How Much Should I Charge to Fit a Kitchen?

For installers

Search online for what a kitchen fitter should charge and you will find different answers. As one published benchmark, Checkatrade’s UK kitchen fitting guide, checked in October 2026, puts a kitchen fitter at £280–£360 a day. That gives you some market context. It does not tell you what your business needs to charge.

The problem isn't that all those figures are necessarily wrong. It's that none of them knows anything about your business. They're useful for seeing what customers are likely to find when they do the same search, and they're useful as a general sense check. But copying somebody else's day rate has never been a great way of working out what you should charge. Your number needs to start with you.

Why do kitchen fitter rates vary so much?

Because we're not all selling the same thing. A fitter working five days a week for a national retailer, turning up to jobs that have already been sold and surveyed, is running a very different business from somebody finding their own customers, doing the surveys, pricing every job, arranging the subbies and dealing with everything from the first phone call through to the final payment.

Even two self-employed fitters working in the same town can have completely different costs. One might have an old van that's paid for, work on his own and do very little advertising. Another might have a new van on finance, employ somebody, carry more insurance, use software, spend money generating leads and coordinate plumbers and electricians on every job. Their rates shouldn't automatically be the same.

Don't confuse what the retailer charges with what the fitter gets

This comes up a lot when you're subcontracting for one of the bigger kitchen retailers. A customer might pay the retailer a sizeable amount for installation and the fitter doing the job receives considerably less. It's easy to look at that and think, They're charging the customer all that and paying me this.

But they're not selling exactly the same thing you are. The retailer may have found the customer, designed and sold the kitchen, carried out or arranged the survey, handled the administration, provided customer support and put guarantees or other infrastructure around the installation.

That doesn't mean the rate you're being offered is good enough. It might not be. It just means the customer's installation price and your subcontract fitting rate aren't directly comparable.

If you go out and find the customer yourself, you may be able to keep more of the value of the job. But now you have to find them, sell the job, survey it, quote it, organise it, communicate with the customer and carry more of the risk yourself. There's no free bit in the middle.

Start with what you actually need to earn

A lot of installers start with a number they've heard somewhere else. Maybe another fitter is on £280 a day, so £280 feels about right. You use that number for a couple of years, get busier, and because the diary is full you assume everything must be working.

It might be. But being busy doesn't tell you whether you're charging enough.

A better way is to work backwards from the business you've actually got. Think about:

• what the business costs to run each year
• what you need to take home
• how many days you can realistically invoice
• what needs to be left in the business after you've paid yourself

That last one matters more than most of us realise when we first go self-employed.

You don't get paid for every day you work

This catches people out. You might work 220 or 230 days in a year, but you won't invoice all of them. There will be days spent surveying jobs, pricing, collecting materials, talking to customers, arranging trades, sorting paperwork, dealing with problems and going back to finish things.

There are also holidays, sickness, quiet gaps and all the small bits of time between jobs that somehow never appear on an invoice.

If you work 220 days but only invoice 170 of them, those other 50 days still have to be paid for somewhere. They come out of the 170. That's why another fitter's £250 day rate tells you very little unless you know how his whole business works.

Your wage isn't the same thing as the business making money

You can take decent money home and still have a weak business. I've seen plenty of installation businesses where the owner is working flat out, paying himself, keeping the bills covered and thinking everything is fine — until the van needs replacing, a customer holds money back, work goes quiet or they're off for a few weeks. Then you realise there wasn't much sitting behind you.

You don't need to become an accountant. The business simply needs to bring in enough to cover the cost of doing the jobs, cover the cost of being in business, pay you properly and still leave something behind.

You can call that profit or margin if you want. The name doesn't matter nearly as much as making sure it's actually there.

Your day rate isn't necessarily your job price

Let's say you've worked everything out and decided you need to recover £350 for a chargeable fitting day. That doesn't mean a kitchen you expect to take ten days should automatically be £3,500.

What about the time before you start? You may have surveyed it, worked out the price, met the customer, spoken to other trades and gone backwards and forwards over the details.

Then there's the job itself. You might have parking, travel, consumables, waste, collections, missing items, changes, call-backs or a design issue that nobody knew about until the old kitchen came out.

Some of those things can be charged separately. Others need to be allowed for in the price. The important thing is that you haven't forgotten they exist.

Your day rate helps you understand what your time needs to be worth. Your price for the job needs to cover the whole job.

So what should you charge?

Work your own number out first. Then look at what the market is doing. If you discover that your business really needs £375 a day and you're still charging £250 because that's what you started charging years ago, you've learned something useful.

If your figures tell you that you need £600 a day and everyone around you is charging £300, that's useful too. You now need to work out why there's such a gap.

Maybe your costs are too high. Maybe you're doing work that doesn't suit the business you've built. Maybe you're taking on too much that never gets charged. Or maybe your service genuinely is different enough to command more. The point is that you've stopped guessing.

What if I work outside the UK?

The numbers and the way jobs are priced will change, but the principle doesn't. In the US and Canada you'll often see cabinet installation priced per cabinet, by crew day, by project or using other methods that aren't as common in the UK. Australia will have its own going rates again.

Don't convert a UK day rate into dollars and assume that's your answer. Look at your local market, then work backwards through your own costs, your own chargeable time and what you actually need the business to produce. That's the bit that works anywhere.

Want to work out your own number?

Every Install's Profit Planner is included with Free membership. Rather than telling you what every kitchen fitter should charge, it lets you start putting your own figures in and look at what your business is actually producing.

Join Every Install free and use the Profit Planner →

Already know your prices probably need to move? The Raising Your Prices Quick Win is also included with Free membership and gives you a simple way to think through increasing your prices without making a huge drama out of it.

Get the Raising Your Prices Quick Win with Free membership →

If you want help applying these numbers to the way you run the business, KBB Momentum offers structured business support for installation business owners.

Pricing figures are current public UK market benchmarks checked in October 2026. They are included for context only and are not a recommended rate for any individual installer or business.