Knowing your day rate and knowing how to quote are two different skills. Plenty of trades work out a solid rate, then hand it straight to the customer as the price — “it’s three days at £320” — and wonder why the job that took two and a half days paid less than the one that overran.

The rate is your internal number. How you present it is a separate decision, and it changes who carries the risk, how the customer behaves on site, and whether being good at your job makes you money or costs you it. Here’s how to choose per job.

The same job, two very different feelings

Take a first-floor bathroom refit you’ve surveyed properly. Five days’ work, sanitaryware and tiles specified, nothing hidden.

Quote it as “£320 a day plus materials” and the customer hears an open tap. They don’t know what five days means — they know it could be six, or eight. So they start keeping score: what time the van arrived, how long you were at the merchant, why Thursday was a half day because the tiler couldn’t get in.

Quote the same job at a firm figure with a clear list of what’s included, and the customer hears a decision they can make once. They compare it to the other two quotes, pick one, and stop thinking about your hours entirely.

That’s the real difference, and it has nothing to do with the arithmetic. Both routes can land on the same money. Only one of them puts your daily timekeeping on trial.

Why fixed price usually pays you better

Fixed price is the default for most defined work, for three reasons that matter more than they first look:

It rewards you for being fast. You’ve fitted forty of these. If the job goes in in four days instead of five, a fixed price hands you that fifth day to sell to somebody else. On a day rate, twenty years of getting quicker earns you exactly nothing — you’ve priced your own efficiency out of your pay.
It’s much harder to haggle down. A single lump sum is a target. An itemised quote with stages and materials broken out invites the question “which bit do you want removed?” rather than “can you do it for less?”
It reads as confidence. A firm number says you’ve seen this job before and you know what it involves. “We’ll see how it goes” says the opposite, even when you’re the better tradesperson.

The catch is real, though: on a fixed price, you carry the overrun. Which is precisely why it only belongs on work you can see and define.

When a day rate is the honest answer

Day rate isn’t the soft option — on the right job it’s the only fair way to price:

Diagnostic work. An intermittent electrical fault, a leak that’s tracked across a ceiling, a boiler that locks out once a fortnight. You cannot fix-price finding something when you don’t yet know what it is.
Genuinely open-ended jobs. “Come and help me get the site finished,” snagging lists that grow as the customer walks round, a landlord who wants a day’s worth of odd jobs with the list still forming.
Labour-only on someone else’s programme. If you’re second-fixing to a builder’s timetable and their plasterer is three days late, a fixed price makes you pay for their delay.
Work you can’t inspect. Anything behind plaster, under a floor or below ground — until it’s opened up. The alternative is to firm-quote what you’ve seen and price the unknown separately, which is covered in pricing a job when you can’t see everything.

Quote a day rate on any of these and you’re not being vague — you’re declining to gamble on information you don’t have. Say that out loud to the customer and it lands as honesty, not hedging.

Which to quote

	Fixed price	Day rate
Job type	Defined and surveyed — bathroom, rewire, patio, repaint	Diagnostic, open-ended, or programme-led
Who carries the overrun	You	The customer
Speed	Rewards you	Costs you
Customer’s attention	On the result	On your hours
Needs from you	An accurate survey and clear exclusions	A record of hours and a cap or check-in point

Notice the pattern: the more you can see, the more a fixed price is in your favour. The less you can see, the more a day rate is.

Use the day rate to build the fixed price

These aren’t rival systems. Your day rate is the engine; the fixed price is the bodywork. Every fixed quote you send should be built from it, not guessed at.

The method, using a bathroom as the example — illustrative figures only, yours will differ:

Labour   5 days × £320                      £1,600
Materials (at your cost)                    £1,900
Materials markup                              £285
Skip / waste disposal                         £280
Contingency for opening up (allowance)        £200
                                            ------
Fixed quote                                 £4,265

Two things to keep straight. First, the customer sees the total and the inclusions — they don’t need your day rate or your markup laid out line by line. Second, if you build it this way you can defend it: when someone asks why it’s more than the bloke down the road, you know exactly which line carries the difference. That beats knocking money off a number you can’t account for.

The hybrid that covers most awkward jobs

Most jobs that feel like they don’t fit either model actually want both: a fixed price for the defined work, an agreed day rate for anything extra.

On the quote, that reads as one line under your terms:

Fixed price covers the works itemised above. Additional work requested on site, or work arising once existing pipework is exposed, will be agreed in writing beforehand and charged at £320 per day (or part day pro rata).

That single paragraph does a lot of lifting. The customer gets certainty on the bulk of the job, you’re not absorbing extras out of goodwill, and the price for extras is settled in advance rather than argued about at the end. It only works if you actually use it — every variation priced and agreed in writing before you do it, never sprung on the final invoice.

If you do quote a day rate, tie it down

An unbounded day rate makes customers nervous, and a nervous customer picks somebody else. Three things fix that without turning it back into a fixed price:

Give an expected range. “Most jobs like this take two to three days” is not a commitment, and it’s far better than silence.
Set a check-in. “If it looks like going past three days I’ll stop and talk to you before carrying on.” Nobody minds a bill they saw coming.
Define the day. State your hours and how part days are charged. “Half day” meaning different things to each of you is a genuinely common argument.

The takeaway

Fixed price for anything you’ve surveyed and can define — it pays you for your speed, protects your margin from haggling and keeps the customer’s eyes off the clock. Day rate for diagnostics, open-ended work and anything you can’t see yet, with a range and a check-in so it doesn’t feel like a blank cheque. For everything in between, fix the defined part and put your day rate in the terms for the rest.

Whichever you send, build it from your own costs rather than the going rate — the method for working that out is here — and put it in writing before anyone lifts a tool.

Queezy builds itemised fixed quotes from your own rates while you’re still stood in the room. Download it free on iPhone.

Day Rate vs Fixed Price: Which Should You Quote?