UK Tradesperson Prices 2026: The Real Regional Breakdown

Where you live in the UK now more than doubles the cost of hiring a tradesperson. An analysis of 218,538 priced services across 342 UK cities, published here for the first time, finds a 108.6% gap between the country's most and least expensive places for identical work. A new bathroom that costs £5,362 in Boston, Lincolnshire costs £11,186 in St Albans. A full house rewire is £4,213 in Boston and £8,789 in St Albans. This article lays out the full regional picture using the same dataset that powers How Much?'s 2026 pricing guides.

The headline finding

St Albans is 108.6% more expensive than Boston for the same tradesperson work. That is the single biggest regional price gap in the UK dataset and it holds across every trade tracked -- plumbing, electrical, bathroom fitting, extensions, and every other physical service with a local labour component.

The gap is driven by local wages. Our pricing model applies a per-city cost multiplier derived from the Office for National Statistics Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. Cities where tradespeople earn above the UK median charge proportionally more; cities where wages sit below the median charge less. St Albans carries a multiplier of 1.598, the highest in the dataset. Boston sits at 0.766, the lowest. Every other UK city falls somewhere in between.

For consumers, the practical consequence is that quoted prices should always be benchmarked against local data, not a national average. A national average boiler install price of around £3,000 translates to roughly £3,730 in London and £2,730 in Newcastle -- a real £1,000 difference before any variation between individual tradespeople.

The 10 most expensive UK cities

Ranked by cost multiplier across all trades:

Seven of the top ten are London boroughs. The exceptions -- St Albans, Elmbridge (Surrey), and several inner-London areas -- track high-wage commuter-belt and central-London patterns rather than geographic London per se. The top spot going to St Albans rather than Kensington reflects St Albans' combination of strong local wages and proximity to London employment without being subject to some of the mid-range boroughs that pull the London average down.

The 10 cheapest UK cities

Four of the ten cheapest are in the East Midlands, with Boston and East Lindsey forming a clear bottom cluster. This is a structural feature of lower wage-growth in parts of Lincolnshire relative to the national mean, not a signal about quality of work or availability of tradespeople.

Regional breakdown

Averaged across all cities within each region, the picture looks like this:

Southern England (London, South East, East of England, South West) averages roughly 11.8% more expensive than the North (North East, North West, Yorkshire, Scotland). The North-South divide on tradesperson pricing is real but narrower than headline regional GDP gaps would suggest -- service prices track labour costs rather than regional economic output.

Scotland is a mild surprise in this breakdown: Scottish cities average 5.2% below the UK mean, placing Scotland in the cheaper half of the country. Aberdeen and Edinburgh remain above the Scottish mean internally, driven by local wage premia, but both still undershoot most Southern English regions on tradesperson pricing.

The London premium, by trade

Across all 51 trades tracked, Londoners pay an average of 24.3% above the UK average. The premium is not uniform. Services with the highest London uplifts tend to be routine, labour-intensive jobs rather than one-off specialist work.

Biggest single-job price gaps

The dataset contains 218,538 individually priced services (51 trades times 342 cities times an average of 12.5 job types per trade). Ranked by the absolute difference between the cheapest and most expensive price for the same job, the largest gaps are:

The £41,600 gap on a single-storey extension is the largest on the UK market by a wide margin. For context: the cheapest-region price would cover the entire extension, kitchen fit, and bathroom renovation combined for a household in the South East paying London-adjacent rates.

A household basket: London vs Boston

Translating these figures into something a household actually experiences, consider a representative annual basket of services: an emergency plumber call-out, an electrician call-out, an annual boiler service, a routine private dentist check-up, a haircut, and a standard window cleaning. The same basket priced in three places:

Basket composition is illustrative and tilted toward larger one-off services (boiler install, rewire-style items may feature). Routine-only baskets show narrower gaps in the £500-£800 range. The wider number captures the cost of being a homeowner with occasional larger maintenance bills.

Methodology

Base prices are compiled from industry cost guides including Checkatrade, Heatable, and Boiler Guide, then cross-referenced against at least two further sources per job type. Conflicting figures are resolved using a weighted average biased toward the most recent and comprehensive datasets. Base prices represent national UK averages (low / average / high) for each specific job within each trade.

Local prices are produced by applying a per-city multiplier derived from the Office for National Statistics Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. The multiplier represents local wage levels relative to the UK median. Cities with multipliers above 1.0 have above-median wages; below 1.0, below-median. The multiplier is uniform across trades within a city -- it models cost of living, not trade-specific regional markups.

Multipliers in the current dataset range from 0.766 (Boston) to 1.598 (St Albans). The full dataset of 51 trades and 342 cities is available for custom data cuts on request. See the press and data page for contact details and journalist resources.

Related cost guides

For deeper breakdowns of specific trades referenced above:

• How Much Does a Full House Rewire Cost?
• How Much Does a New Bathroom Cost?
• Kitchen Renovation Cost UK