Timber handrail profiles: mopstick, pigs ear, and wall vs balustrade rails

A handrail profile is simply the shape the rail is milled to when you look at its cross-section. It matters for two reasons: how easy it is to grip, and how it looks. The regulated part, how high the handrail sits and where you must have one, is covered on the handrail requirements page; this is about the shapes themselves.

The common profiles

• Mopstick. A rounded, almost circular rail, so called because it is shaped like a mop handle. It is the most comfortable to wrap a hand fully around, which makes it a common choice for a wall-mounted rail and for anyone who needs a secure grip.
• Pigs ear (lambs tongue). A slim, low-profile rail that fixes flat against the wall with little projection, its underside shaped so a hand can still hook under it. It is the neat, unobtrusive wall rail, and the two names describe the same style.
• Chamfered and half-round. Simple, modern profiles: a squared rail with the top edges taken off (chamfered), or a rail rounded on top and flat beneath. Clean and contemporary rather than traditional.
• Traditional moulded. A shaped, moulded profile that suits a period or classic balustrade, more decorative than a plain modern rail.

Wall-mounted or balustrade: two different jobs

The bigger distinction is what the rail is doing. A balustrade handrail sits on top of the spindles on the open side of the stair, and it is grooved along its underside so the tops of the spindles seat into it. A wall-mounted handrail runs along a wall with no spindles, so it is ungrooved and fixed on brackets or, in the case of a pigs ear, straight to the wall. They are milled differently, so a rail meant for a balustrade is not the one you fix to a wall, and vice versa. On a narrow stair, a wall rail also has to project far enough for a hand to pass behind it comfortably without catching, which is worth allowing for early.

Whichever profile you choose, the height it sits at and where it is required are set by the regulations, not by the shape. See handrail requirements and guarding.

Tenoned or screwed into the newel

How the handrail meets the newel post is a quiet mark of quality. On good work the handrail is tenoned into the newel: a tongue on the end of the rail fits a matching mortise in the post, glued and often drawbored, so the joint locks rigid and square. A quicker job butts the rail up to the newel and screws it, which is never as solid.

There is one honest exception the trade knows well. On a short section of handrail, typically a small run across a landing between two newels that are already fixed in place, you cannot practically tenon both ends. A tenon has to be fed in end-on, and a short rail trapped between two fixed posts has nowhere to go, so seating a tenon at each end of a small gap simply is not possible on site, whatever you may be told. The right answer there is to tenon one end and screw the other. That is sound work, not a corner cut; it is only on the longer, open runs that both ends can be tenoned.