Question about price of labour...

[Gracie123]

We have just bought a new build, but it doesn't come with flooring.

It's our first home, and we have decided on tiles for the kitchen and bathroom and ordered them and adhesive/grout etc...

What I want to know is, roughly how much should we expect to pay in labour for someone to lay the tiles for us?

A friend of ours is a builder, but the quote he gave my mum for tiling seemed pretty outrageous (£30 per m2) particularly when the tiles are 600x600mm, so it's more than £30 to lay four tiles!!

Obviously if this is how much it costs universally, we'll use our friend, but I don't want to pay more than we have to just because he is a mate IYSWIM?

So.... any builders/tilers out there? Anyone married to one? What do you charge?

We just had a load of vinyl flooring fitted. The labour cost was £950 for 2 men doing 2 long days work, including the cost of adhesive and plywood etc underneath.

I think that equates to around £150 per man per day. Obviously if you live somewhere posh, or London, it will be more.

The guy who fitted our bathroom tiles charged £170 for 1.5 days work, including adhesive, but that was mates rates.

How big was your bathroom?
Did he do walls too?

I've got no idea how long it would take to do. I think that's part of the problem!

£150 per day labour is about average.

Okay, so based on mates quote he is expecting to do about 5m2 (or just under 20 tiles) a day.

Does that sound reasonable?

I'm not sure how long these things normally take!

Tiling a floor will be spread over 2 days minimum - remember the grout will need to set overnight before the job can be finished on the following day. I agree that £150 labour for a tiler per day is average (6-8 hr day). I paid that rate 5 yrs ago (after getting a few quotes and haggling!) so it might have gone up/down since then.

BTW, the rate was just for the labour - the cost of the actual tiles on top will vary enormously depending on what you plump for obviously.

The amount of time will not depend so much on the area as on how much cutting there is to do. Laying large tiles is fast in big square areas, another story altogether if it's a number of small rooms with funny shapes.

I would expect to be able to do a small kitchen and bathroom in 2 days. That's always going to be the minimum as the glue needs to set overnight before you can grout. It would be 3 days if there's a lot of cutting to be done.

The thing with bathrooms is that there's not usually that many square metres but working in a cramped space does take some time.

I would not go with the first quote you are given.
You really need to get 3 different quotes and compare them.
And, sometimes, the cheapest is not always the best option. Remember, you do get what you pay for.

Thanks guys!

All really helpful information. The kitchen should be cheap (large and square) but the bathrooms are going to be more fiddly.

I'll get a few more quotes done. Just a bit embarrassed to get someone other than my mate, so wanted to make sure we were getting a good price.