The UK minimum wage just rose to £12.71. Have you recosted?

On 1 April 2026 the UK National Living Wage rose from £12.21 to £12.71 per hour — a 4.1% increase. For employed workers it’s a straightforward pay rise. For the hundreds of thousands of home bakers who make and sell food from their own kitchens, it’s a quieter prompt: the number you’re supposed to be costing your own time at just changed, and most bakers won’t update their pricing to match.

Worth a quarter-hour.

The numbers, in plain English ¶

A home baker making a batch of 16 Biscoff Brownies. Active time: 60 minutes — 10 minutes prep, 30 minutes in the oven, and 20 minutes on the parts recipe cards don’t list (washing up, packaging, the Instagram DMs with the customer picking a pickup time).

Two scenarios play out across UK home kitchens right now.

Scenario A — the baker who already pays themselves NLW:

• Old rate: 1hr × £12.21 = £12.21 labour per batch → £0.76 per brownie
• New rate: 1hr × £12.71 = £12.71 labour per batch → £0.79 per brownie
• Extra cost: +3p per brownie

Across 250 bakes a year (a realistic cadence for a home baker running regular markets + orders), that’s roughly £120 of extra labour cost to carry. If your prices stayed flat, your margin just dropped by that amount. Not a crisis. But not free, either.

Scenario B — the baker who pays themselves £8/hr (or nothing at all):

This is far more common. Most home bakers, asked point-blank what hourly rate they cost their time at, say a number well below NLW — if they’ve thought about it at all.

• “Current” rate: 1hr × £8.00 = £8.00 labour per batch → £0.50 per brownie
• Should-be rate: 1hr × £12.71 = £12.71 labour per batch → £0.79 per brownie
• Gap: +29p per brownie

Across 250 bakes × 16 brownies a batch, that’s 4,000 brownies — and £1,160 of labour you’re effectively giving away every year.

The NLW rise doesn’t create this gap. It just makes it harder to ignore. The 4p headline movement in Scenario A is the news; the 29p gap in Scenario B is the story.

Why most home bakers underprice their own time ¶

Three reasons it happens.

It doesn’t feel like work when you enjoy it. Baking is the thing most home-based sellers do for love first. The hours don’t register the same way a 9-to-5 shift does. So when it comes to setting a price, labour is easy to leave out entirely or discount heavily on the basis that “I was going to be baking anyway.”

“I just want to cover my costs.” A surprising number of home bakers explicitly frame their pricing this way — usually in the early months. The implicit position: my time isn’t a cost. Which means you pay yourself nothing, then wonder why the side hustle never becomes a real income.

Social proof pulls the floor down. Other stalls at the market aren’t charging NLW either. Other cottage producers on Instagram don’t post their labour line. The result: a whole cottage-industry tier quietly subsidising its customers, each one reassured by what the next one is doing.

What rate should you actually charge? ¶

NLW is the floor. It is not the answer.

For most home bakers with a year or more of genuine experience — who know their oven, who can mirror-glaze without drama, who’ve survived a batch disaster and recovered — £15 to £20 per hour is the honest rate. That accounts for skill, your own equipment, and the reality that home baking to a saleable standard is actual skilled work.

For custom and bespoke orders — wedding cakes, themed celebration cakes, detailed character work — £25 per hour and up is defensible. Custom is where skill compounds. Your rate should reflect what a trained decorator would cost, not what a minimum-wage tray-baker costs.

The rate you pick feeds directly into your per-unit cost, which sets the floor for your selling price. Pick a low rate, and every sale quietly leaks profit. Pick an honest one, and your prices start telling the truth about what you make.

Build the annual habit ¶

The National Living Wage changes once a year, on 1 April. The new rate is typically announced in late autumn of the previous year — so you’ll know it’s coming months ahead. Block fifteen minutes in the first week of April. Update your hourly rate in your costing system. Recheck a couple of the recipes you bake most. Adjust prices if anything meaningfully moved.

That’s it. Ten minutes, once a year.

The NLW rise is one moment of public accountability about the cost of labour. The bigger lever is having a costing system that holds your hourly rate — whatever you decide it should be — and applies it consistently across every recipe you sell. Energy went up in April 2026. Butter went up through the year. Packaging nudged up last quarter. Each moves a little; together, they’re the difference between a margin that holds and a margin that quietly erodes.

The next NLW rise lands on 1 April 2027. If your recipes are costed properly today, that one’s a fifteen-minute job. If they aren’t, every bake between now and then is carrying a gap you can’t see.