Bricklayer Pay in the UK: Day Rates, Price Work and CIS in 2026

Price work is the whole story

No other trade prices output the way bricklaying does. The unit of pay is the 1,000 bricks: a rate per thousand for standard facing brickwork, a rate per square metre for blockwork and larger formats, sometimes a rate per linear metre for garden walls and boundaries. The rate itself moves with the job — straightforward stretcher-bond cavity walls on a clean new-build plot pay less per thousand than intricate work with specials, soldier courses and arches that slow the trowel.

Take an example to see how it converts. At an example rate of £400 per 1,000 bricks, a brickie laying 500 bricks in a day grosses £200 for the day. Lay 650 on a good run with everything to hand and it is £260. Lay 350 on a bad day — frost delay at 9am, drawings queried at 11, mix running late after lunch — and it is £140. The hours are the same in all three cases; the bricks are not. That is why experienced brickies judge a job by the run of it before they judge the rate.

This is also why the trade rewards speed honestly. A brickie who consistently lays 600 a day at £400 per thousand grosses £240 a day, £1,200 a week, £62,400 annualised before weather and holidays — well above the employed median. A brickie who lays 350 grosses £140 a day and £36,400 annualised. The spread between a quick hand and a steady one is the widest in construction, and it explains why the ONS employed median understates what good price workers actually earn.

Gang work: the brickie and the hod carrier

Most price work on housing sites runs in gangs: a bricklayer paired with a hod carrier, or two brickies with one hod carrier between them. The hod carrier — the labourer — keeps bricks, blocks and mortar arriving at the lift so the trowel never stops. A brickie waiting for materials is a brickie not earning, which is why the gang exists: it buys the brickie uninterrupted laying time.

The gang agrees one price for the work and splits it. As an example, a gang price of £400 a day might split £260 to the bricklayer and £140 to the hod carrier, though splits vary with who found the work, who supplies the tools and how the contractor pays. When the work runs well, both earn more than they would alone; when it runs badly, both feel it. The trust in a gang matters enormously — a slow hod carrier costs the brickie bricks, and bricks are money.

For CIS, the gang is not one entity: each member is deducted individually at 20% on their share, and each keeps their own deduction statements for Self Assessment. Gangs that drift into one person collecting the whole payment and handing out cash are asking for trouble with HMRC — the deduction statements have to match who actually did the work and got paid.

Weather decides your week

Frost and heavy rain stop bricklaying. Mortar laid in a hard frost fails; driving rain washes joints out and soaks the lift. Site agents call it off, and for a price worker that means the day simply does not exist in the pay packet: no lay, no pay. An employed brickie on a day rate still gets paid; a subcontractor on price gets nothing for the lost day.

This is the maths that ruins annual salary comparisons for brickies. A price worker grossing £200 a day who loses 20 days a year to weather never sees £4,000 of gross pay that the day rate implied — an illustrative figure, but the shape is right every winter. Sensible brickies price their year on realistic working weeks, not 52 of them: take the day equivalent, multiply by the weeks you will actually lay, and budget the lost weeks in advance rather than discovering them in January.

Frost protection helps on the margins — hessian, insulated covers, heated enclosures on some sites — but it does not repeal the weather. The honest way to read any bricklayer pay figure is to ask how many laying days sit behind it. The ONS weekly median of £640 assumes a working week happened; a frozen week in February is not one.

New-build housing sets the price

The main employer of brickies in Britain is the new-build housing site: rows of plots, phases of cavity-wall houses, year-round programmes on the big developers' land banks. Extensions, garden walls and small builders provide work too, but the volume — and therefore the rate-setting power — sits with housing. When developers are building, brickies name their price per thousand; when developers slow, the phone goes quiet.

