Checkatrade describes around £50 an hour excluding VAT as fairly standard for small building jobs across the UK. MyBuilder gives a wider national range of £25 to £60 an hour on the same basis. In London, applying Checkatrade's stated uplift of about £5 an hour puts the figure near £55.
All of those exclude VAT. A VAT-registered firm adds 20%, so £55 becomes £66 on the invoice.
The London hourly figure is derived, not measured
The same caution applies here as to day rates. No authoritative source measures a London builder's hourly rate. Checkatrade publishes a UK figure and a London uplift; adding them is an inference, and a reasonable one, but not a measurement.
MyBuilder puts London and the South East at £60 to £100 an hour excluding VAT, which is materially higher than the derived £55 and does not sit comfortably with MyBuilder's own day-rate figures. Where two sources this far apart are the only sources available, the honest output is a range with the disagreement disclosed.
There is one figure to be careful of. A claim of roughly £50 an hour for an experienced London builder circulates widely, and it traces back to Checkatrade's UK number wearing a London label. It understates London by the amount of the uplift.
The hourly and day figures are derived separately, and they do not reconcile
Checkatrade's London numbers come from two different uplifts applied to two different UK averages: roughly £5 an hour on top of a £50 UK hourly rate, and roughly £80 a day on top of a £400 UK day rate. That produces about £55 an hour and about £480 a day, which is why this site publishes £55 to £60 an hour and £450 to £500 a day. They are two separately derived estimates. Neither is calculated from the other.
They also do not agree. £55 multiplied by eight is £440, which is £40 short of £480. A homeowner who notices that gap has noticed something real rather than made an arithmetic error, and it is worth saying so rather than explaining it away. The gap is a product of how the two uplifts happen to have been published, not evidence about what either rate should be.
Hourly work does carry costs that day work spreads out. Travel to and from site, unloading and loading, setting up and clearing away, and the risk that the day contains only three chargeable hours all sit inside an hourly rate, whereas a booked full day amortises them across eight hours. That effect is real, and on the plumbing figures published on this site it is visible: £400 to £450 a day against £55 to £70 an hour puts a divided day below the hourly rate at both ends.
It does not hold everywhere, though, and it should not be presented as a rule. On the builder figures above the arithmetic runs the other way at the top of the range, and Checkatrade derives the electrician day rate as eight hours of the hourly average, which makes the two equal by construction. The useful conclusion is narrower than a formula: an hourly rate and a day rate answer different questions, so ask which basis a quote is built on rather than trying to convert one into the other.
The minimum charge is the figure that bites
This is the most useful caveat in this answer and it is barely published anywhere. Many builders apply a minimum charge of two to four hours. A one-hour job can therefore cost £100 to £200 excluding VAT, whatever the headline hourly rate says.
That is not sharp practice. A builder who crosses South London for a forty-minute repair has still spent most of a morning on it, and the minimum charge is what makes small work possible to take on at all.
The practical consequence is that small jobs are worth bundling. If someone is coming out to rehang a door, having the architrave made good and a cracked lintel looked at on the same visit costs a fraction of two separate call-outs, because you have already paid for the visit.
When an hourly rate is the wrong basis entirely
Hourly pricing suits work nobody can scope in advance: investigating a damp patch, opening up a ceiling, chasing a leak through a wall. It is the fair way to price uncertainty.
It is the wrong basis for anything that can be drawn and specified. On a defined job an hourly rate leaves you carrying the overrun risk with no ceiling, and it gives the builder no incentive to be quick. Ask for a fixed price wherever the scope can be written down, and accept hourly pricing where it cannot.
Where you do agree hourly work, agree three things in writing: the rate, the minimum charge, and who authorises additional hours once an estimate is exceeded. The Federation of Master Builders recommends that a contract set out rates for extras and overruns for exactly this reason.
Sanity-checking an hourly quote
Ask whether the figure includes VAT. Ask what the minimum charge is. Ask whether travel time is chargeable and from where. Ask whether materials are marked up, and by how much.
Then ask for labour and materials to be separated on the paperwork. Two builders quoting the same total can be charging very different rates behind it, and you cannot see which until the two lines are apart.
An hourly rate is a starting point for a conversation rather than a price.