the calculator and then subtracting a labour figure from this page is not a like-for-like sum. If these guide figures are before VAT and your trade is VAT registered, the labour you take on is worth a fifth more than it says here. Not every trade is registered, so this is a question to ask rather than a correction to apply blind.
Waste is the one people forget until the old kitchen is stacked in the garden; skip hire cost prices that line on its own.
Work out the whole project first, then take days out of it. A saving only means something against a total, and taking on the wrong four days can push a project past the point where a trade will pick it up cleanly afterwards.
Day rates and durations are national guide figures, not offers, and the guides revise them through the year, which is why each one carries the date it was last updated and the date I last read it. The legal lines are the ones to check for your own address: Part P applies in England and Wales, and building control is your council or a registered building control approver.
Painting. Paint and supplies are often as little as 10 to 15 per cent of the total on a standard job with budget or mid-range paint, so nearly the whole bill is the labour you take on, and none of it is notifiable work. A painter and decorator is £150 to £250 a day outside London and £250 to £350 a day in the capital.
For most of it, yes. The cabinet run is 4 to 8 days of a fitter at £200 to £300 a day, and tiling, flooring, decorating and the strip-out are all yours. Two pieces of work are not: gas work has to go to a business on the Gas Safe Register, and a new circuit or a consumer unit replacement is notifiable under Part P. Note that those are the pieces, not the whole trade visit. Fit an induction hob and an electric oven and there is no gas in the job at all. Labour is up to around 30% of the total cost on a standard kitchen, on a total the guide puts at £6,000 to £20,000 or more, so those two visits are a smaller share of the bill than people expect.
Because labour is between 45 and 60 per cent of the final bill of a bathroom, and most of those hours are plumbing and electrics: the two parts a homeowner cannot take on. What you can take is the tiling, at 4 days for the walls and floor of a medium bathroom, and the decorating. A single headline number would hide which of the two halves it came from.
No. The floor tiling guide states plainly that its £15 to £25 per square metre comes from the day rate divided by the 8 to 12 square metres a tiler lays in a day. Comparing the two is comparing a number with itself. Work in days.
I do not know, and I found no source that puts a defensible number on it, so this page applies no multiplier. Every day count here is a professional day, with their tools and their hundredth repeat of the same job. Read them as a floor and add your own margin.