Housing cycles move brickie pay more than any other trade because bricklaying is front-loaded in the build programme. The walls go up early; if starts fall, bricklayers are the first trade off site and the last back on. Interest rates, planning decisions and developers' land pipelines all show up in brickie pay packets months before they show up in official statistics. In a hot market, per-thousand rates climb and gangs pick their sites; in a cold one, rates soften and brickies take work they would have turned down.

For anyone entering the trade, this is the risk to price in. Bricklaying pays well in a building boom — the price mechanism makes sure of it — but it is cyclical in a way that, say, plumbing maintenance work is not. The brickies who survive the downturns are the ones who banked the boom years instead of spending them.

CIS is the trade’s default tax system

Bricklaying is the most CIS-heavy trade in construction. Very few brickies are employed; almost all work as subcontractors inside the Construction Industry Scheme, which means 20% comes off every price-work payment before it reaches the bank. The contractor deducts it and pays it to HMRC as an advance on the subcontractor's tax and National Insurance bill.

Because the deduction is a flat 20% of gross payments — with no allowance for the Personal Allowance, expenses or the actual tax bands — it almost always over-deducts. A brickie with £9,000 of allowable expenses and a modest profit margin has paid 20% on turnover and owes far less than that in real tax. The difference comes back as a rebate through Self Assessment, which is why filing the return properly is worth real money every year for brickies.

The alternative is grim: subcontractors who never register, or who cannot be verified, get 30% deducted instead of 20%. On price work at £200 a day, that is the difference between keeping £160 and keeping £140 of every day's gross — £3,000-plus over a year of laying days, handed to HMRC unnecessarily. Registration is free and takes a short phone call or online form. There is no reason to sit on 30%.

Reading the ONS median honestly

The ONS figure — £16.47 an hour, £640 a week, all employees, pay period April 2025 — is the best official anchor for bricklayer pay, and it is worth understanding exactly what it covers. ASHE measures employees: people on payrolls. In the most subcontractor-heavy trade in construction, that means the median describes the employed minority — site-employed brickies, those on the books of contractors — not the price workers on the trowel.

As a floor, it is solid: an employed brickie at £16.47 an hour working 40 hours grosses £34,258 a year, which is the figure the take-home calculator below uses. As a description of what brickies earn, it understates the top end badly. A fast price worker laying 600 bricks a day at £400 per thousand grosses £240 a day — £62,400 annualised before weather — which is 82% above the employed median. The median is a floor for competent hands, not a ceiling.

The weekly figure tells the same story in miniature: £640 a week is what employed brickies took home in gross terms in April 2025. A price worker's week runs from £700 in a bad weather week to £1,200-plus on a clean run. Both numbers are true; they describe different ways of being a bricklayer.

Where the numbers come from

Employed pay figures come from ONS ASHE 2025 provisional data: bricklayers and masons (SOC 2020 5313), all employees, median gross hourly pay £16.47 and median gross weekly pay £640.00, pay period April 2025. Price-work arithmetic — bricks per day, rates per 1,000, gang splits, weather-day losses — is illustrative example maths built on the verified ONS baseline, clearly labelled as examples rather than measured rates.

CIS rates and rules come from GOV.UK's Construction Industry Scheme pages, verified on 24 September 2026: 20% for registered subcontractors, 30% where unregistered or unverifiable, 0% with gross payment status, registration free, no deduction on VAT, directly-paid materials or plant hire, overpaid deductions reclaimed through Self Assessment. Take-home figures use the 2026/27 England tax model: Personal Allowance £12,570, 20% basic rate to £50,270, employee National Insurance at 8% between £12,570 and £50,270, and auto-enrolment pension at 5% of qualifying earnings.

How to use this hub

If you are employed — on a payroll with a payslip — start with the take-home calculator, which works through the £34,258 ONS-derived salary line by line for 2026/27. If you are a subcontractor on price, the CIS and pay guide is the more useful page: the 20% deduction, gang CIS, and why the rebate usually follows. Everyone quoting day rates should read the weather section first — the annual figure is only honest once the lost days are subtracted.