How Much Does a Power BI Consultant Cost in the UK? (2026)

Try to find out what a Power BI project costs in the UK. Go on. Open ten consultancy websites and count how many numbers you find.

You will get "get in touch for a quote", "tailored to your requirements", and a contact form. Which is not an oversight. The silence is the pitch, because a price you have to ask for is a price that can be adjusted once somebody has worked out how badly you need it and how little you know.

So I put every price on my own site, which occasionally loses me work and I am fine with that. What follows is the wider version: how this kind of work gets priced, what each pricing shape does to your risk, and roughly what the numbers look like.

The short version: Power BI work is priced four ways. A day rate, where you carry the risk of it taking longer. A fixed price for a defined piece of work, where the supplier carries it. Per report, which suits migrations. And a monthly retainer for keeping things alive. As a rough shape: a scored review of an existing estate is around £950 to £3,000, a properly modelled reporting build starts around £9,500, report migration runs about £500 to £1,000 per report, and ongoing support starts around £250 a month. Anything quoted without a written scope is a day rate wearing a costume.

What the UK market actually pays

Before the four shapes, the one number everybody asks for. These are UK contract day rates for roles citing Power BI, from ITJobsWatch, covering the six months to 26 August 2026 across 1,237 quoted daily rates.

Two things worth knowing about that table. The median has moved up 3.16% year on year and demand went with it, because 1,931 UK contract vacancies cited Power BI in that window against 1,211 in the same period last year. And London is doing most of the lifting at the top, because the UK-excluding-London median sits £40 below the national one.

The spread is the useful part, not the middle. The gap between the 10th and the 90th percentile is more than double, and it is not a quality ladder. It is seniority, agency margin, sector, security clearance, and how much of the rate never reaches the person doing the work.

Day rate

The default in this industry, and the one to understand properly rather than avoid.

Day rates vary enormously with seniority, with whether you are buying an individual or a body through an agency, and with how much the agency is taking. The headline number you are quoted is not the number to compare, because a rate is meaningless without the number of days beside it, and the number of days is the bit nobody commits to.

What a day rate really does is move the risk of a bad estimate onto you. If the model turns out to be worse than it looked, that is your problem, in days. Which is fine when the work genuinely cannot be scoped in advance, and unnecessary when it can.

Where day rates work well: unblocking, second opinions, an experienced pair of hands next to your own team for a fortnight, discovery on something genuinely unknown. Where they work badly: anything a supplier has done fifty times before and could have quoted.

Fixed price

Someone names a number and a scope, and if it takes longer than they thought, that is their problem.

Suppliers only offer this on work they understand well enough to estimate, which is itself a useful signal. If nobody will fix price a review of your reporting, either your estate is genuinely unusual or they have not done many.

Roughly, for the review end of the market: a scored review of an existing Power BI estate sits around £950 to £3,000 depending on how far down it goes. Mine is £950 for six areas of the reporting layer, forty eight checks scored against a written standard, delivered in five working days. An assessment of whether a semantic model will give Copilot correct answers is £2,950, mostly because building and verifying a thirty question test harness with your team is real work. A Fabric readiness assessment with a three year cost model behind it is £5,950. An independent Sage 200 reporting audit that reconciles back to Sage is £1,500.

For build work: a properly modelled reporting system, not a dashboard, starts at £9,500 as a sprint, with larger builds scoped individually. Archiving a dead system's history into something auditable starts at £1,950, or £6,500 for the finance-grade version with a zero variance reconciliation per financial year.

Two things to check on any fixed price. What happens when it turns out to be worse than expected, which should be a conversation and a written change rather than an extra line on the final invoice. And whether the fee credits against the work that follows, because a review that pays for itself if you proceed is a very different proposition to one that does not.

Per report

Standard for migrations off Tableau, Qlik, SSRS or a spreadsheet estate, and the easiest one to sanity check.

Around £500 to £1,000 per dashboard is the accepted market rate. I charge £600 per report with a ten report minimum, so £6,000 is the smallest engagement, and the free one day assessment produces the inventory and the fixed total before you commit to anything.

The thing to interrogate is not the per report number, it is what happens to the shared logic. Ten Tableau workbooks usually contain ten slightly different definitions of the same measure, which is why nobody trusts them. If the quote is ten reports rebuilt faithfully one at a time, you are paying to migrate the disagreement. The semantic model should get built first, once, and the assessment should tell you where the current definitions differ before anybody rebuilds anything.

Also ask how the migrated figures get validated. Side by side against the original, every figure, before sign off, and if one differs you get told which of the two was wrong. That check should be in the price rather than an extra.

Monthly retainer

For the phase after the build, which nobody budgets for and everybody needs. Refreshes fail, source systems change, somebody leaves and takes the only Power BI knowledge in the building with them.

