Guide

Quoting for dry stone wallers — the FastQuote guide

If you build dry stone walls for a living, the wall itself is rarely the hard part. The hard part is everything that has to happen before you ever lift a hammer: a customer rings you, you go out to look at the job, you stand there counting metres and guessing tonnage, you drive home, and then you sit at the kitchen table at half-nine at night with a cold cup of tea trying to turn it all into a quote that does not make you look like a cowboy.

Most one-person walling businesses we have spoken to spend somewhere between one and two hours producing a written quote. Some spend longer. A fair few do not produce one at all — they send a price by text, or quote it on the spot, and then lose the work when the customer asks for "something in writing for the insurance" or "an itemised breakdown for the farm accounts".

The job is the job. It always was. What has changed is that customers — especially landowners, estates, the National Park officers, and anyone spending grant money — now expect a quote that looks like a quote. A few lines on the back of a delivery ticket does not cut it any more.

This guide is the FastQuote hub for everything to do with quoting walling work: what a good quote contains, how long it should take to write, what to charge, and how to handle the bits around the wall itself (VAT, RAMS, Chapter 8, stone sourcing). It is written for working wallers, not for the consumer-side audience that the rest of the internet seems to serve. Each section links out to a deeper article. Pick the ones that matter.

How long should a quote take?

The honest answer most wallers will give you, off the record, is "too long". Between site visit, measuring, working out tonnage, ringing the quarry, writing the document, and chasing it up if the customer goes quiet — half a day a quote is normal.

Five minutes is realistic. Not five minutes for the whole job — five minutes for the document. The site visit and the measuring still have to happen. But the bit you do at the kitchen table, the writing-it-up part, can absolutely be five minutes if you have a template, your day rate is settled, and you know your tonnage rule of thumb.

The wallers we built FastQuote with were going from roughly an hour and a half down to a few minutes per written quote. That hour back per quote is the whole point — it is paid time on the tools, or it is an evening with your family instead of fighting with a spreadsheet.

What a good waller's quote includes

A professional dry stone walling quote should contain, at minimum:

• Site address and a clear description of what you are quoting for. "Rebuild collapsed section of field boundary, north side of Beck Lane, approx 14m, double-faced gritstone, height 1.1m to 1.3m."
• Wall measurements. Length in metres, height in metres, top width, bottom width if it is a proper batter. Single-skin or double-faced. Note if any sections are short-stoned, copestones missing, or built on a rubble fill.
• Stone tonnage. Estimated tonnes to lift, sort, and place. Note the proportion you expect to reclaim from the existing wall.
• Labour days. Operative-days at your day rate. Be honest about who is on site — solo, two-man, with or without a labourer.
• Materials. Reclaimed stone (if hauling), pinning stone, lime mortar if any sections are mortared, hearting, copes if not reusing existing. Plant hire if you need a dumper, mini-digger or hi-ab.
• Day rate or per-metre rate. Whichever you are pricing on. State which you have used.
• VAT line. Either VAT charged at the current rate, or a clear "Not VAT registered — no VAT applies" note. Customers prefer clarity to a vague line.
• Payment terms. Deposit if you take one, stage payments for longer jobs, final payment terms. Bank details.
• RAMS reference. Even a simple line: "Risk Assessment and Method Statement available on request." Estates, farms and councils will ask. Having a one-pager ready turns "we'll need RAMS" from a job-killer into a five-minute attachment.
• Chapter 8 mention if it applies. Roadside boundary walls need traffic management. Either include it in the quote or be explicit that it is a separate cost. See the Chapter 8 traffic management guide.
• Quote validity. Stone prices and labour rates move. A 30-day or 60-day validity is normal.
• Your insurance details. Public liability cover, sum insured. The customer rarely reads it, but its absence is what loses you the job to the man with a tidier letterhead.

You do not need a designer to produce this. You need a template that you do not have to rebuild every time.

How wallers price their work

There are two pricing models in UK dry stone walling, and the choice between them is one of the most argued-about topics in the trade.

Day rate is what most wallers default to. A typical solo day rate sits in the £220 to £320 range across England and Wales, with experienced DSWA-graded wallers and tighter regional markets (Cotswolds, parts of Cumbria, parts of Yorkshire that touch the National Parks) pushing higher. Day rate works when the job has unknowns: how much stone is reclaimable, what is underneath when you dig out the foundation, whether the access is going to slow you down. The downside is the customer hears "open-ended" and gets twitchy.

Per-metre is cleaner for the customer and harder for the waller. Typical rebuild rates run somewhere between £140 and £220 per metre for a standard 1.2m-high double-faced wall, with a wide regional spread. Cotswold limestone walls quote higher per metre because the stone is more particular and the visual standard is higher. Yorkshire gritstone walls quote lower per metre on rural boundary work but higher on garden / heritage work. Per-metre works when the job is a known quantity — a clear length of fallen wall, all the stone is there, normal access.

A lot of working wallers price hybrid: per-metre on the wall itself, day rate on anything atypical (excavation, hauling, repointing of mortared sections, off-site stone sorting).

There is no right answer. There is only the answer that keeps you above your real day rate when the job is finished. The articles below dig into the regional specifics and the maths.

The guides

These are short, practical pieces. Each one targets a specific question a working waller (or a customer looking up rates) actually types into Google.

• Cost per metre to rebuild a dry stone wall — UK ranges by stone type, wall height, and region. Honest numbers, with what they include.
• How long does it take to rebuild a dry stone wall? — operative-day-per-metre benchmarks, what slows a job down, what speeds it up.
• How much stone do I need? Estimating tonnage for a wall rebuild — the 1-tonne-per-square-metre rule, single-skin vs double-faced, sourcing reclaimed stone.
• What should a dry stone walling quote include? — checklist with the why behind each line. The "send this to a waller mate" article.
• DSWA-style day rates — what to charge and when to flex — what the DSWA grading levels imply for your rate, when day-rate beats per-metre.
• Dry stone walling costs in Yorkshire — gritstone, sandstone, the boundary-wall convention, regional rate norms.
• Dry stone walling costs in the Cotswolds — Cotswold limestone, conservation expectations, the golden-stone aesthetic premium.
• Do I need Chapter 8 traffic management for roadside walls? — when it applies, kit costs, who supplies it, how to price it on the quote.

If you want the written-quote part to take five minutes instead of two hours, FastQuote does the assembly. The thinking and the prices are still yours — and they should be, because nobody knows the wall in front of you better than you do.