How to price a tiling job per m² (without eating the prep)

Most tiling jobs are lost or underpriced in the same two places: the m² rate was copied from someone else’s area, and the prep was “included” instead of priced. Fix those two and pricing a bathroom becomes a ten-minute exercise you can do standing in it. Here is the framework, with worked figures you can adapt.

Treat every number here as a starting point. Rates move by region, by tile format and by how bad the walls are. The method is the part to keep.

Start with two rates, not one

Walls and floors are different jobs and deserve different rates. A UK wall rate for standard-format ceramic typically lands somewhere around £40 to £60 per m² labour-only, with floors a touch higher once levelling and falls come into it. Large-format porcelain, mosaics and anything needing a wet room fall belong at their own rates, because they take meaningfully longer per metre.

Build your own numbers from your day rate. If you lay 8m² of standard wall tile in a day and your day rate needs to be £280, your wall rate is £35 labour before materials, and you know exactly when a fancy format that halves your daily coverage should double the metre price. If you have not pinned your day rate down honestly, do that first with our day rate calculator.

Price the prep as its own line

Prep is where tiling margins go to die. Hacking off old tiles, skimming or boarding, tanking a shower area, self-levelling a floor: none of that is tiling, and none of it should be hidden inside the tiling rate.

Put prep on the quote as separate lines:

• Hack off and dispose of existing tiles, per m²
• Board or re-skim, per wall
• Tanking kit and labour for the wet area, per job
• Self-levelling compound, per floor

Two good things happen. The customer sees why the bathroom costs what it costs, and when the wall behind the old tiles turns out to be blown plasterboard, you are having a variation conversation, not an argument about a fixed price that never included rebuilding a wall.

Count the tiles properly, then add wastage

Materials are simple to get right and embarrassing to get wrong. Area, divided by tile size, plus wastage: 10% for straight lays, 15% or more for diagonal lays, herringbone and rooms with lots of cuts. Our free tile calculator does the boxes-and-wastage arithmetic in a few seconds if you want a sanity check while you measure up.

Quote adhesive, grout, trim and spacers at real merchant prices, not last year’s. On a 30m² job, a £4 per bag drift on adhesive is not noise.

A worked example: the standard family bathroom

Say walls are 24m² of standard ceramic and the floor is 8m² of porcelain:

• Hack off and dispose, 24m²: £360
• Tanking to shower area: £140
• Wall tiling, 24m² at £45: £1,080
• Floor prep and tiling, 8m² at £65: £520
• Adhesive, grout and trim: £210

That is £2,310 as five lines the customer can read, instead of “£2,300 for the bathroom” they can only haggle with. Line-itemed quotes get questioned less because there is nothing mysterious left to question. The same logic drives what to put on a quote that wins.

Take a deposit that covers the tiles

Tiles are the one material the customer often chooses and you often front. A 20% to 25% deposit taken when the quote is accepted means the porcelain is paid for before it is ordered, and a customer with money down does not go quiet for three weeks while you store their tiles in the garage. If you are still on the fence about deposits, here is the case for taking one.

Offer the extras as options, not suggestions

The niche shelf, the upgraded trim, underfloor heating prep before the floor goes down: put them on the quote as optional add-ons with prices, and let the customer tick them. Extras offered in writing at quote time get accepted at a rate that a mid-job “while I’m here, do you want…” conversation never matches, and every ticked box is margin on a visit you were already making.

Send it while you’re still at the house

The tiler who quotes from the bathroom beats the tiler who quotes on Sunday night, at the same price, most of the time. Speed reads as professionalism, and it gets your number in front of the customer while the job is still the thing they are thinking about.

That is the part Snapquo built for tilers does: your m² rates and prep prices saved once as items, a quote assembled by tapping them in, photos of your last bathroom attached, optional extras the customer ticks, and a deposit taken by card the moment they accept. The first few documents are free, so the next bathroom you measure up can be the test.