Last updated: September 2026
By Zac Harrison · Co-founder, Stayful
Ten things decide whether a crew is comfortable for six weeks or complaining by week two. This is the list, in the order it matters, from £19 per person per night with bills included.
Searching for beds for builders usually means one of two things: you are a tradesman sorting your own digs for a job away, or you are the person who has to house eight of the lads by Monday.
Either way the question underneath is the same. Not "is it nice", but "will it work" — can they cook, can they wash workwear, is there somewhere to put the van, and does everyone get their own bed.
This guide sets out the ten things that actually decide that, what to ask a provider before you commit, and what a whole house costs per head against hotel rooms. If you already know what you need and want a quote, go straight to our contractor accommodation across England.
What do builders actually need from accommodation?
A bed each, a proper kitchen, a washing machine and somewhere to park the van. Those four decide most bookings. After them come drying space for wet kit, separate bedrooms, wi-fi that holds up with six people on it, a short drive to site, shops nearby, and a quiet street. A whole house covers all ten. Hotel rooms cover two. The sections below take each in turn.
We come back the same working day with what we can source for your dates at a fixed quote — or tell you straight if we cannot cover it. From £19 per person per night, all bills included, £200 refundable deposit, separate beds for everyone. Send the dates even if the job is not signed off and we will hold a quote so you can put a real number in the tender.
Or ring 0113 479 0251 — we answer during working hoursThe phrase covers any accommodation arranged for trades working away from home. In practice it means one of four things, and they are not equivalent.
A whole house. The entire property to your crew, with a kitchen, a washing machine and usually a drive. This is what most crews want and what the rest of this page is about.
A hotel or budget chain. A room each with an en-suite. Fine for one or two nights. Expensive per head for a crew, and it solves none of the practical problems.
A B&B or pub room. Cheap, often near the job, and common in smaller towns. Breakfast is usually fixed at a time that does not suit a 7am start.
Rooms in a shared house. Cheapest per head. You share the kitchen and bathroom with people who are not on your job and not on your shift pattern.
Not site cabins. Welfare units and modular sleeping accommodation inside the hoarding are a plant hire question. They are provided by the principal contractor and come out of a different budget. What we are describing is ordinary residential housing off site, with a front door onto a street.
Not a shared HMO with other people’s tenants. Plenty of trades have rented a room in a house full of strangers and had a bad time of it — a queue for the bathroom at six in the morning, a kitchen used by people on other shifts, kit going missing. A whole house removes that entirely: nobody outside your crew holds a key.
Not a holiday let with a hard hat on the listing. Properties set up for tourists are furnished for a weekend, not for a crew washing workwear every night for six weeks. It is a real distinction and it shows up by about week two.
One note on wording. People search this as beds for builders, contractor accommodation, contractors accommodation, worker accommodation, digs and self-catering. Different words, one requirement: a decent house near the job with everything switched on.
If you only check four things before you commit, check these.
Separate beds for every person, no sharing. This is the one that causes arguments on site if it goes wrong.
The trap is the occupancy figure. A house advertised as sleeping nine often gets to nine by counting a sofa bed in the lounge. Ask how many separate beds in separate rooms there are, and work your per-head cost off that number, not the headline. A crew of six in a house that genuinely sleeps six is a different stay from a crew of six in a house that sleeps six by putting two of them in the front room.
Not a kettle and a microwave. Oven, hob, fridge-freezer, and enough pans, plates and cutlery for the whole crew to eat at once.
This is the biggest single cost difference against a hotel. Eating out every night runs £20 to £40 per person per day, which on a crew of six over four weeks is more than the accommodation. It is also the difference between the lads eating properly and living on garage sandwiches, and that shows up in how they work.
Ask specifically whether the kitchen is equipped for your headcount. Six people and four dinner plates is a real thing that happens.
Off-street, on the property, with the number of spaces confirmed before you book rather than assumed.
Most trades travel in a van, and the van holds tools worth more than the vehicle. Leaving it on an unfamiliar street overnight is a risk the site manager carries. City-centre hotels make this worse than people expect: car parks routinely cap at 1.8 or 2.1 metres, which a Transit will not clear, and the ones that do take a van charge £15 to £25 a day. Two vans on a four-week job is over a thousand pounds before you have paid for a single room.
Ask how many vehicles fit, whether it is off-street or permit parking, and whether the property sits inside a clean air or congestion zone.
In the property, not a launderette down the road.
A working week generates a full load of dirty workwear per person, sometimes more. Without a machine the crew overpacks, spends a Sunday at a launderette, or wears dirty kit — which on some sites is a welfare issue somebody has to answer for. Ask about drying space at the same time. A utility room, a garage or a decent airer matters far more in February than it sounds in July.
These rarely get asked at booking stage. They are usually what people mean when a stay has quietly gone wrong.
PPE, boots, high-vis and waterproofs take up room and carry a lot of water. A property with a utility space, a garage or a porch keeps that out of the living areas. Without it, wet kit ends up over radiators and the backs of chairs, and the house feels unmanageable by the end of the first wet week.
