The best paid self employed trades in the UK, ranked by day rate
Everybody has an opinion on which trade pays best, and most of them come from somebody in the pub. So we went through the published rate data for 2026 and put ten trades in order. Here is what they actually charge a day, and more usefully, what separates the ones at the top of each band from the ones at the bottom.
The top three
Labour only, based on an 8 hour day, before VAT and before materials.
Number 1
Commercial gas and heating engineer
£420
typical day rate
Range £300 to £600
Number 2
Electrician, commercial and specialist
£360
typical day rate
Range £225 to £620
Number 3
Air conditioning and refrigeration engineer
£345
typical day rate
Range £245 to £650
One thing worth saying up front: the trade you pick matters far less than the tickets you hold and the number of days you actually get paid for. More on both further down.
All ten at a glance
Typical is the national midpoint. The range covers the lowest published regional rate through to the top of the London figures.
UK self employed trade day rates for 2026, ranked by typical national rate
These four missed the cut, in some cases by a matter of pounds. Plastering in particular is a price work trade, so the day rate flatters it downwards in the same way it does bricklaying.
Plasterer£265 typical
Tiler£260 typical
Painter and decorator£235 typical
Landscaper£225 typical
The ten in full
1.
Commercial gas and heating engineer
£420 a day typical£300 to £600 range
Nothing else on this list pays like commercial gas. Straight domestic boiler work sits nearer £300 a day, which is respectable but not remarkable. The money arrives when you hold commercial ACS tickets and start working on plant rooms, warm air systems and catering appliances, because the pool of engineers who can legally touch that kit is small and the buildings cannot go cold while somebody finds a cheaper option.
Heat pumps have pushed the ceiling higher again. Installers are quoting £400 to £600 a day on air source work, and MCS accreditation is the thing that unlocks the grant funded jobs rather than the ones where the customer is paying every penny themselves.
What pushes this one to the top of its band
•Commercial ACS tickets such as COCN1, CIGA1 and CORT1
•LPG and commercial catering qualifications
•MCS accreditation for heat pumps and Boiler Upgrade Scheme work
•Out of hours breakdown cover for landlords and letting agents
Electricians have the widest spread of any trade here, which is exactly why the trade is worth being in. Domestic work sits at £250 to £350 a day once you are established. Commercial runs £250 to £400. Data centres, hospitals and anything with a shutdown window pay £350 to £500, because the client is buying certainty about a deadline as much as they are buying labour.
Testing and inspection is the quietly excellent corner of the trade. EICR work runs at £300 to £450 a day and the heaviest thing you lift all week is a test meter. Hudson Contract, which handles real payments to roughly 60,000 subcontractors, has electricians as the top earning trade in the country on money actually banked rather than money advertised.
What pushes this one to the top of its band
•C&G 2391 testing and inspection, which opens up EICR work
•OZEV approval for EV charge points, at £300 to £500 a day
•Solar PV and battery storage installs
•Fire alarm and emergency lighting
•Data centre, healthcare and other high compliance sectors
This trade has the highest ceiling on the whole list. The national typical sits at £325 to £385 a day, but London figures run to £640 and commissioning work goes higher still.
The reason is simple. You cannot legally touch refrigerant without F Gas Category 1, the qualified pool is small, and when a supermarket chiller or a server room cooling unit drops out, somebody is paying whatever it takes to have it running before the stock spoils or the servers throttle. Reactive commercial work is where the good money hides, not on domestic split installs.
What pushes this one to the top of its band
•F Gas Category 1 for refrigerant handling
•Commissioning and validation work
•Commercial refrigeration, cellar cooling and cold rooms
•Planned maintenance and breakdown cover contracts
•Heat pump crossover, which uses much the same skill set
Checkatrade puts plumbers at £320 to £480 a day for 2026, which is ahead of nearly every other domestic trade. Plumbing earns it on reactive work more than planned work. A Saturday morning leak pays a multiple of a Tuesday afternoon radiator swap, and the customer rarely argues about it.
The obvious move is gas. Add a Gas Safe registration to a plumbing business and you are competing in the top three of this list rather than the middle.
This one surprises people, and it should not. A good fitter is four trades in one body: joinery, tiling, first and second fix plumbing and enough electrical work to get the job over the line. Job values are high, customers judge you on the finish rather than the clock, and nobody wants a half fitted kitchen sitting in their house while they shop around.
