MyBuilder Review: Is It Worth It for UK Tradespeople in 2026?

This MyBuilder review is written for the tradesperson paying the shortlist fees, not the homeowner posting the job. My verdict after going through MyBuilder’s help centre, its reviews policy and the forum threads where trades compare notes: it is the lowest-risk big directory to try, because a quiet month costs you nothing, and the fee that annoys people is the one for a homeowner who never answers the phone.

Most MyBuilder reviews online are homeowners rating a builder. This one is about what the platform is like to pay for.

Where I stand. I run Local Ladder, which builds websites and local SEO for UK trades. I earn money when a tradesperson decides to own their marketing instead of renting enquiries, so I am not neutral about directories. MyBuilder has not paid to appear here or seen this page. Every figure links to a dated source, and the prices live in my UK Trade Lead Cost Tracker, re-verified on 30 September 2026.

The Quick Verdict

Worth trying if you:

• Want to test paid leads without a contract or a monthly bill
• Do jobs where one win covers a run of shortlists that went nowhere
• Can ring a homeowner within the hour of being shortlisted, and send a message on the platform as well
• Have a few reviews to show, or can bring up to five from past customers with invoices
• Are in a building or renovation trade, which is where MyBuilder’s demand sits

Poor value if you:

• Do small call-outs. A £20 shortlist on a £60 job needs a win rate nobody gets
• Cannot pick up the phone during the day
• Expect a refund when a shortlisted customer goes quiet. The terms say no, and the credit window is narrow
• Want to quote on big projects without watching the fee. Members have filmed £540 and £940 charges
• Have no reviews yet and are in an area with plenty of established members

How MyBuilder Charges in 2026

MyBuilder is pay-per-shortlist. A homeowner posts a job, you express interest for free, and the homeowner reads the profiles of everyone who did. If they add you to their shortlist, MyBuilder releases their contact details and charges you a fee.

The official line is short: “You only pay a fee when the homeowner shortlists you.” There is no joining fee, no membership and no commission on the work.

The fee depends on the job. MyBuilder’s help centre says it “can start from £7” and varies with “criteria such as surface area, quantity (doors, frames, walls and / or stairs) and the material”. It is shown before you respond and is not adjusted afterwards.

You are invoiced each week and payment is taken the next day. That matters if you express interest in a lot of jobs at once, because the shortlists can land together.

The full price record, including the filmed £540 and £940 fees, is in my MyBuilder cost guide. This review is about whether paying them makes sense.

What You Are Paying For

This is the part that decides whether you will like MyBuilder, so it is worth quoting MyBuilder on it.

Its help centre explains the fee like this: “Because the customer has chosen you, most shortlists should result in positive contact. Despite our best efforts though, we cannot guarantee you will always make contact, get to quote or win the job.”

When a trader asked for a refund on an unanswered shortlist in 2023, the support reply was blunter: “As MyBuilder is an introductory service, rather than a ‘pay to win’ service, the outcome of the job does not affect the validity of any fees.” And: “With MyBuilder you are paying for the verified phone number of the customer rather than the guarantee that you will always get in contact.”

So the fee buys a phone number that a homeowner chose to give you. It does not buy a conversation, a quote or a job.

That is a fairer deal than Bark, where you pay to reveal details before the customer has chosen anyone. It is still a deal where the customer can shortlist five trades on a Sunday evening and ring none of them on Monday.

What a Won Job Costs

A shortlist is not a job. MyBuilder’s own registration page used to tell new members that “most tradesmen win their first job after being shortlisted between 4 and 8 times”, a line Tradesman Saver quoted in 2019, and third-party analyses in 2026 report 1 job per 5 to 8 paid shortlists.

Fee per shortlist	Cost per won job at 1 in 5	At 1 in 8
£5	£25	£40
£15	£75	£120
£35	£175	£280

One member’s filmed figures land inside that range: £250 of shortlist fees produced 6 jobs worth £775, about £42 in fees per job on thin work.

A plasterer on The Original Plasterers Forum put the cheap end plainly: “Try four or five quotes at a couple of quid a time. You get one you’re quids in.”

The expensive end is the large project. Fees are priced as a slice of the job’s value, and a £940 shortlist fee on an extension is a lot to pay for a homeowner who is collecting five quotes.

Run your own trade’s numbers through the break-even calculator on the lead cost tracker before you express interest in anything over £100.

MyBuilder Reviews From Tradesmen: The Recurring Themes

I read the MoneySavingExpert, Plasterers Forum, Screwfix Community and ElectriciansForums threads, plus the trade Facebook groups. Five themes repeat. These are individual experiences, some of them old, and I have kept the positive ones in.

1. Paying for customers who never answer

The complaint in almost every thread. A trader who had used MyBuilder since 2020 paid £24 plus VAT for a shortlist in March 2023, got one question from the customer, then nothing “despite multiple attempts to reply and call”. MyBuilder refused the credit, and the thread on MoneySavingExpert is a good read on how the support conversation goes.

A post in a trade Facebook group describes the same thing: a fee “every time a potential customer adds us to their shortlist, regardless of whether” the job goes anywhere.

2. A refund policy that is really a credit policy

MyBuilder does not refund. It credits, in specific circumstances, and the current rules apply to shortlists from 25 July 2026.

For an unreachable customer you must have contacted them within 48 hours through MyBuilder, sent at least one platform message, and submitted the request between 7 and 20 days after the shortlist. Ask on day six or day twenty-one and the request is not eligible.

Those rules are workable if you know them. Most of the trades complaining in the forums did not.