A crew is not a group of friends on a weekend. People are on different shifts, in different moods after different days, and the ability to shut a door matters over six weeks.
Bathrooms are the honest one. A three-bed house often has one or two bathrooms, not one each, and six people leaving at the same time creates a queue. If an en-suite each genuinely matters more than a kitchen and parking, a hotel is the better answer — we would rather say that than pretend otherwise.
Site managers do paperwork and timesheets after hours. Inductions are online. People video call home. Wi-fi that works for one person and falls over with six on it is a professional problem, not just an annoyance. Ask whether it carries the full crew at once, and whether there is a table somebody can actually work at.
Miles on a map tell you nothing. Ten miles on a dual carriageway can beat five miles through housing estates at half six in the morning.
Ask for drive time at shift-change, not distance. Thirty minutes each way across a six-week job is fifteen hours of the crew’s own time, and fatigue on top of physical work is a safety issue as well as a morale one.
Nobody wants a twenty-minute drive for milk after a ten-hour shift. A property near a supermarket, a pharmacy and a petrol station removes a small daily friction that otherwise accumulates.
Sleep is the thing that makes the next day possible. A flat above a bar in a city centre, or one with noise coming through from the units either side, means people turn up already depleted. A residential street is worth more to a working crew than a central postcode.
It is tempting to treat accommodation as a line item to squeeze. The argument against that is not about being kind to the lads.
A crew that sleeps properly, eats properly and has somewhere decent to come back to stays on site and finishes on programme. Accommodation that does not work is an attrition risk, a morale risk and an avoidable cost.
Site managers know this from experience. The pattern is familiar: put the crew in a budget hotel with no kitchen, patchy wi-fi and somebody sharing a room, and morale goes in the first fortnight. Move them into proper digs and the job changes.
The cost of getting it wrong is rarely the accommodation budget. It is a week lost to somebody going home, or a job that slips because the crew is running on four hours and takeaway food. Set against that, the difference between a bad room and a decent house is small.
That is the case to make internally when somebody asks why the crew is not just going in the cheapest rooms available.
The most common job we get is not a headline scheme. It is a package won late on a Friday with eight people needing a base by Monday morning, two vans carrying tools overnight, and an office manager who does not want eight separate hotel folios landing at month end. Send the site postcode, the headcount and the vehicles and you will have a fixed quote the same working day — and if we cannot cover it, you will know that day rather than on Sunday night.
The reason a per-head figure beats a room rate is that nothing gets added to it afterwards. When we say all bills included, that is the whole list.
Parking is the one to raise at enquiry. We will not claim a specific property has van space until we have checked it for you — but we will tell you before you book, not after.
The whole property goes to your crew and nobody else has access for the duration.
Crews of two to twenty. Beyond about ten you are usually looking at two houses within a few minutes of each other, which we source, manage and invoice as one job.
Separate beds for every person as standard. No room sharing, ever — a commitment rather than an aspiration, and the reason we quote on separate-bed occupancy rather than a headline sleeps figure.
Phased arrivals work the same way. Start with four, add capacity as the programme ramps up, release properties as phases complete. On a job that runs through several stages that matters more than it does on a two-week visit.
If you are running several sites at once, that is one point of contact and one invoice across all of them rather than an account per city.
The figures below assume a crew of six on a job of a week or more. For one person on a two-night trip the hotel usually wins, and we would say so.
One row genuinely favours the hotel and we have left it in, because a comparison that only ever points one way is not a comparison. On bathrooms, a hotel gives everyone an en-suite and a house often does not.
Where the house wins is everything that is not the bed: the kitchen, the machine, the drive, and one invoice instead of six folios.
Extensions. A four-week job becoming six is the most common thing that happens to a booking. Tell us early and we will extend the same house for the same crew wherever availability allows — same property, same keys, no rebooking from scratch. We cannot guarantee a specific property indefinitely, and if it is genuinely let after your dates we will say so early enough for you to plan.
Swaps. Somebody rotating off and a replacement joining next week means we update the names. It does not mean rebooking.
Cancellation. Stated plainly at the point of quote, in writing, before you pay anything. Worth knowing honestly: a hotel on a flexible rate will beat us on same-day cancellation, and if your dates are genuinely uncertain that is a fair reason to book one.
Deposit. £200, fully refundable after the stay.
Invoicing. One invoice for the whole crew, matched to your PO number, 30-day terms for approved accounts.
Stayful manages around 70 properties across 45+ areas of England and has hosted more than 10,000 nights. Co-founded by Zac Harrison and Martyn Butler. Where we hold our own stock you deal directly with the people who manage the building — not a listings site passing your enquiry on, and no broker margin priced into the quote. Where a job falls outside our own areas we source it to brief and deal with the operator on your behalf, and we tell you which of the two you are getting. One number, one email, one person who knows your job.
4.6 out of 5 from 21 Google reviews. That is the company-level rating from our Google Business Profile and it is the figure our schema publishes.
