Most plastering is quoted per job rather than per day, so the day rate is best understood as a tool for checking whether a quote is sane, not as something you will actually be billed.
The published figures, and why they disagree
MyJobQuote's July 2026 guide puts London and the South East at £250 to £350 and above, the Midlands at £200 to £275, and the north of England at £180 to £250. HaMuch, which aggregates rates from tradespeople listing on its own platform, gives a London average of £218 a day against a national average of £170.
That is a wide gap for the same city in the same year, and it is worth understanding why rather than averaging it away.
The two sources are measuring different things. A cost guide reflects what quoted jobs work out at, including the overheads of an established business. A rate aggregator reflects what tradespeople advertise, which skews toward sole traders competing on price and toward whoever bothered to list.
Neither is wrong. The useful conclusion is that a South London plasterer somewhere between £220 and £350 a day is within the normal range, and that anyone presenting you with a precise London average is overstating what the data supports.
Why per-job pricing dominates
Plastering has an unusually predictable relationship between area and time, which makes fixed quotes low-risk for the plasterer. An experienced plasterer knows within an hour how long 40 square metres will take.
There is also a quality argument for it. A day rate rewards slowness, whereas a fixed price rewards efficiency. Since plastering is judged on finish rather than hours, most homeowners are better served by a fixed quote.
Where day rates do appear is on open-ended work: chasing out and making good after a rewire, repairs across several rooms, or anything where the scope genuinely cannot be defined in advance.
Using the day rate properly
Take the quote, divide it by the number of days the plasterer says they will be on site, and see what falls out.
MyJobQuote's timings are a reasonable yardstick: a small room in one day, a medium room in one to two, a large room in two to three, and a patch repair in two to four hours. So a double bedroom quoted at £750 for two days implies about £375 a day. That is at the upper end for London but not absurd if the room is high-ceilinged and needs hacking off.
The same £750 for a job the plasterer describes as a single day is worth a polite question. Not an accusation, since materials, access and preparation all legitimately sit inside that number, but a question.
What the rate has to cover
A self-employed plasterer's day rate is not take-home pay. Out of it come materials on smaller jobs, van and fuel, tools, public liability insurance, waste disposal, unpaid quoting time, and the days when weather or a delayed previous trade means no work at all.
The cheapest quote in a set of three is not usually the bargain it appears to be. In plastering specifically, the finish is the entire product, and it is the one thing that cannot be fixed cheaply afterwards.