The hourly figure is the least useful of the three ways plastering gets priced, and it is worth knowing why before you ask a plasterer for one.
The numbers
MyJobQuote gives a typical UK range of £25 to £40 an hour. HaMuch puts the national average at £25 and London at £33, within a national spread of £15 to £50 depending on region.
Those are consistent enough to be usable. A South London plasterer quoting somewhere around £30 to £40 an hour for small works is charging normally.
Why plastering resists hourly billing
Plaster sets on a fixed chemical timetable that has nothing to do with your convenience. Once a mix is made it must be applied, flattened and trowelled through several stages within a window of roughly ninety minutes to two hours.
That has a practical consequence: a plasterer cannot pause partway through a wall. They cannot do two hours today and three tomorrow on the same surface, because the join will show permanently as a visible line in raking light.
So the natural unit of plastering work is not the hour, it is the wall. A plasterer arriving to skim one wall is committing to seeing that wall through in a single continuous session regardless of how long it takes, which makes an hourly rate a poor fit for both parties.
Where hourly rates genuinely apply
Small, self-contained repairs are the honest use case. Filling a hole left by a removed radiator, making good after a socket has been moved, patching where a shelf was pulled out of the wall.
Even here, most plasterers convert it to a minimum charge rather than billing literal hours. Expect a half-day minimum on almost any callout, because travelling to a job, unloading, mixing, working and cleaning down consumes most of a morning whether the patch is the size of a plate or a door.
MyJobQuote's own figures reflect this. They put patch repairs at £100 to £300 for two to four hours of work, which is a minimum charge in all but name.
What this means when you are collecting quotes
If a plasterer offers an hourly rate for a full room, be slightly cautious. It suggests either that they have not properly assessed the job, or that the scope is genuinely uncertain because the existing plaster is in unknown condition.
The second reason is legitimate and worth naming. If nobody yet knows whether the old plaster will come off in sheets or hold firm, an hourly arrangement transfers that risk to you but is at least honest about it. Ask them to cap it, or to quote separately for the two scenarios.
For anything with a defined scope, ask for a fixed price. It is the industry norm for good reasons, it lets you compare quotes properly, and it puts the risk of a job overrunning where it belongs.
Bundling small jobs
The minimum charge is why it pays to save plastering jobs up. Three separate patch repairs booked on three visits will cost close to three minimum charges. The same three done in one morning cost barely more than one, because the expensive part is the plasterer's travel and setup, not the plaster.