Separately, guests rate individual categories across the portfolio on Airbnb, over more than 10,000 nights hosted:
Airbnb guest category scores across the Stayful portfolio, September 2026. These are category scores, not an overall company rating, and we do not present them as one.
Read the communication score as operational reliability rather than hospitality. It is 4.9 because things do occasionally go wrong on a booking and we sort them quickly — which is what matters when a boiler fails at 6am and six people need to be on site by seven.
Off-street space for two vans. A ground-floor bedroom. Pet friendly. Individual rooms with no sharing. Monday-to-Friday only. EV charging. A dining table the whole crew can sit round. We have properties across the portfolio and the sourcing network that cover all of these — but what is available in a given area on your dates depends on the dates. Send the requirements and we will tell you exactly what we can do, or tell you honestly if we cannot. With a network this size there is usually more than one way to make a set of dates work, including splitting a larger crew across two nearby houses rather than turning the job away.
Contractor digs are ordinary furnished houses rented to a working crew rather than to holidaymakers. You get the whole property — kitchen, washing machine, separate bedrooms, off-street parking where it exists — and nobody else holds a key.
A hotel gives you a room each with an en-suite and a bed made daily. It does not give you anywhere to cook, wash workwear, or dry wet kit. On a two-night trip that does not matter. On a six-week job it decides whether the crew arrives on site rested or worn down.
Separate beds for every person as standard. No room sharing, ever.
The thing to watch when you compare providers is the occupancy figure. A house advertised as sleeping nine often reaches nine by counting a sofa bed. We quote on separate-bed occupancy, so the per-head number you are given is the one that actually applies when the crew walks in.
Bathrooms are the honest caveat. A three-bed house may have one or two bathrooms rather than one each. If an en-suite per person matters more than a kitchen and parking, a hotel is the better answer and we will say so.
Off-street, on the property, where the property has it — and the number of spaces is stated per property before you commit rather than claimed in general.
This is the question worth asking first, because it is where hotels fail crews hardest. City-centre hotel car parks routinely cap at 1.8 or 2.1 metres, which a Transit will not clear, and charge £15–25 a day for the spaces that do fit. Two vans on a four-week job is over a thousand pounds before a single room rate.
Tell us how many vehicles and whether they carry tools overnight, and we will confirm what a specific property can take.
Yes, in the house, included in the rate.
It is a small thing that becomes a weekly irritation without it. Building work destroys clothing and a working week generates a full load per person. Without a machine the crew either overpacks, finds a launderette on a Sunday, or wears dirty kit — which on some sites is a welfare issue the site manager has to answer for.
Ask about drying space too, not just the machine. A property with a utility room or a garage is worth considerably more to a crew in February than one without.
Properly equipped: oven, hob, fridge-freezer, microwave, kettle, toaster, and pans, plates and cutlery for the full crew.
We are specific about that because "fully equipped" gets used loosely across this market. If a property is short of anything for your headcount we tell you before you book rather than after.
The kitchen is the single biggest cost difference against a hotel. Eating out every night runs £20–40 per person per day. Cooking properly after a ten-hour shift also does more for how the crew performs the next morning than most things you could spend the money on.
Gas, electricity, water, council tax, broadband, hotel-quality linen and towels, a fully equipped kitchen, a washing machine, and off-street parking where the property has it. Self check-in from 3pm, check-out 11am.
Not included: food, and a £200 damage deposit that is fully refundable after the stay. There is no daily housekeeping — these are houses, not hotel rooms, and the crew keeps the place themselves.
Tell us as early as you can and we will extend the same house for the same crew wherever availability allows. Same property, same keys, no rebooking from scratch.
A four-week job becoming six is the most common thing that happens to a booking, so it is worth asking any provider how they handle it before you book rather than after. We cannot guarantee a specific property indefinitely, and if it is genuinely let after your dates we will tell you early enough to plan.
Crews change shape too. Somebody rotating off and a replacement joining next week means we update the names, not that you rebook.
Yes. One invoice for the whole crew, matched to your PO number, with 30-day terms for approved accounts.
Nobody needs to put a crew on a personal card and chase receipts at month end. If you are running several sites at once it is still one invoice and one point of contact across all of them, rather than an account per city.
We answer calls during working hours. If you won a package on Friday and need a crew housed by Monday, ring rather than fill in the form.
Email: info@stayful.co.uk
Stayful — around 70 managed properties across 45+ areas of England, 10,000+ nights hosted. Co-founded by Zac Harrison and Martyn Butler.
If you need a single room for one night, a hotel will suit you better and cost you less. We are built for crews of two or more staying a week or longer.
One email, one invoice, one contact. We reply the same working day with what we can source for your dates — or tell you straight if we cannot cover it. From £19 per person per night, all bills included, £200 refundable deposit, separate beds for everyone.
Or ring 0113 479 0251Own a property and wondering what it could earn housing working crews? Stayful also manages properties for landlords — see how our management service works.
