How Much Does Repointing Cost Per m²?
Quick Answer
Roughly £30–£60 per m² for sand:cement pointing, £60–£90 per m² for lime mortar
Indicative 2026 UK estimates, cross-checked against four independent trade cost guides (see sources below). Add roughly £500–£1,800 for scaffold or access-tower hire on anything above ground-floor reach, and expect London and South East quotes 20–35% higher than the national range. These are estimates, not a quote: get at least three local prices before budgeting.
Repointing Cost Per m² by Mortar Type
| Mortar type | National | London / South East | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sand:cement pointing (modern brick) | £30-£60/m² | £50-£75/m² | suits post-1919 brick and blockwork |
| Lime mortar pointing (period brick) | £60-£90/m² | £75-£110/m² | required for most pre-1919 solid-wall construction |
| Lime pointing on stone or rubble walling | £75-£100/m² | £90-£130/m² | irregular joints take longer to point by hand |
National ranges cross-checked against Green’s Brickwork & Building and WhatPrice; the South East column is Green’s Brickwork & Building’s own regional split (see sources below). Figures are supply-and-fit trade prices for straightforward, ground-to-first-floor access.
Sand:Cement vs Lime Pointing Cost Per m²
Lime pointing costs more than sand:cement pointing on the same wall. Green’s Brickwork & Building puts the premium at roughly £10–£20 per m², and BookaBuilderUK’s 2026 guide describes lime work as adding 20–40% to the job overall. Two things drive that gap. Lime mortar needs slow, damp curing over several days rather than the 24–48 hours a cement mix needs, which ties up labour for longer. It is also not optional on most pre-1919 solid-wall buildings: a harder cement mortar traps moisture in the wall and spalls the brick face, which is why our repointing calculator offers a dedicated lime-only mix (1:3 lime putty to sand) for heritage and conservation work alongside its general-purpose cement:lime:sand blend, and our depth guide recommends lime mortar for older brick and stone.
On stonework the lime premium widens further, £75–£100 per m² against £30–£60 per m² for cement brick pointing, largely because irregular rubble joints simply take longer to point by hand than a regular brick course, whatever mortar goes into them.
Chimney vs Full Elevation Pricing
A typical chimney stack repoint costs roughly £350–£1,500 (2026 UK estimate), and almost all of that spread comes down to access rather than the mortar itself. MyJobQuote’s guide (updated January 2026) gives around £350 for a straightforward 6ft stack, rising to £800–£1,300 once a scaffold or access tower is needed, which most chimneys require since they sit above eaves height. BookaBuilderUK’s 2026 guide quotes a similar £600–£1,500 range, and WhatPrice (updated September 2025) sits in between at £500–£1,000.
Elevation and whole-house repointing is usually priced as a job rather than strictly per m², and the per-m² rate tends to fall as the job gets bigger. MyJobQuote’s 2026 guide, built on a £20–£50 per m² labour rate, gives roughly £600–£1,500 for a 30m² wall, £1,300–£3,250 for a 65m² terraced front, £1,900–£4,750 for a 95m² semi-detached house, and £2,900–£7,250 for a 145m² detached house. BookaBuilderUK’s whole-house figures run notably higher, £4,000–£9,000 for a semi-detached full repoint and £8,000–£18,000+ for a detached house, which is more consistent with a full supply-and-fit job including scaffold rather than a labour-only rate. Treat any single quote as landing somewhere in that spread depending on what is and is not included.
Access and Scaffold: the Line Item That Swings the Total
Beyond ground-floor reach, add roughly £500–£1,800 for an access tower or scaffold on a single elevation: Green’s Brickwork & Building quotes £500–£1,500, BookaBuilderUK quotes £800–£1,800, and MyJobQuote gives up to £900. Scaffold around a whole house runs £2,500–£6,000 (BookaBuilderUK). On a single-storey wall or a chimney reachable from a ladder, this cost may not apply at all, which is a large part of why two otherwise similar repointing jobs can come back with very different quotes.
Where raking out is priced separately from the repointing itself, Green’s Brickwork & Building puts it at roughly £20–£50 per m² on top of the repointing rate. See our depth guide for how deep that raking-out needs to go before the new mortar goes in.
Region: London and the South East
Labour rates in London and the South East run about 20–35% higher than the UK average across every source checked here (BookaBuilderUK and Green’s Brickwork & Building agree on that band, and WhatPrice notes that South East prices “can exceed £80 to £100 per square metre”). MyJobQuote’s own day-rate figures show a similar pattern from a different angle: around £220 a day for a London bricklayer against roughly £180 a day in the North West.
Condition and Joint Profile Also Move the Price
Every range above assumes a fairly standard raking-out-and-repoint job. Badly spalled or frost-damaged brick, previous hard cement repairs that need drilling out before new mortar will key in, and decorative joint profiles such as tuck pointing or weather-struck-and-cut joints all add time on top of the base rate. A survey or a couple of trade visits before quoting is normal on anything beyond a straightforward wall.
Working Out Quantities, Not Just Cost
The figures on this page are supply-and-fit trade prices. If you are pricing your own materials rather than paying for the whole job, see how much repointing you need for wall-area and mortar-quantity workings, and our step-by-step repointing guide for tools, technique and curing times. Our repointing calculator works out sand, cement and lime quantities for your own wall area and joint size, with an optional price-per-bag field for a materials cost estimate.
Cost ranges cross-checked against four independent UK trade cost guides fetched July 2026: MyJobQuote (updated 2 January 2026), BookaBuilderUK (2026 guide), Green’s Brickwork & Building (lime mortar cost guide, updated July 2026) and WhatPrice (updated 3 September 2025). These are third-party trade cost-guide publishers, not fixed price lists: actual quotes vary by property, region, tradesperson and site condition. Last updated: July 2026.