If you play, or you're about to start, this question comes up fast and nobody gives you a straight answer: what do you actually charge for a pub gig? Ask around online and you'll get a hundred different numbers and a row in the comments underneath. So here's the honest version from someone who plays them.
Let's start with the uncomfortable bit, because it's the most useful thing on this page. The going rate for a solo musician in a pub has barely moved in thirty years. It was around two hundred quid back then, and for a lot of gigs it's still around two hundred quid now — while the fuel to get there, the gear you carry, and the price of the pint you buy at the end have all gone up and up. Nobody planned that. It's what happens when there's always someone willing to do it cheaper, when "exposure" gets offered as if it were money, and when players undercut each other without realising they're dragging the rate down for everyone, themselves included. Knowing that is the first step to not being part of it.
What's actually normal
With that said, here's roughly where things sit. For a solo act doing a couple of sets in a pub of an evening, you'll commonly see anywhere from around £150 at the lower end to £250 or more for a busy room on a good night, and it climbs from there once you're somewhere people specifically come out to. Some musicians work it by the hour, some by the gig — I'd lean towards a gig price, because "per hour" invites someone to squeeze you into a slightly shorter slot for less. It moves with where you are in the country, the night of the week, and the kind of room. A quiet Tuesday background gig and a packed Saturday where you're the reason people stayed are not the same job, and they shouldn't be the same fee.
What actually moves your number
A few real things change what you can ask for, and it's worth being clear-eyed about them. Whether you're bringing the PA or the venue has its own makes a difference — if you're hauling and setting up a full rig, that's part of what they're paying for. Travel matters; an hour each way eats your evening and your fuel. The day of the week matters. And the biggest one: whether it's a background pub gig or a proper function. A birthday, an anniversary, a corporate do — those have a different ceiling entirely, because now you're part of someone's actual event, not the soundtrack to a normal Friday.
The other thing that moves it, quietly, is you. A musician who brings people through the door is worth a lot more to a landlord than one who doesn't, because the landlord makes his money at the bar, not from your set. If the place is busier on the nights you play, you have a real reason to ask for more — and the numbers behind the bar make the case for you.
Don't give it away
Here's the principle I'd hold onto. Work out the number below which you'd genuinely rather have the night off, and don't go under it. Not out of stubbornness — because every time you do, you make it that bit harder for the next musician, and for you next time. You can't pay your fuel bill in exposure. And for functions especially, take a deposit; it protects both of you and it weeds out the enquiries that were never serious. None of that makes you difficult to deal with. It makes you someone who treats this like the work it is.
How to actually get paid more
The honest route to a better fee isn't a clever line in an email, it's being the act they can't wait to book again. Turn up when you said, be easy to deal with, sound good without making a fuss, and read the room so you're lifting the night rather than playing at it. Do that and you stop being a one-off and start being a regular — and a regular slot you can rely on is worth more than a string of better-paid one-nighters you have to keep chasing. Then, when you're ready, step up into functions and weddings, where the ceiling is far higher and the work is steadier than people think. That's a bigger conversation, and it's where the real money in this is.
If you want the rest of it — how to actually get in front of the people who book, the approach that gets a reply instead of silence, and how to turn one good night into a standing date — that's what the book's for. But the pricing starts here: know your number, don't apologise for it, and don't be the one who gives it away.