A bathroom is one of the most commonly quoted jobs in the trade and one of the easiest to get wrong. It’s a small room with a lot going on: plumbing, electrics, tiling, waterproofing, joinery and decorating, all stacked into a few square metres where two people can’t easily work at once. Miss one stage and the whole price is out.

This guide is a method, not a price list. Your rates, your area and your suppliers will give you different numbers to mine — what matters is that you survey it properly, break it into stages, and price every stage rather than eyeballing the room and picking a figure that feels about right.

Survey it before you price it

The single biggest cause of a bathroom job going wrong is pricing it from memory in the van afterwards. Take ten extra minutes in the room and write down what you actually see.

Things worth checking on every bathroom survey:

The suite and layout. Is it a like-for-like swap, or is anything moving? Moving a WC or a bath is a different job to dropping a new one into the same footprint.
The existing pipework. What are you connecting to, and can you see it? Old copper buried in a screed floor, or a soil stack in an awkward spot, changes your day count.
The floor. Timber or concrete? Is it level and sound? Will it need overboarding or levelling before tiling or vinyl goes down?
The walls. Plaster, plasterboard, dot-and-dab, or tile-on-tile from a previous refit? Anything you’ll need to overboard or re-tank?
Electrics. Existing lighting, shaver socket, extractor, underfloor heating, towel rail. Anything that needs certification is a cost, whether you do it or you’re bringing someone in.
Ventilation. Where is the extractor going and where does it duct to? Through a wall is straightforward; through a loft and out a soffit is not.
Access. Terraced house with no parking, a first-floor bathroom and a skip permit, or a spiral staircase — all of it costs time.
Water pressure and the heating system. Combi, unvented cylinder or gravity-fed? It decides what showers you can realistically fit.

Photograph everything, including under the bath and inside the airing cupboard. You’ll want it when you write the quote up and again when the customer asks what changed.

Break it into stages

Bathrooms price best when you treat them as a sequence of stages rather than one lump. Six stages cover most refits:

Strip-out and disposal. Removing the old suite, tiles and floor covering, plus skip hire or tip runs. Tile-on-tile and a screeded floor can turn a half-day strip into a day and a half.
First fix. Pipework, waste runs, electrics, extractor duct, any stud work or plasterboarding, floor levelling or noggins for the new layout.
Preparation and tanking. Overboarding, levelling, and waterproofing wet areas. This is the stage most commonly skipped in a cheap quote and most commonly the reason someone rings you two years later.
Tiling and flooring. Walls and floor, including adhesive, grout, trims and cutting time. Large-format tiles, mosaics and herringbone all take longer than a standard brick bond.
Second fix. Fitting the suite, taps, shower, screen, towel rail, lights, extractor, accessories — plus commissioning and testing.
Making good and finishing. Silicone, painting, boxing in, replacing the door if it now fouls the new layout, and a proper clean before handover.

Pricing each stage separately gives you two things: a labour estimate you can defend, and a quote the customer can actually read. It also makes it obvious when a stage is missing.

What to itemise, and what to bundle

Itemise at a level the customer can understand and you can price against later. A quote that reads:

Strip out existing suite, tiling and flooring; skip and disposal
First fix plumbing and electrics for revised layout
Overboard and tank shower area; level floor
Wall and floor tiling (customer-supplied tiles)
Supply and fit bathroom suite, brassware and screen
Second fix electrics, extractor, towel rail; commission and test
Silicone, decorate and make good

…is far stronger than one line saying “bathroom refit”. Each stage justifies the one above it, and when the customer asks “what if we keep the existing floor?”, you’ve got a line to price against instead of renegotiating the whole job. That’s the same principle behind what every professional quote should include.

Don’t go so granular that you’re listing every tube of silicone. Bundle sundries into the stage they belong to and note them in your inclusions.

The bits people forget

Almost every bathroom that loses money loses it on the same small items. Run this list before you total anything up:

Waste and disposal — skip hire, permits, tip fees, and the time to carry it out
Isolating and draining down, and any temporary reinstatement so the customer has water overnight
Sundries: adhesive, grout, trims, silicone, screws, fixings, tanking kit, pipe insulation
Extractor and ducting, plus any core drilling
New shower valve, wastes, traps and flexi connectors — rarely reusable
Floor levelling compound or overboarding
Boxing in pipework and the soil stack
Replacing or trimming the door, and door furniture
Certification for notifiable electrical work
Protecting the route in and out — dust sheets, floor protection, corridors and stairs
Your own return visit for snagging

Materials versus labour

Price materials from an actual list, not a guess. Measure the tiled area, add a wastage allowance appropriate to the tile and pattern, and get live prices from your merchant rather than what things cost last year.

Where the customer is supplying their own suite or tiles, say so explicitly in the quote and exclude yourself from responsibility for shortfalls, breakages and delivery delays. Client-supplied materials are a common source of arguments — and of days lost waiting for a replacement tray.

For labour, work from your day rate and a realistic day count per stage, including the days you can’t work because something has to dry. If you’ve never worked your rate out properly, do that first — every job price is built on it.

Here’s a purely illustrative shape — your numbers will be different:

Labour       6 days @ £300/day (illustrative only)   £1,800
Materials    suite, tiles, sundries — from list        £1,450
Disposal     skip and tip runs                           £280
Contingency  allowance for opening up                    £250
                                                      -------
                                                       £3,780
                                             (+ VAT if registered)

Allow for what you can’t see

You cannot see behind the tiles or under the floor at survey. In a bathroom, that’s where the surprises live: rotten floorboards under a leaking bath, hidden pipework in the wrong place, no proper waterproofing behind the old shower.

You have three honest options, and dishonesty isn’t one of them:

Build in a contingency for likely-but-unconfirmed work, and say so on the quote.
Use a provisional sum for a specific unknown — for example, replacing floorboards in the shower area, priced per square metre and only charged if needed.
Caveat it clearly — “price assumes sound floor and no concealed leaks; any remedial work will be priced and agreed before proceeding.”

What you must not do is quote a firm price you know you can’t hold and then hit the customer with extras in week two. That’s how good jobs turn into bad reviews.

Present it as one clean fixed price

Once the stages are priced, present it as a fixed quote with a clear total, VAT shown separately if you’re registered, and a short inclusions and exclusions list. Say how long the price is valid for — material prices move — and set out the payment terms and the process for agreeing any variation in writing.

If your bathrooms lean heavily on one discipline, it’s worth reading the trade-specific angle too: quoting as a plumber and quoting flooring work both cover how to structure the parts of a bathroom you’ll spend most of your time on.

The takeaway

Survey the room properly, price it in stages, list the small items you always forget, and be straight about what you can’t see yet. Do that and a bathroom stops being the job that quietly eats a week of your margin and becomes one of the most profitable, repeatable jobs on your books.

Queezy is built for exactly this — building an itemised, room-by-room quote on your phone while you’re stood in the bathroom, then sending a branded PDF before you leave. Join the waiting list to be first in when we launch.

How to Quote a Bathroom Renovation (Step by Step)