Painter and Decorator Pay in the UK: 2026 Rates, Compared

The 2026 pay landscape

Start with the anchors. The ONS median of £15.70 an hour (£625 a week) is the centre of the trade: half of employed painters and decorators earn more, half earn less. On a 40-hour week that annualises to £32,656 — the salary the take-home calculator uses as its default. The employed day rate sits at £125 to £130 a day, and that number has barely moved in real terms for years, because supply keeps pace with demand.

Decorators get paid in three currencies: the day rate, the hourly rate, and the price. Employed painters live on day rates and hourly rates. Self-employed decorators increasingly live on the price — a fixed quote per room or per job, where speed and accuracy turn into margin. A two-day room priced at £400 is £200 a day if it takes two days and £267 a day if you finish it in a day and a half. That arithmetic is the whole game of price work.

Region moves the numbers but less dramatically than in the licensed trades. London and the South East pay 10 to 20% above the national median; the North and Wales sit below it. The day-rate ranges in the table above are typical market ranges, not ONS figures — treat them as the going rate in most English regions, and expect London to sit above the top of each band.

Domestic work: the bread and butter

Most decorators start — and many stay — painting for homeowners directly: bedrooms, whole houses, hallways, exteriors in the summer months. The work is priced per room or per day, quoted face to face, and paid by bank transfer when the job is done. There is a quiet structural advantage here that painters in other arrangements do not get: private homeowners are not contractors under the Construction Industry Scheme, so no CIS deduction touches domestic invoices. What you quote is what arrives.

Domestic decorating is a reputation economy. The decorator who turns up when promised, sheets everything properly, cuts a clean line and leaves the house cleaner than expected gets the street — and then the street's friends. Photos of finished rooms, a tidy van and a short list of genuine reviews are worth more than any advert. Repeat customers and referrals are the cheapest diary-fillers in the trade.

The ceiling is the constraint. Household budgets cap what domestic work pays: most homeowners will not pay £250 a day for a bedroom, however good the finish. Competition is intense because anyone with a brush can quote. And December and January bite domestic decorators hardest, when households simply stop spending. Domestic work is the steadiest way to start, but it is rarely the way to the top of the pay table.

Commercial and site work: steadier money, bigger jobs

The other half of the trade works for contractors, not homeowners: new-build snagging and decorating, office refits, schools, retail units, housing-association voids. The jobs are bigger, the runs of work are longer, and the day rates are higher — typically £140 to £180 a day. The price of admission is the Construction Industry Scheme: the contractor deducts 20% from the labour on your invoice if you are CIS-registered (30% if you are not), and that money sits with HMRC until your Self Assessment sorts it out.

Site work has a different rhythm. You are told where to be and what is being painted; the spec is set by someone else; the pace is set by the programme. In return you get weeks or months of booked work instead of a diary full of one- and two-day domestic jobs. Some of it comes through agencies, which adds a margin-taker between you and the rate — worth checking before you sign on.

The trade-off is autonomy for security. Site decorators give up choosing their jobs and setting their prices, and gain a full order book through the winter months when domestic work dries up. Plenty of decorators run a hybrid year: domestic price work through spring and summer, site work through the cold months.

Spraying: the premium skill

If there is one skill that lifts a decorator out of the £125–£130 band, it is spraying. Airless sprayers lay paint on new-build walls, large commercial spaces, fencing runs and exteriors at a speed no roller can match — a whole house interior that takes a week by hand can take two days sprayed. Main contractors and developers pay for that speed, and the premium is real: spraying specialists typically command £180 to £250 a day against £125 to £150 for standard brush-and-roller work. Those are typical industry ranges and they move with region and contract type, but the gap is consistent.

The barrier is equipment and nerve. A professional airless setup costs £1,000 to £3,000, and the learning curve is genuine — masking discipline, pressure control, overspray management. Get it wrong and you have painted the windows, the floor and the neighbour's car. Get it right and you are one of the few decorators on site who can do what the programme needs fastest.

Spraying also answers the competition problem. Thousands of painters can cut in a wall; far fewer can set up, spray and clean down a rig properly. That scarcity is exactly what the day-rate premium is paying for. For a decorator looking to close the gap with the licensed trades, a sprayer is the cheapest qualification that actually moves the rate.