Ongoing support starts around £250 a month for monitoring and a scored monthly report with no build hours in it, roughly £750 for hands on fixes with a turnaround commitment, and £1,500 or more for someone actually owning the reporting roadmap.

Read the fair use terms rather than the headline. "Unlimited support" means either a queue you are at the back of, or a definition of support narrow enough to exclude whatever you were going to ask. Hours, response times and how many requests can be in flight at once are the numbers that matter.

Hiring someone instead

The comparison most SMEs run at some point, so here are both sides of it with real numbers rather than a feeling.

The UK median advertised salary for a permanent role citing Power BI is £55,000, from 1,568 quoted salaries over the same six months to 26 August 2026. The 25th percentile is £41,250, the 75th is £75,000, and outside London the median drops to £50,000. Add employer National Insurance, pension, holiday, kit, licences and recruitment, and the loaded cost of a £55,000 hire lands somewhere north of £70,000 a year.

At the median contract rate of £490, £70,000 buys about 143 days. So the question is not really cost, it is shape. A permanent hire is the right answer when there is more than about a hundred and forty days a year of Power BI work and somebody senior enough to direct it. Below that, or where the work is a defined piece with an end date, you are paying a salary to have somebody wait for work.

The trap is hiring one person for a job that needs two skill sets. Data modelling and report design are different disciplines, and the £41,250 end of that salary table is usually one of them, not both.

Every price I charge

For whatever it is worth as a reference point, this is the whole list. All of it excludes VAT where applicable, and every assessment fee credits against the work that follows it.

Four things in a quote that should worry you

A price with no scope next to it. If nothing in writing says what is included, the negotiation has not finished, it has been postponed until you are committed.

"Number of licences" as the main line item. Anybody whose margin comes from reselling you seats has an interest in you buying more of them. I sell no Microsoft licences, which is worth knowing when I recommend a capacity size.

A discovery phase with no deliverable. Discovery is real and often necessary. It should still end in a document you own and could hand to a different supplier.

No mention of who owns what at the end. You should own the model, the reports, the documentation and the pipeline. If any of it lives in a supplier's tenant or their proprietary framework, the second quote you get from them will reflect that.

What to actually do with all this

Work out which of the four shapes your problem is, before you talk to anyone. "Nobody trusts the numbers" is a fixed price review. "We have nothing worth the name yet" is a build. "We are stuck on Tableau" is per report. "It keeps breaking" is a retainer. Getting that wrong is how a review turns into six months of day rates.

Then ask for the price in writing with the scope beside it. Anyone who will not put both on paper has told you something useful for free.

Common questions

How much does a Power BI consultant cost per day in the UK?

The UK median contract day rate for roles citing Power BI is £490, with the middle half of the market between £406 and £588 and the full range roughly £320 to £656 (ITJobsWatch, six months to 26 August 2026). Outside London the median is £450. A rate on its own tells you very little, because the number of days beside it is the part that moves.

How much does a Power BI project cost?

It depends which of four shapes it is. A scored review of an existing estate runs about £950 to £3,000. A properly modelled reporting build starts around £9,500. Migrating reports off Tableau, Qlik or SSRS is about £500 to £1,000 per report. Ongoing support starts around £250 a month.

Is a fixed price better than a day rate?

For anything the supplier has done before, yes, because it moves the risk of a bad estimate off you and onto them. Day rates are the right answer for genuinely unknown work: unblocking, second opinions, discovery. If nobody will fix price a review of your reporting, either your estate is unusual or they have not done many.

How much does a Power BI health check cost?

Mine is £950 flat: six areas of the reporting layer, forty eight checks scored against a written standard, a report card in five working days, and the fee comes off the work that follows. Comparable UK reviews run from about £950 up to £3,000 depending on how far down they go.

Should I hire a Power BI developer instead of using a consultant?

The UK median advertised salary for a permanent Power BI role is £55,000, which loads to somewhere over £70,000 a year once employer National Insurance, pension, holiday, kit and licences are in. At the median contract rate that is about 143 days. So a hire makes sense above roughly that much annual work, with somebody senior enough to direct it, and does not below it.

Why do so few Power BI consultancies publish their prices?

Because a price you have to ask for can be adjusted once somebody has worked out how badly you need it. Publishing costs work occasionally, and it means nobody wastes a call finding out the number was never going to fit.

Do Power BI consultancy prices include VAT?

The figures here exclude VAT where applicable. Always check, because a £950 headline and a £1,140 invoice is the sort of surprise that sours a first engagement.

Every price I charge is published on the services page, with the reasoning, and the FAQ answers the awkward ones about what happens when a project goes sideways. All of it excludes VAT where applicable. If you want to talk through which shape your problem actually is, that is what the free twenty minute intro call is for, and I will tell you if the answer is that you do not need me yet.

Market rate and salary figures: ITJobsWatch, UK, six months to 26 August 2026. Last updated 26 August 2026.