The UK National Living Wage rose to £12.71 on 1 April 2026. If you’re a home baker, the official line is: that’s the floor for paying yourself per hour. If you’re paying yourself NLW, you’re earning £12.71. If you’re not — and most home bakers aren’t — you’re earning less.
The question is: how much less?
For this article, we’ll use one running example — two batches of Triple Chocolate Brownies, sold two ways. Once at the door. Once at a Saturday market.
The numbers, in plain English ¶
Two batches of Triple Chocolate Brownies — 32 brownies in 9×9 inch tins, 90 minutes from shop to scrub. Ingredients £16.82, overheads £15.36 (about 48p a brownie — boxes, energy, and your share of mixer, scales, and tins). You sell them at £3 each — a typical UK market price for a brownie in 2026.
If a regular drives to your kitchen and buys all 32 at the door for £96, 90 minutes of your time earned this:
| Cost element | Amount |
|---|---|
| Revenue | £96.00 |
| Ingredients | £16.82 |
| Overheads | £15.36 |
| Left for your time | £63.82 |
| Time spent baking | 90 min |
| Real hourly rate | £42.55/hour |
Not bad. Well above NLW. Margin you can feel.
Now do the same maths with the same brownies, sold at a Saturday market instead:
| Cost element | Amount |
|---|---|
| Revenue | £96.00 |
| Ingredients | £16.82 |
| Overheads | £15.36 |
| Stall fee | £30.00 |
| Left for your time | £33.82 |
| Time spent (90 min bake + 6 hr market) | 7.5 hours |
| Real hourly rate | £4.51/hour |
Same brownies. Same price per brownie. An hourly rate £38 lower. Below NLW. Below the legal floor an employer would have to pay anyone for the same hours — except you’re self-employed, so it’s allowed.
Most home bakers running a market stall are sitting between £3 and £6 an hour, even when their per-product price looks healthy.
Why most home bakers miss it ¶
The number isn’t hidden. It just rarely gets calculated. Three reasons it stays invisible:
The market hours don’t feel like work. You’re chatting to neighbours, sipping a coffee, watching the kids run around. It feels closer to a Saturday out than a Saturday shift. The hours don’t register as labour, so they never get costed.
The price was set for the kitchen, not the stall. £3 a brownie is the right price for a direct sale where your only labour cost is the bake time. Layer on six unpaid hours of standing-around-time and a £30 stall fee and the same price is suddenly an under-price.
“I’d be there anyway.” The mental trap that makes a market day feel free. You wouldn’t be at the market at all if you weren’t selling. The hours are work hours.
What this means for your pricing ¶
This isn’t a “raise all your prices” article. It’s a “count all your hours” article. Two bakers selling the same brownie at the same price can be earning radically different rates depending on whether they’re selling to the door, to a market, to wholesale, or via a delivery app. The price needs to absorb the channel — not just the recipe.
Want to find out yours? The free Recipe Costing Calculator covers the kitchen side. For the channel side — what your real hourly rate is across every product and every place you sell it — the Food Costing Toolkit is the system that makes the gap visible.
Three ways to lift the rate ¶
The shock isn’t the answer. The fix is. Three levers, in order of how much each lifts the hourly rate:
Bake more. Going from two batches to three (48 brownies) at £3 lifts this baker from £4.51 to £8.22/hour. Setup and cleanup happen once whether you bake one batch or three, so three batches takes about two hours, not three. The £30 stall fee gets diluted across more revenue. The catch: there’s a practical ceiling — most home bakers cap out at three or four for a small market. And it lifts the rate without fixing it. £8.22/hour is still £4.49 below the National Living Wage; volume helps, but the six unpaid market hours are still sitting in the maths.
Raise the price per brownie. Two batches at £3.50 clears £6.64/hour. £4 a brownie clears £8.78. £5 a brownie — which sounds steep, until you’ve done the maths — clears the National Living Wage. This is the lever that scales without working harder, and most home bakers underestimate how much room there is here.
Change the channel mix. Door sales (no stall fee, no market hours) earn more than nine times what market sales do at the same per-brownie price. Pre-orders, regulars, a corporate Christmas order — anything that doesn’t carry six unpaid hours of stall time. The market can stay in the mix; it shouldn’t be the only mix.
The next price you set ¶
This week, do one thing. Pick one channel — your Saturday market, a wholesale tray, a corporate order. Add up every hour you spent on it (bake time, prep, market hours, delivery, admin), subtract every cost, divide. The number you land on is your real hourly rate for that channel.
If it’s £4, that isn’t a hobby. It’s a problem. And the fix isn’t loving the work less — it’s pricing the channel like the work it is.
Common questions
What's a fair hourly rate for a UK home baker?
How do I work out my hourly rate?
Aren't market hours just part of selling, not work?
If I raise my prices, won't I lose customers?
Stop pricing the recipe. Start pricing the channel.
The Food Costing Toolkit calculates ingredients, labour, overheads, and margin per recipe — and stacks on the channel-specific costs (stall fees, payment processing, delivery, packaging tier) so you can see your real hourly rate per place you sell. Update one input, every product recalculates.
Get Price It Right — £79One-time purchase · no subscription · PDF guide included