12 October 2026 1 min read Costs & planning
Ask three tilers for a price and you’ll get three numbers. Here’s what sits behind
them, using the rates we actually quote around Hereford.
Labour
For straightforward wall tiling in a standard format — say 600×300 porcelain — labour lands
around £40–£50 per m². Floors are similar. The figure climbs when:
- the tiles are very large (over 600mm, needing two people and levelling clips),
- the tiles are very small (mosaics take far longer per square metre),
- there are lots of cuts — niches, window reveals, around sockets,
- it’s natural stone, which needs sealing before grouting.
Materials
Tiles themselves run from about £20 per m² for a basic ceramic to £80+ for decent porcelain and
beyond for stone. Then there’s the bit nobody budgets for: adhesive, grout, trims, backer board,
tanking kit and silicone. On a typical bathroom that’s £150–£400 of consumables.
Preparation
This is where quotes diverge most. Replacing soft plasterboard behind a shower, overboarding a
flexing timber floor, levelling a dipped concrete slab — each adds a day and materials. A quote
that ignores it isn’t cheaper, it’s just incomplete.
A real example
A 2.4m × 1.8m bathroom, floor and four walls, mid-range porcelain, one wall needing backer board:
roughly £1,900–£2,600 all in, four to five days on site. That’s the honest middle of what we see.
Getting a number you can trust
Insist on a written, fixed quote after a visit. Anyone pricing a bathroom over the phone is
guessing, and guesses tend to be revised upwards once the walls are open.