Prices on a tradesman's website: yes or no?

Most tradespeople we talk to have the same worry: put prices on a website and competitors will undercut you, or customers will fixate on the number and skip the conversation. So the question of whether to show prices on a tradesman's website comes up constantly, and the honest answer is that total silence costs you more enquiries than a rough figure ever will.

🔍 Should you show prices on your website at all

Nobody expects a fixed quote for a full rewire or a boiler swap before you've seen the job. But that's not what most visitors are actually looking for. They want to know if they're in the right ballpark before they bother calling. A visitor who can't tell whether you're a £60 callout or a £600 one usually leaves and calls whoever does tell them, even if that figure is only a guide.

This matters more for trades than for most other businesses, because the buying moment is often urgent or stressful (a broken boiler, a dead socket, a leak). People in that situation have little patience for a website that makes them ring round for basic information they could have had in ten seconds.

⚖️ What UK pricing law actually says

If you do publish any pricing information, consumer protection rules apply. The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 cover anything you say about your services, including prices, and Trading Standards guidance is clear that pricing claims must not mislead, even by omission. In practice this means:

• If you quote a "from £X" figure, it has to be a price some customers genuinely pay, not a bait figure nobody ever gets.
• If there's a minimum callout charge or an out-of-hours uplift, say so near the price, not buried in terms you link to from the footer.
• VAT status should be clear. "£85" and "£85 + VAT" are different prices and the law expects you to be upfront about which one you mean.

None of this is a reason to avoid pricing altogether. It's a reason to word it carefully, which takes a sentence or two, not a legal team.

💷 What to publish instead of a full price list

Very few trades need a line-by-line price list, and for complex jobs it would be misleading anyway. What works better:

• A callout or minimum charge, stated plainly ("£65 callout, waived if you go ahead with the work").
• A day rate or hourly rate range, if that's genuinely how you charge.
• Typical price ranges for your most common jobs ("boiler servicing: £80 to £120", "consumer unit upgrade: £350 to £600"), with a line making clear these depend on the property and the final quote confirms the figure.
• A clear statement of how quotes work if you'd rather not publish numbers at all: "we quote free on-site within 24 hours" tells a visitor what happens next, which is nearly as useful as a number.

That last option matters. If you genuinely can't give a meaningful range because every job varies wildly, the fix isn't silence, it's telling people exactly how and when they'll get a figure.

📈 Why even partial pricing helps you win work

Surveys of buyers across industries consistently find that missing pricing is one of the biggest frustrations people report when researching a company online, trades included. Showing something, even a rough range, does three things for you:

It filters out time-wasters before they call, so the enquiries you do get are closer to ready to book. It builds a bit of trust before you've even spoken, because hiding a number reads as evasive to a lot of customers, fairly or not. And pages built around specific job prices (boiler service cost, EICR cost, average cost of a rewire) tend to rank well in search, because that's exactly what people are typing into Google before they call anyone.

🛠️ What this means for your website

If you're building or rewriting a trade website, give pricing its own section rather than a single buried line. A short table or a few bullet ranges on your services pages, plus one line about how quotes work for anything bigger, covers most of what customers need and keeps you on the right side of the pricing rules.

At WebCheap, a standard build (£395, plus £25 per extra page) has room for this from the start: a services page with indicative pricing, a clear quote process, and a contact form that asks the right questions so you're not starting every enquiry from zero. If your pricing changes seasonally or per job type, the £25 small-change batches keep those figures accurate without a full redesign.

The honest takeaway: don't publish a rigid price list if your jobs genuinely vary too much to make one fair, but don't say nothing either. A callout charge, a day rate, or a few typical ranges, worded carefully and kept current, will win you more of the right calls than a website that makes people ask.