Day Rate or Fixed Price?
Written by James Walker · Last reviewed 16 August 2026
James Walker has 2 degrees in construction (BSc (Hons) Building Surveying · MSc Environmental Design of Buildings) and an extensive background in issue resolution, resolving over £4 billion of consumer issues.
The short answer
- Fixed prices win more domestic work. Customers want certainty.
- Day rates protect you where the scope genuinely cannot be predicted.
- Open-ended hourly work makes customers anxious, and anxious customers watch the clock.
- Capping a day rate gives you protection and them certainty.
- Builders and subcontract work often run on day rates; homeowners rarely prefer them.
On this page
What customers actually want
Certainty, almost always.
A homeowner hearing "it's £300 a day and it'll take three or four days" hears a number between £900 and £1,200 and assumes the higher one. A fixed £1,100 wins that comparison even though it is more than the low end.
Open-ended time also changes the relationship. Customers on a day rate watch when you arrive, notice when you take lunch, and interpret a slow afternoon as being charged for. Nobody enjoys that on either side.
When a day rate is right
Genuinely unpredictable work. Chasing an intermittent fault, repairs behind a wall, remedial work on someone else's mess.
Small jobs where pricing takes longer than doing.
Subcontract work for builders, where it is the norm.
Customer-directed work where they keep changing what they want, a fixed price for a moving target is a trap.
Capping the day rate
Where you need a day rate but the customer needs certainty, cap it: "£300 a day, I expect three days, and I'll come back to you before it goes past four."
You keep the protection. They get a ceiling. It converts an open-ended commitment into a bounded one, which is usually all they needed.
Fixed price properly
If you fix a price, fix the scope with it. A fixed price against a vague scope is how trades lose money, the customer's understanding of what was included expands to fill the ambiguity.