3. The race to the bottom

The longest forum write-up, from a plasterer who tried MyBuilder in 2015, called it “a fight to the bottom” where he was competing with “handymen and odd-jobbers who price over the phone”. He got three or four job alerts a day, bought two shortlists for £13.20 in total, and won neither.

That post is a decade old. The pattern it describes, several trades chasing one homeowner who wants a price on the spot, is built into how the platform works and has not changed.

4. Reviews take time to earn and then do the work

The same thread has the balancing view from a member who found MyBuilder “okay”: “If you’ve just joined you’ll find it difficult because you’ll have zero feedback. You get twenty or thirty good feedback customers will invite you to quote on your own.”

That matches what the shortlist model rewards. The homeowner picks from profiles, so the profile with reviews gets picked.

5. Small fees that pay back

A Screwfix Community member reported a £6 shortlist that turned into a £200 job and around £4,000 of repeat work. Jobs like that are why plenty of trades keep an account open and dip in when the diary is thin.

The Small Print That Decides Whether It’s Worth It

• The fee is for the contact details. MyBuilder calls itself “an introductory service” and says the job’s outcome “does not affect the validity of any fees” (support reply quoted on MoneySavingExpert, March 2023; help centre, verified 11 October 2026).
• Credits, not refunds, and only inside the window. Unreachable customer: contact within 48 hours via MyBuilder, at least one platform message, request between days 7 and 20. Also eligible: wrong type of work, shortlisted twice for the same job, or a customer who is looking for work rather than posting it. Policy applies to shortlists from 25 July 2026.
• Weekly invoicing. Fees are invoiced each week and taken the next day.
• No contract. Stop expressing interest and the fees stop. There is nothing to cancel.
• Reviews stay on MyBuilder. The platform publishes them and controls removal “at our sole and absolute discretion”. You can respond to a review and object to one, and you can bring up to five reviews from outside the platform if you supply the paid invoice.

Are MyBuilder Reviews Genuine?

As far as the published rules go, MyBuilder runs a tighter review system than most directories. A homeowner can only review a tradesperson they hired through the platform once work has started or a deposit has been paid, and off-platform reviews are published only after MyBuilder sees the paid invoice.

Reviews are removed only for listed reasons, such as no work started, incentivised feedback, personal information or a court order. Negative reviews are checked but not removed for being negative.

From the trade side that cuts both ways. A bad review from a real job is going to stay, and so is your professional reply underneath it.

What the policy cannot tell you is whether the homeowner’s account of the job was fair. For that, the forums are the only source, and they are as mixed as you would expect.

Is MyBuilder Legit?

Yes. MyBuilder is an established UK marketplace with published fees, a public reviews policy and a Trustpilot profile of around 56,500 reviews, scoring 4.3 out of 5 when I checked on 30 September 2026.

The Trustpilot score mixes homeowners rating the tradesperson they hired with tradespeople rating the platform, and those are different products. The trade complaints are about shortlist fees on dead leads, which the terms allow. I found nothing that suggests fraud.

One caution from the homeowner side of the forums: posters on Reddit advise checking a MyBuilder tradesperson’s previous work independently, because a profile is not a vetting certificate. From the trade side, that is a reason to keep photos and references on your own site as well.

MyBuilder vs Checkatrade vs Bark

	MyBuilder	Checkatrade	Bark
How it charges	Fee when a homeowner shortlists you	Monthly subscription	Credits to reveal a customer’s details
When you pay	After the customer has chosen you	Every month, leads or not	Before the customer has chosen anyone
Typical cost	£5–£35 a lead, from £7 official	£30 a month official; £80–£500 reported	£9–£36+ a lead
Trades per lead	3–5 reported	10–20+ reported	Up to 5 (official)
Contract	None	12 months fixed	None on standard credits
Refund on a dead lead	Credit, inside a 7-to-20-day window	Not applicable	Only if the lead is invalid
Trustpilot, Sep 2026	4.3 from ~56,500	4.7 from ~88,000	3.8 from ~112,000

MyBuilder is the only one of the three where the customer has already picked you before any money moves. That single difference is why its cost per won job is the lowest of the big platforms on reported figures.

Checkatrade wins on volume and on the badge, and ties you in for a year. The long version is in my Checkatrade vs MyBuilder comparison.

Since September 2026, Checkatrade also owns the Rated People brand, which leaves MyBuilder as the main pay-per-shortlist platform it does not control. What that did to former Rated People members is in my guide to what happened to Rated People.

If You Try MyBuilder, Do It Like This

1. Fill the profile properly and bring your best five past customers in with invoices, so you are not starting from zero reviews.
2. Express interest only on jobs where the fee is under a fifth of what you would earn.
3. When you are shortlisted, ring within the hour and send a message through MyBuilder the same day. The message is your evidence if the customer vanishes.
4. Put a reminder in for day seven. If the customer has not replied by then, request the credit before day twenty.
5. Keep a note of every fee and every outcome. After twenty shortlists you will know your real cost per won job.

MyBuilder Alternatives

The other directories change when you pay and how many rivals see the lead. None of them changes the arrangement, which is renting introductions on someone else’s website.

The alternative they all depend on is ranking on Google. Advertisers bid up to £6.18 for one top-of-page click on “builders near me” and £13.41 on “plumber near me” (Google Ads data, September 2026). The map pack sits above those adverts, charges nothing per click, and the enquiry comes to you alone.

That is what I sell, so weigh my bias, then check the figures in the tracker. My guides for builders, plumbers and electricians show what ranking involves for each trade, and the Checkatrade alternatives guide lays out every route side by side.

I audit trade businesses’ local visibility for free: a grid showing where you rank across your area, who is above you, and the three changes worth making first. No obligation, and you keep it either way. See where you rank and I’ll run yours.