What do tradies actually charge per hour?

Look across the table and the spread is huge. An apprentice plasterer might be charged out at $20 an hour and a city drainlayer at $150 or more. Even inside one trade, a builder can be $65 in a smaller centre and $120 in Auckland. None of that is random, and almost none of it is a rip-off.

Three things move the number. Location comes first: Auckland and Wellington run 10 to 25% above the regions because rent, fuel, wages and demand all cost more there. Then risk and skill: an electrician or gasfitter carries a licence, a legal liability, and years of training, so they sit well above a general handyman. Last is the job itself. A tricky tiling job with waterproofing and endless cuts is priced higher per hour than a straight run of floor.

So when you compare two rates, you are not comparing like for like. You are comparing two businesses with different costs, different speed, and different risk. The rate is just the visible tip of that.

This one matters for both sides of the table. The hourly rate a tradie puts on a quote is not what lands in their pocket. Out of it comes the ute, the fuel, the tools, insurance, ACC, phone, the hours spent quoting for free, the quiet weeks, and a wage. What is left is the profit, and it is a lot thinner than the rate makes it look.

For a tradie, that is the whole game. If you set your rate off a mate's number or off this table without doing your own maths, you can be flat out all year and still going backwards. The gap between your sticker rate and your real rate is where businesses quietly die. Work out your true hourly rate first, then use this table as a sense check, not the other way around.

For a homeowner, the same fact explains the low quote. A tradie charging well below the range is either very lean, very new, or not covering their real costs, and the last one shows up later as corners cut or a business that folds mid-job. Cheap on paper is not always cheap in the end.

Two tools here go deeper than the rate. Our true hourly rate calculator turns a target income into the rate you actually need to charge, and the margin vs markup calculator stops the other quiet leak, quoting a markup while you think in margin.

If you are a homeowner staring at three quotes, the cheapest is tempting and often the trap. Here is how it plays out. The low quote wins the job. Halfway through, the "unforeseen" extras appear, because the price was too thin to include them honestly. The finish is rushed. Something fails in a year, the tradie has moved on or wound up, and you pay a second tradie to fix the first one's work.

The number you should compare is not the hourly rate and not even the quote total. It is the total cost of getting the job done right and done once. A tradie who charges $110 an hour and does it properly in a day can beat one who charges $75 and takes two, then comes back. Ask what is included, ask about insurance and guarantees, and ask to see recent work. The rate is one line of that picture, not the whole thing.

Cheapest is a fine filter for a throwaway job. For anything you have to live with, buy the outcome, not the hourly rate.

If you run the trade, the rate is not just a number, it is a sales moment. Most tradies either hide it or lead with it, and both cost work. Hide it entirely and the price-shoppers still ring, waste your time, then vanish when you say it out loud. Slap a bare "$120/hr" on the homepage and you become a price on a list, judged next to someone charging $75 who does half the job.

The move is to frame the rate, not just state it. Show what an hour of you actually buys: the licence, the insurance, the guarantee, the not-coming-back. Put a couple of real jobs next to it with real photos. When the number arrives with proof beside it, the person reading has already decided you are worth it, and the rate confirms the decision instead of starting the argument.

That framing lives on your website, and it is the moment most trade sites drop the ball. If yours is a phone number and a stock photo, you are handing the framing to whoever quotes lower. If your site brings in calls but no real enquiries, that is usually a website problem, not a pricing one. We wrote a plain read on why a site gets traffic but no enquiries if that sounds like yours.

Whichever side of the quote you are on, treat this table as a reality check, not a rulebook. The ranges are pulled from published NZ cost guides and dated, but they are ranges for a reason. Your job, your region, and your tradie all move the real number.

• Homeowner: use the range to spot a quote that is wildly off in either direction, then dig into what is included rather than chasing the lowest hourly rate.
• Tradie: use the range as a sanity check after you have worked out your own true hourly rate, never as a substitute for it.
• Both: confirm whether any rate is GST inclusive or exclusive before comparing two of them. That one question removes 15% of the confusion.

Rates move, trades differ, and every source has its own method. Use the numbers to ask better questions, not to settle an argument.