Should you put prices on your website? For most trades and local services the answer is yes, even when every job is different, as long as the price you show is honest about what it covers. The customers who never ring because they could not tell whether you were in their range are invisible, which is why the cost of leaving prices off rarely gets counted.
Why leaving prices off costs more than it saves
The usual reasons are fair ones: every job is different, competitors will undercut you, customers will hold you to a number you gave before seeing the job. All three are real. The cost on the other side is quieter.
A customer comparing three websites, one with figures and two without, has an answer from the first and homework from the other two. Some ring all three. Many ring the one that answered the question. And the enquiries that do reach a site with no prices include more of the people who were never going to pay what the job costs, which you only find out after the visit.
A price on the page does a filtering job before the phone rings. The people who call have already accepted the range.
Four ways to show a price
You do not have to choose between a full price list and nothing. There are four shapes, and most businesses use two or three of them on different services.
A “from” price that does not mislead
The trap with “from” prices is the starting figure that almost nobody pays. It gets the click and loses the trust the moment the quote arrives.
- Right “From £165: up to six slipped or broken slates, matched and refixed, reached by ladder. Scaffold, if the roof needs it, is priced in your quote.”
- Not “Roof repairs from £99”, where scaffold, the callout and VAT are all extra and nobody has paid £99 in two years.
The first version tells the customer what the figure buys, where the line is and what would push it up. Fellside, a demo we built for a roofer in Kendal, prices every common job this way, including the scaffold note, so you can see how it reads on a phone.
Worked example: pricing by the hour
Some work cannot be priced until it is opened up, and an hourly rate is the honest answer. The detail that makes it useful to a customer is saying exactly what the first charge includes. Here is a structure a plumber might publish, with figures for illustration:
- Breakdown visit, including diagnosis and the first 45 minutes: £85.
- Each hour after that, charged by the half hour: £68.
- Parts priced and agreed before they are fitted.
A customer whose job takes two hours can now do the sum before they ring. The first 45 minutes are in the £85; the remaining hour and a quarter is billed as an hour and a half, so £102; the labour comes to £187 plus parts. Nobody is surprised by the invoice, and the customer who only wanted the cheapest possible visit has filtered themselves out.
Copperline, a demo we built for a plumber in Stockport, uses this structure and puts a fixed price next to each common fault, which is the pattern most trades can borrow.
The rules once a price is on the page
Since April 2025 the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act has given the Competition and Markets Authority direct powers over how prices are shown to consumers, and its price transparency guidance (CMA209) sets out what it expects. The rules apply to traders of every size, and three points matter for a service business:
- A price on a web page counts. The guidance treats a price shown before the customer buys, on a shop shelf, in an advert or on a website, as an invitation to purchase, even when the page has no way to buy.
- The price should include what the customer cannot avoid. That means VAT if you are VAT-registered, and any fee that applies to every job, such as a compulsory callout or booking fee. Listing them separately is usually not enough.
- “From” prices are allowed, as long as the figure includes those unavoidable charges and does not mislead about what it covers. Where part of the price cannot be worked out in advance, explain how the customer can work it out, as prominently as the price itself and next to it.
If you are VAT-registered, a price quoted to consumers without VAT is the most common mistake. “£400 + VAT” on a page aimed at householders asks the customer to add 20% themselves, and the CMA’s guidance expects the total to be shown instead.
This is a summary of published guidance, not legal advice. If you sell mainly to other businesses, the consumer rules do not apply in the same way, and quoting without VAT is normal there.
When to leave prices off
Some work genuinely cannot be priced from a web page: a full renovation, an architect’s commission, anything that starts with a survey of something nobody has seen. Even then, an empty page is not the only option.
- Say what the price depends on. Size, access, materials, what has to come out first, how soon you need it done.
- Give a range from finished jobs. “Our last ten kitchen fits came to between £11,000 and £24,000” is honest, true and useful.
- Price the first step. A survey or a design visit can have a fixed fee, and can be taken off the bill if the customer goes ahead.
How to work out your own numbers
Use your own invoices rather than a competitor’s website. Their figures reflect their costs, their area and their appetite for work, none of which are yours.
- Pull your last 20 invoices for one service. Fewer if it is a job you do rarely.
- Sort them by total. Ignore the cheapest and the dearest one or two; they are the unusual jobs.
- Read off the range of the rest. That is your typical range.
- Look at what made the expensive ones expensive. Those reasons are your “what the price depends on” sentence.
- Check the figures include VAT and any fixed fee, if you charge them, before anything goes on the page.
A sentence you can adapt: “Most [job] we do costs between £[low] and £[high], including VAT. The ones at the top end usually involve [reason] or [reason]. We give you a fixed written quote after a free visit.”
Where to put them
Next to the service, not on a separate page and not in a PDF. A customer reading about boiler servicing wants the price of a boiler service on that page, near the button to book one. Date anything that changes with materials, and look at the figures every six months. A price list from 2023 is worse than none.
If you would like someone to read your service pages the way a customer does, the free review tells you in writing what we would change first, prices included.
For the rest of what a trades site needs, there is what a tradesperson’s website needs, and if your site has visitors but no calls, website not getting enquiries? goes through the other checks.