Decorating extras: wallpapering, coving and the prep that wins price work

The decorators who earn best are rarely the fastest painters — they are the ones who sell the extras. Wallpapering and coving are priced as add-ons to a paint job, and plenty of painters quietly avoid both, which is precisely why they pay. A decorator who hangs paper neatly and runs coving without drama can add hundreds of pounds to a job that a brush-only competitor cannot touch.

Then there is preparation, the unglamorous core of the trade. Filling, sanding, caulking, priming bare timber — prep is where price work is won or lost. The decorator who prices two hours of proper prep into a room quote protects the day rate and never gets callbacks. The decorator who skips it to win the quote on price spends the margin on a return visit. Customers cannot see prep in a quote, but they can see its absence on the wall.

This is also where the honest pay gap narrows. A domestic decorator selling paint-only rooms competes with everyone; a decorator selling paper, coving and a flawless prep finish competes with almost no one. Specialisation inside the trade beats complaining about the trade's rates.

December and January: the quiet months

Every domestic decorator knows the pattern: December arrives, households stop booking work, and the diary empties until mid-January. Nobody paints the spare room in the week before Christmas, and January budgets go on bills, not emulsion. Six slow weeks is the normal shape of it — not a crisis, a season — but only if it is planned for.

The arithmetic is on the take-home page: six weeks at half income on the median salary leaves about £1,880 of gross missing against a steady year (illustrative). The decorators who sail through it bank the autumn — September to November is the busiest domestic stretch — and price January work keenly to fill the diary rather than sitting at home defending a rate. A discounted January week beats an empty one.

Commercial and site decorators feel it less. Programmes run through winter, and housing-association voids do not follow the Christmas calendar. The hybrid year — domestic in the warm months, site work in the cold ones — exists largely because of these six weeks. Employed painters, of course, are insulated entirely: the salary lands in December just like every other month.

The honest pay gap — and how to beat it

Say it plainly: at £15.70 an hour, painting is the lowest-paid of the five construction trades on this site, and the gap to electricians at £19.00 is £3.30 an hour — about £6,800 a year on full-time hours. The cause is structural. Electrical and gas work are fenced behind qualifications and certification; painting is fenced behind nothing. When anyone can enter, rates settle where supply meets demand, and supply is plentiful.

Three routes genuinely close the gap. The first is spraying, covered above: a £50-a-day premium over 200 working days is £10,000 a year, which more than erases the £6,800 deficit. The second is commercial contracts — steadier, higher day rates, longer runs of work, winter-proof. The third is running a small team: the decorator who employs two painters stops selling hours and starts selling jobs, keeping a margin on every hour someone else paints. That is a different business, with payroll and vans and quotes, but it is how decorating incomes reach £50,000 and beyond.

None of these routes requires a licence or a degree. That is painting's paradox: the trade is easy to enter and hard to get rich in, but the ceiling is set by business skill, not by certification. The decorators earning electrician-level money are not better painters — they spray, they contract, or they employ.

Where the numbers come from

The medians — £15.70 an hour and £625 a week — are ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025 provisional figures, pay period April 2025, for SOC 2020 code 5323 (painters and decorators), all employees. The £32,656 annual figure is derived at 40 hours a week. Day-rate, spraying and price-work ranges are typical market ranges, clearly labelled as such in the table; they are not ONS data.

Monthly figures on this hub come from the 2026/27 UK tax model — England bands, a £12,570 Personal Allowance, employee National Insurance at 8% between £12,570 and £50,270 and 2% above it, plus auto-enrolment pension at 5% of qualifying earnings. The take-home calculator page shows the full workings for a painter's salary, the 2026/27 tax guide explains the complete model, and CIS deduction rates are from GOV.UK.

How to use this hub

Employed painters should start with the take-home calculator: enter the salary or hourly rate and see the monthly figure after tax, National Insurance and pension. Subcontractors working for contractors need the CIS and pay page, which works a painter's invoice through the 20% and 30% deductions. The full Construction Industry Scheme guide covers registration and gross payment status, and the construction hub compares all five trades side by side.