What SmartFix charged in September 2026. Some of the jobs, and what each one cost.

Last month we published what twenty-six August jobs cost. Here is September. Forty jobs this time, with the amount the customer actually paid on each one. The smallest was ₦3,300 and the biggest was ₦5,013,530.

Still nobody else is publishing theirs

We said in August that we would do this every month, so this is month two. The reason has not changed. People ask what a job will cost before they ask anything else, and in Lagos there is no reference point anywhere, so a quote lands in your hand and you have no way of telling whether it is fair or whether somebody looked at your gate and decided.

September was a wider month than August. The cheapest job was a small electrical repair at ₦3,300. The most expensive was a solar installation that came to just over five million. Same company, same month, and the gap between them is the whole point.

Some of the jobs we completed in September 2026

Cheapest first. Locations are given as the area only, because the work is public but the customer is not. The last column is what was actually paid. It includes transport where transport applied, and our fee where it was not waived, which is why it is sometimes more than the two columns beside it.

Now here is the part I want you to see

Look at the materials column. Across the thirty-three jobs in that table where we bought parts, materials came to ₦8,082,760 out of ₦9,305,935. That is eighty-seven percent.

That figure is pulled up by the two biggest jobs, so take them out. On the other thirty-one, materials came to ₦1,445,605 out of ₦2,048,780, which is seventy-one percent. In August the same calculation gave sixty percent. The answer is the same either way. Most of what you pay goes to the part, not to the person fitting it.

That is not us being generous. It is what the work is. A mixer tap costs what a mixer tap costs, a dryer timer costs what a dryer timer costs, and a lithium battery costs what a lithium battery costs. Nobody in Lagos controls those prices. What we can control is whether you get to see the split.

Some lines show zero under materials. Those are the jobs where nothing was bought at all, like dismantling a bed or draining a septic tank, and the tiling job where the customer already had the tiles. It does not mean a part was hidden somewhere. It means there was no part.

The expensive jobs in September were not the complicated ones

Two things in that table cost far more than they needed to, and neither was anybody’s bad luck.

The first was a leak. We went out for a plumbing job and the artisan traced the water back to the bathroom next door, where the tiling had never been sealed properly in the first place. Fixing that properly took two separate tiling jobs, ₦43,650 and ₦44,700. Eighty-eight thousand naira to correct work that somebody had already been paid to do once.

The second was a roof. A solar installation went ahead and the clear part of the roof, the part that faces the sun all day, had already been taken by another flat in the same building. The panels had to go elsewhere, which meant a longer cable run and an extra ₦105,000 on a job that was already large. On a block of flats nobody really owns the roof, and it goes to whoever installs first.

Then compare the cheap end. A pan connector under a WC started leaking, somebody called the same week, and it was changed for ₦4,725. Elsewhere a mixer tap was left, and by the time we got there the pan connector and a drawer had gone with it, and that one came to ₦59,350. Same category of problem. More than twelve times the money. The only difference was how early somebody looked.

Common questions about what repairs cost in Lagos

Every figure here is taken straight from our completed job records for September 2026. Nothing has been rounded. This is a selection of the month’s work rather than all of it, and locations are given as area only. It is the second in a monthly series, so the October numbers will follow in November, and every month after that.