Should I Charge a Day Rate or Fixed Price for Kitchen Fitting?

For installers

I don’t think there is one answer to this that works for every kitchen installation.

Some fitters have always worked on a day rate, some price almost everything as a complete job and plenty use a bit of both depending on what they are being asked to do. For me, the important question isn’t whether one method is better than the other. It is how well you can understand the job before you start and who is carrying the risk if it turns out differently.

If you have properly surveyed a kitchen, you have the plans in front of you and you understand the scope, then giving the customer a fixed price can make a lot of sense. They know what the installation is going to cost and you can price the job around what it is actually going to take to deliver it properly.

Where fitters get caught is when a so-called fixed price is really just a guessed number of days multiplied by a day rate.

The examples here are kitchens, but the same decision comes up on bathroom installations. What matters is how clearly you can define the work and what happens if the job changes.

A fixed price needs to be properly priced

If you look at a kitchen and think it will take eight days, then multiply eight by £300 and call that the price, you haven’t really priced the job. You have estimated the time and turned it into a lump sum.

That might work perfectly well if everything goes exactly as expected, but kitchens have a habit of not doing that. There can be collections, return visits, problems with products, time spent organising other trades, consumables, waste, parking, travel and all the other small things that eat into the job without necessarily looking like fitting time.

Then the eight-day kitchen takes ten days and suddenly you feel as though you have worked the last two for nothing.

The problem there isn’t fixed-price work. The problem is that the price never properly accounted for the job in the first place.

A fixed price needs to cover the whole installation as you reasonably understand it, including the time you expect to spend on it, your direct costs, your overheads and the margin the business needs to make.

The customer is buying the job, not your time

This is one of the reasons I have always thought fixed pricing can work well when the scope is clear.

If it used to take you ten days to fit a certain type of kitchen and, through experience, better tools and better organisation, you can now do the same standard of job in eight, I don’t think that means you should automatically earn 20% less.

You got better at what you do.

The customer is paying for the kitchen to be installed properly. They are not buying a guaranteed number of days of your life.

That matters because one of the dangers of always thinking in day rates is that becoming more efficient can actually work against you. You finish sooner, so you invoice less, even though the reason you finished sooner is that you have spent years learning how to do the job better.

A fixed price allows some of that experience and efficiency to stay with the business.

There is obviously another side to that. If you have given a fixed price and the agreed job takes you longer because you underestimated it, you can’t simply add another two days to the bill because things didn’t work out the way you hoped. That is part of the risk you accepted when you fixed the price.

Day rates still make sense on the right work

There are plenty of situations where I would rather work on a day rate than pretend I can confidently price something I don’t properly understand.

Remedial work is a good example. Somebody asks you to sort out a kitchen another company has fitted badly, but until you start taking things apart you genuinely don’t know what you are going to find.

The same can happen with alterations to an older kitchen, repairs or investigative work where the customer knows there is a problem but nobody yet knows the extent of it.

In those situations, putting a fixed price on the work can mean either guessing low and getting hurt or adding so much contingency that the customer is paying for problems that might never exist.

An agreed day rate can be fairer to both sides.

That still needs to be explained properly. The customer should know what the rate covers, whether materials are additional, whether it is one fitter or a team and roughly how much time you think the work could take based on what you can see.

A day rate shouldn’t mean, “It’s £300 a day and we’ll see what happens.”

You still need to give the customer something sensible to work with.

Your day rate still has to be the right number

This is probably one of the biggest mistakes I see when fitters talk about day rates.

Someone charges £250 because that is what another fitter charges. Somebody else is at £300 because that sounds about right locally. Another hasn’t changed their rate for five years because they are still getting plenty of work.

None of those tells you whether the rate actually works for your business.

You are not going to invoice 260 fitting days a year. There are surveys, quotations, collections, admin, holidays, sickness, gaps between projects and all the other days where the business is still costing you money but there is no customer paying a fitting day.

Your van, fuel, insurance, tools, accountancy and everything else behind the business still have to be paid for.

So whether you charge by the day or by the job, you still need to know what your business needs to earn from the days that are genuinely chargeable.

Copying somebody else’s rate has never made much sense to me because you don’t know their costs, what they include or whether they are actually making any money themselves.

Fixed price does not mean every possible problem is included

This is where having a proper scope of work becomes important.

If you have quoted a fixed price to install the kitchen shown on the plans, that price should cover the work you agreed to do. It doesn’t mean you have also agreed to repair anything and everything that might be discovered once the old kitchen comes out.

You might lift the old floor and find rotten timber. The customer might change the appliance layout. They might decide they now want more sockets, extra tiling or something else that wasn’t part of the original job.

That is different from you simply taking longer to do the work you already priced.

If the job changes, the price may need to change with it, and that is where a proper variation process helps.

The clearer your original scope is, the easier those conversations become because both sides can see what was included and what has genuinely changed.

You can use both methods

There is nothing wrong with having a fixed price for the parts of the job you can properly define and another arrangement for work that genuinely can’t be known until you get into it.

You might quote the kitchen installation as a fixed price but explain that any hidden structural or remedial work discovered after strip-out will be assessed separately before it is carried out.

That can work perfectly well.

What causes trouble is when the fitter thinks something is open-ended and the customer thinks they have agreed one fixed price for absolutely everything.

Get that clear before you start.

Don’t let a customer turn your fixed price back into a day rate

This is another thing that can happen.

You give a customer a fixed price of £5,000 and mention that you expect the installation to take around ten days. They immediately divide one by the other and decide you are charging £500 a day.

Then you finish in eight days and they start wondering why the price hasn’t come down.

That isn’t how a fixed-price job works.

You have priced the installation, taken on the responsibility for delivering it and accepted the risk that it could take longer than you expected. If it had taken twelve days, the customer probably wouldn’t have volunteered another £1,000 because you had underestimated it.

The same principle works the other way.

You don’t need to apologise for being efficient, but you do need to make sure the overall price still represents good value for the work and responsibility you are taking on.

So which should you use?

For a kitchen installation that has been properly surveyed and where the work can be reasonably understood, I think a fixed price often gives both sides a cleaner arrangement. The customer gets certainty and the installer can price the whole job rather than selling individual days.

Where the work is genuinely uncertain, investigative or difficult to define before starting, a day rate can be much more sensible.

The important thing is not to use a day rate because you have never learned how to price a complete job, and not to give a fixed price simply because you think that is what customers expect.

Price the work in the way that best reflects the job and the risk you are taking on, then make sure the customer understands exactly what they are agreeing to.

Every Install can help with the numbers

The Installer Pricing Calculator is available free inside the Every Install Toolkit and gives you a practical way of looking at what your pricing actually needs to cover rather than copying another fitter’s rate.

Use the free Installer Pricing Calculator →

If you are pricing complete installations, the Scope of Works Builder and Quote Checklist are available with Every Install Pro and help you make clear what your price includes before you commit to it.

Explore the Price & Quote tools in Every Install Pro →

The Profit Planner is also available free if you are busy but still unsure whether enough money is being left behind once the work is done.

Use the free Profit Planner →