Fitters with settled showroom relationships do best of all. The work arrives without a bidding war, which is worth more over a year than another £20 on the day rate.
What pushes this one to the top of its band
•Being genuinely multi skilled rather than subletting half the job
•Showroom, merchant and developer relationships that bring repeat work
•Wet rooms, tanking and level access showers
•Part P and G3 tickets so the plumbing and electrics stay in house
Roofing is weather dependent, physically punishing and priced to match. General tiling and slating sits at the lower end of the band. Leadwork, single ply and liquid applied systems sit well above it, because manufacturer approvals are required to issue the guarantee and not many firms hold them.
Access is the other reason the range stretches past £500 in London. Once scaffolding, edge protection and a permit are in play, the day is being paid for properly.
What pushes this one to the top of its band
•Leadwork and heritage slating
•Manufacturer approvals for single ply and liquid systems
•Flat roofing on commercial buildings
•Owning your own access equipment rather than hiring it in
Split this trade in two and the numbers make more sense. Site carpentry, first and second fix, sits at the lower end. Shopfitting sits near the top of the whole industry: Hudson Contract has shopfitters as the second highest earning trade in the country at £1,141 a week.
Retail and hospitality fit outs run on tight overnight programmes with a hard opening date, and the rate reflects the antisocial hours far more than it reflects the difficulty of the work. Bespoke joinery, staircases and structural timber sit comfortably above general site work too.
What pushes this one to the top of its band
•Shopfitting and retail fit out, especially night work
The range here is enormous because the word covers everything from one person with a van to a firm running four extensions at once. Treat the day rate as the least interesting number in the business.
Builders make their money on the job price and the spread between what the subcontractors charge and what the customer pays. Get that right and the day rate becomes almost irrelevant. Get it wrong and no day rate saves you.
What pushes this one to the top of its band
•Pricing extensions and loft conversions as whole jobs
•Running a team of trades rather than working solo
•Groundworks and structural work kept in house
•Building control and structural warranty experience
Bricklaying is the trade where the day rate genuinely undersells the earnings. Most experienced gangs work on price per thousand rather than per day, and a quick, tidy gang on a well run site will beat the day rate without breaking much of a sweat.
The day figures still stretch a long way by region: around £190 a day in Northern Ireland against £560 in London for the same work by the same hands.
What pushes this one to the top of its band
•Working on price rather than on day work
•Working in a settled gang with a hod carrier
•Facework, feature brickwork and heritage pointing
•NVQ Level 3 and a CSCS gold card for commercial sites
Advanced scaffolders sit at £200 to £280 a day nationally, with London and the South East pushing £300 to £400. It is a card driven trade in the strictest sense: no CISRS card, no site, no exceptions.
That is precisely why the rate holds up. Supply stays tight because you cannot decide on a Monday morning that you fancy being a scaffolder, and the trade sits at the front of nearly every programme, so the pressure to get the scaffold up is constant.
What pushes this one to the top of its band
•CISRS Advanced card
•System scaffold and temporary roof experience
•Scaffold inspection and design tickets
•Long commercial programmes rather than domestic one offs
Four things that move your rate more than your trade does
Look at the ranges above and you will notice something. The gap between the top and bottom of a single trade is bigger than the gap between first place and tenth. That gap is where the decisions actually are.
The ticket, not the trade
The single biggest jump in this data is never between two trades. It is between two people doing the same trade, where one holds the certification and the other does not. Commercial ACS, F Gas Category 1, C&G 2391, OZEV and MCS are all worth more per day than switching trade entirely.
Commercial beats domestic
Every trade on this list pays more on commercial work than domestic, usually by £50 to £150 a day. You are being paid for insurance cover, compliance paperwork, working around a live building and hitting a date that costs the client money if you miss it.
Where you stand
The same job pays 25% to 45% more in London than the national midpoint, and 15% to 20% less in the North East, Wales and Northern Ireland. Before you move, work out what the extra rate is worth against what the extra rent costs.
The days you actually bill
This is the one everybody ignores. Going from 180 billed days to 210 is worth more than a £40 rise on your day rate, and it costs you nothing but better scheduling and fewer wasted quoting trips.
What the same job pays around the country
Apply these against the typical figures above to get a realistic number for where you work.
Regional adjustments to UK trade day rates against the national midpoint
Region
Against the national rate
Why
London
+25% to +45%
The highest rates in the country, and the highest costs to go with them.
