Carpenter Malta Price List: Hourly & Day Rates

The short answer

For a small carpentry job in Malta — a sticking door, a dropped hinge, a cupboard front that no longer closes — the published hourly figures sit between €25 and €50 an hour, and the first visit carries a one-hour minimum. Everything else on your bill is a variation on that: half-hour increments after the first hour, time spent buying materials, and a premium if you need someone on a Sunday night.

What you will not find anywhere is an authoritative figure. There is no Maltese trade body publishing a carpenter's tariff, and no joiner we have found publishes their own price list. The numbers in circulation come from a marketplace guide and an app's hiring guide. We say so here rather than dressing them up.

Our rate-card lines

These are the lines from the Carpenters.mt rate card as published. The card header states it is provisional until confirmed.

The door line is worth reading twice. It is one to two hours at the small-jobs rate on an existing frame. A door into a new or out-of-square opening is a different job, and nothing in these sources prices it.

Where the numbers come from

Three published sources sit behind the repair band.

MelaLocal, a services marketplace, says carpenters in Malta typically charge €25–€45 per hour. The page carries no publication date and makes no statement about VAT. It is a marketplace guide written to orient buyers, not a joiner's price list.

Rozie.app, in a handyman hiring guide published on 10 May 2026, gives a weekday rate of €35–50 per hour excluding VAT. Its scope includes door and window adjustments and furniture assembly, which is why it is relevant here even though it is a handyman guide rather than a carpentry one. It is the only source in this set that publishes a full billing structure rather than a single number.

Check Your Traders, in a contractor costs guide published on 1 April 2026, gives €25–€40 per hour for a tradesman on smaller jobs. The trade is unspecified and there are no carpentry line items. It is an in-house estate source, so we use it only as corroboration that the lower end of the band is real.

Our €25–50 band is the span of those published figures, not an average of them.

How an hourly rate becomes a bill

The one-hour minimum

Both our rate card and Rozie.app apply a one-hour minimum on the first visit. If the fix takes eleven minutes, you are still billed for the hour. This is the mechanism that does, in Malta, what a separate call-out fee does elsewhere — and it is why no source here publishes a call-out fee as its own line. If you are used to a fixed call-out charge plus labour from the first minute, you are paying for the same thing under a different name.

Half-hour billing after that

Rozie.app gives €25–30 per half hour after the first hour. Practically, that means the second hour is the one where your preparation pays. Clearing the cupboard, moving the bed, having the new handles already in the room — all of it comes off the clock in half-hour steps.

Shopping time

Rozie.app lists materials-shopping time at €30–35 per hour, charged on top of the cost of the materials themselves. This catches people out. A hinge costs a few euro; the trip to find the right one does not. Decide before the visit whether you are supplying the ironmongery or the carpenter is sourcing it, and get that in writing.

Out of hours

Our rate card gives €60–100 per hour for Sundays, public holidays and late nights. Rozie.app gives the same €60–100 per hour for Sunday and late-night emergency work. For a jammed front door on a Sunday evening in a let, that is the figure to budget against.

Maintenance contracts

Rozie.app also publishes an annual maintenance contract at €300–800 a year. That is a handyman figure covering a broader scope than carpentry alone, and nothing in these sources breaks out what portion of it buys joinery attention. Landlords with several units may still find it the more useful number.

Below €25 an hour

Rozie.app warns that a quote under €25 per hour usually means under-costing or informal, uninsured work. This matters more in Malta than it would in the UK, because there is no trade licence for carpenters here. Nobody checks a card at the door. The practical substitutes are verification schemes — our carpenters are CheckYourTraders-verified — and your own insistence on a written scope before anyone starts.

Things the hourly rate does not answer

A few Malta-specific costs are simply absent from the published record.

• Gozo. Every delivery and every trade visit crosses on the ferry. No source in this set puts a figure on travel time, mileage or a crossing surcharge.
• Apartment common parts. Work touching common parts in a block is governed by the condominium rules under Cap. 398, which can mean seeking agreement before anything happens. No source prices that time.
• Permissions. Buyers arriving from the UK sometimes reach for permitted development; the Maltese instrument is the Development Notification Order, and internal joinery in a finished unit is usually a different question entirely. Nothing here prices applications.
• Shell form. Property is commonly sold as a shell, so a first fit-out is a project, not an hourly job. The bands above describe small works on an existing, finished interior.
• VAT. Only Rozie.app states its position, and it states ex VAT. Ask every quote whether VAT is in or out before you compare two numbers.

Using these figures

Treat €25–50 per hour as the range a small carpentry job starts from, assume the first hour is charged whole, and ask three questions before anyone is booked: is VAT included, who is buying the materials, and does this fall inside normal hours. Our rate card remains provisional until confirmed, and a visit that produces a fixed price for a defined scope beats an hourly rate for anything larger than a repair.