Painter and Decorator Take-Home Pay Calculator 2026

From £15.70 an hour to an annual salary

The median hourly figure only becomes useful once it is annualised against real hours. At £15.70 an hour, the maths runs: 30 hours a week is £24,492 a year; 37.5 hours is £30,615; 40 hours is £32,656; 45 hours is £36,738; 50 hours is £40,872. Same rate, wildly different years — which is why comparing two decorating jobs on the hourly figure alone misleads.

Employed painters should check what the hours really are before celebrating a rate. A £16-an-hour offer on a 37.5-hour week is £31,200 a year; a £15-an-hour offer on a 45-hour week is £35,100. The lower hourly rate pays £3,900 more. Overtime in decorating is often unpaid or folded into the day rate, so the contracted hours are the honest number — put those in the calculator, not the hours you hope to work.

For self-employed decorators the hourly figure is even slipperier, because price work breaks the link between hours and pay. A room priced at £400 that takes a day and a half is £267 a day; the same room taking two full days is £200. Annualising price work means tracking actual invoiced income across the year, quiet months included — not multiplying your best week by 52.

The quiet-months maths

December and January are the decorating trade's annual pay cut, and it is worth seeing the size of it. On the £32,656 median salary the weekly gross is £628. Six slow weeks at half income means £314 of income missing each week — about £1,880 of gross missing against a steady year. That is illustrative arithmetic, not a forecast: your slow patch might be four weeks or ten, and January price work at a discount still beats an empty diary.

For employed painters this is academic — the salary lands every month regardless. For self-employed decorators it is the central budgeting fact of the year. The practical response is timing: September to November is the busiest domestic stretch, and the decorators who bank the autumn rather than spending it are the ones who do not feel January.

Run the comparison yourself: put £32,656 in the calculator for the steady year (£2,173.41 a month), then subtract the missing gross and run the lower figure. The monthly gap is what the autumn surplus has to cover. It is a smaller number than most decorators fear — which is exactly why planning for it works.

Employed painter vs self-employed decorator: two income shapes

The employed painter's year is a straight line: £2,173.41 a month, every month, with pension contributions, paid holidays and sick pay built in. The self-employed decorator's year is a wave: strong spring and autumn, thin December and January, the odd cancelled job that leaves a hole. Over a full year the self-employed decorator often grosses more — but keeps less of the difference than expected once the quiet months, unpaid admin and materials are accounted for.

The tax shapes differ too. The employed painter's deductions happen invisibly on the payslip. The subcontractor working for contractors loses 20% of the labour on every invoice to CIS — an advance payment toward tax and National Insurance, not an extra tax, but money that is gone for months until Self Assessment reconciles it. The decorator working direct for homeowners has no CIS at all and settles everything once a year through Self Assessment.

Choosing between them is choosing a risk profile, not just a pay figure. Employment buys certainty at the median rate; self-employment buys upside — price work, spraying premiums, running jobs — with the quiet months and the admin as the price. The calculator on this page models the employed shape; the CIS and pay page models the subcontractor one.

Where the 2026/27 bands sit at painter pay

Painter pay lives comfortably inside the basic-rate band, which makes the tax line simple. The Personal Allowance is £12,570 and the 20% band runs all the way to £50,270 — so on £32,656, every pound of taxable pay is taxed at 20p. The worked example shows it: £3,753.04 of income tax, £1,501.22 of employee National Insurance, £1,320.80 of pension, leaving £26,080.94.

The 40% band starts at £50,270, which is £17,614 above the median painter salary — out of reach for employed brush work, but not unthinkable for a decorator running a busy small team or a spraying specialist on long commercial contracts. Only income above the threshold is taxed at 40%; everything below stays at 20%. Crossing into the higher band never makes extra work 'not worth it'.

One threshold painters do meet: the pension one. Auto-enrolment takes 5% of qualifying earnings (£6,240 to £50,270), modelled here as salary sacrifice — which is why the pension line also trims the tax and National Insurance figures slightly. Opting out raises the monthly take-home on paper, but forfeits the employer contribution, so it is rarely the bargain it looks like.

Price work, overtime and bonuses: what extra actually adds

Extra income at painter pay levels is taxed at the margin: 20% income tax, 8% National Insurance, and 5% pension on qualifying earnings — 33p in the pound combined. So roughly £67 of every extra £100 reaches the bank. A £400 priced room on top of the salary month is about £268 of extra take-home; a £200 Saturday job is about £134.

That marginal rate is the number to use when pricing decisions. Quoting a job £100 higher is £67 more in the pocket, not £100 — and quoting £100 lower to win the work costs £67, not £100. Decorators who internalise the margin quote more confidently, because the downside of a keen price is smaller than it looks and the upside of holding firm is real.

Bonuses are rare in decorating, but Christmas bonuses and job-completion extras do appear on site work. They are taxed exactly like any other pay in the month they land — there is no special bonus rate. If a bonus arrives in an already-full month it can look heavily taxed on the payslip, but it is just the same 20% and 8% applied to more income.

How the tax engine works

Painter pay sits well inside the 20% band, which keeps the engine's work straightforward: Personal Allowance £12,570, then 20% on everything to £50,270. Pension is modelled as salary sacrifice at the 5% auto-enrolment minimum on qualifying earnings (£6,240 to £50,270), which reduces National Insurance as well as income tax — the standard arrangement for employed decorators. Scotland-registered users can switch to the six Scottish bands, where the 21% and 42% bands shift the monthly figure slightly against England.

What the engine does not model is CIS. If a contractor deducts 20% from your invoices, you are a subcontractor, and your cash flow through the year looks nothing like the smooth monthly figure here — the CIS and pay page works that through instead. Student loan repayments are also excluded; anyone with a Plan 1, Plan 2 or postgraduate loan should run the student loan calculator and subtract the monthly repayment from the figure shown here.

Reviewed and updated

The median pay figure and the worked example were last reviewed on 23 September 2026 against ONS ASHE 2025 provisional data. The tax model covers 6 April 2026 to 5 April 2027. If you are comparing a job offer, enter the actual salary and your actual weekly hours — and if the offer is price work rather than a salary, annualise your real invoiced income first, quiet months included.