South East
+10% to +15%
Commuter belt demand without full London overheads.
South West
Around the national average
Holiday let and second home work props up the rate.
East of England
About 5% below
Close enough to London that good trades get pulled away.
Midlands
Around the national average
Steady commercial and new build volume.
Scotland
About 10% below
Central belt rates run ahead of the rest of the country.
North East and Wales
15% to 20% below
Lower rates, but the cost of running the van is lower too.
Northern Ireland
15% to 20% below
The lowest published day rates in the UK.
Your day rate is not your income
Here is the uncomfortable bit. Hudson Contract processes roughly 1.8 million payments a year to about 60,000 self employed construction workers, so it sees money that has genuinely changed hands rather than money somebody advertised. Its average across the self employed trades came out at £1,022 a week in April 2026, up 2.3% on the year before.
Even the highest earning trade in that data, electricians at £1,203 a week, works out at roughly £240 a day across five days. That is well below every advertised day rate on this page. The difference is not that anybody is lying. It is that nobody bills five full days, every week, all year.
Then the deductions start. On CIS work, 20% comes off the labour before you see it. Take off fuel, the van, tools, insurance, the materials you fronted in March and got paid for in May, and the Thursday you spent driving to three quotes and winning one. A £300 day rate usually leaves £130 to £180 in your pocket.
Which is why the most valuable line in this whole article is the boring one: going from 180 billed days to 210 beats a £40 rise on your rate, and you can do it this year without asking a single customer for more money.
Work out your own number
Put your target income, your real expenses and the days you actually work into the calculator and it will tell you the day rate you need to charge. Most people find it is higher than what they have been quoting.
Every figure is a labour only day rate for a self employed tradesperson, based on an 8 hour day, excluding VAT, materials and call out premiums. The typical column is the national midpoint. The range runs from the lowest published regional figure to the top of the London figures.
Rankings are blended across several published 2026 rate sets rather than taken from any single one, because the aggregators disagree by £30 to £80 a day on some trades. Where sources conflicted we sat nearer the middle rather than picking the flattering number. Figures were compiled in July 2026 and rates in this trade move, so treat them as a benchmark for pricing rather than a guarantee of what any particular customer will pay.
Two trades are deliberately ranked lower than their earning potential: bricklayers and plasterers mostly work on price rather than day work, so a day rate genuinely understates what a fast gang takes home.
Read our editorial policy for how we research and update this kind of page.
Common questions
What is the highest paid trade in the UK?+
On day rate, commercial gas and heating engineers come out on top at roughly £420 a day, with a range of £300 to £600 depending on the tickets held and the work involved. On money actually paid to subcontractors, Hudson Contract data puts electricians first at £1,203 a week, ahead of shopfitters at £1,141 and mechanical and engineering at £1,121.
What is a good day rate for a self employed tradesperson in 2026?+
Most UK tradespeople charge between £150 and £480 a day, and the average across all trades and regions sits around £300 to £350. If you are experienced, hold a recognised qualification and work outside London, anything from £300 upwards is a healthy rate. In London the same standard of work should be starting nearer £400.
Which trade has the highest earning ceiling?+
Air conditioning and refrigeration. Published London figures reach £640 a day, and commissioning or emergency commercial refrigeration work goes higher again. The catch is that the qualified pool is small for a reason: F Gas Category 1 and commissioning experience take time to build.
Do tradespeople really earn more in London?+
Yes, by a wide margin. London day rates run 25% to 45% above the national midpoint, and a bricklayer charging £190 a day in Northern Ireland is looking at £560 for the same work in central London. Whether you are better off is a separate question once housing, parking, congestion charges and travel time come out.
Is a day rate better than pricing the job?+
Day rates suit reactive work, call outs and jobs where the scope is genuinely unclear. Pricing the job pays better on anything you are quick at, which is why most experienced bricklaying gangs work on price rather than day work. Plenty of trades run both: a day rate for open ended work, a fixed price for anything they can scope properly.
How much of my day rate do I actually keep?+
Less than you think. On a CIS job, 20% comes off the labour before it reaches you. Then take off fuel, van costs, tools, insurance, materials you fronted, and the days you spent quoting rather than working. A £300 day rate typically leaves £130 to £180 in your pocket, which is why the number of days you bill matters more than the headline rate.
The other half is billing every day you work, getting the invoice out the same evening and knowing which jobs actually made money. Traddie does all three from your phone.