Job estimate calculator

Build a job price up from its parts instead of pulling a number out of the air. Put in your materials, your labour hours at your rate, anything you sub out, a contingency for the unknowns and the margin you want — and this gives you a price to quote, the profit inside it, and a deposit to ask for.

Nothing is sent anywhere. It runs in your browser, there is no signup, and we cannot see what you type.

Price the job from the ground up

The estimates that lose money are the ones that start at the answer. You picture what the customer will accept, write that number down, and back-fill a job to fit it. The estimates that make money start at the bottom — every real cost, added up honestly — and let the price be whatever covers them plus your margin. If that price is more than the job is worth to the customer, that is worth knowing before you have committed to it, not after.

Count all three kinds of cost

• Materials. What the parts cost you, at today's price, not the price from the last job. Material prices move, and a quote you wrote three weeks ago may already be underwater.
• Labour. Hours × your rate. Be honest about the hours — the job takes as long as it takes, not as long as you would like to bill. If you do not know what an hour of your time should cost, the hourly rate calculator works it out from what you need to earn.
• Subs and job extras. Anything you pay someone else, plus permits, disposal, equipment rental and the specific costs this job carries that the last one did not.

Contingency is not padding

Contingency is the line that separates people who have been doing this a while from people who are about to learn something. It is not padding and it is not a fudge — it is the honest acknowledgement that you cannot see inside the wall, under the slab or behind the panel until you are in there, and that sometimes what you find costs money.

Ten to fifteen percent is a normal band for work with some unknowns; go higher on a remodel or anything on an old building, lower on a job you could do in your sleep. The contractor who never adds contingency is not cheaper — they are the same price plus a running argument about who pays for the surprise.

The deposit

A deposit funds your materials so you are not lending the customer money, and it filters out the people who were never going to pay. The tool shows a deposit as a percentage of the price so you can see the actual figure to ask for; a quarter to a third is common on jobs with real material costs up front. State it on the quote, not as a surprise later. Our deposits and payment terms guide covers how much to ask for and when.

An estimate is not a quote

What this produces is a number to quote — but be deliberate about which document you send. An estimate is a best guess and is not binding; a quote is a fixed price you are on the hook for once it is accepted. Send an estimate when the scope genuinely is not knowable yet, and a quote when it is. The expensive mistake is sending an estimate that reads like a quote and then trying to raise the number. The quote vs invoice guide goes through it.

A worked example

Say a job needs $1,200 of materials and about 24 hours of your time at $85 an hour, with nothing subbed out. That is $1,200 plus $2,040 of labour, or $3,240 of direct cost. Add 10% contingency and your total cost is about $3,564. At a 25% margin the price to quote is roughly $4,752 — leaving about $1,188 of profit — and a 30% deposit means you ask for about $1,426 before you start. Change any input and every figure updates, so you can see immediately what dropping your margin to win the job actually costs you.

Questions people ask about this

What margin should I use?

Enough to survive the jobs that go wrong, not just the ones that go right — commonly 20–40% on labour-and-materials work. If you are unsure how markup and margin differ, the markup calculator shows the gap.

Should the deposit come off the final invoice?

Yes — and show it as a deduction on the invoice, not in a note. A customer who has forgotten they paid it will call you, and a deposit that is not visibly credited undermines every other number on the page.

Is anything I type here stored?

No. It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent to us, and there is no signup.

Related free tools: hourly rate calculator, markup calculator, free invoice template.