Job Price Builder

Build the price before you send it. Put in the hours, the materials and the margin you want to keep. You get the number to quote, plus what the job leaves you for every hour anyone is on site.

Labor hours you expect

Every hour anyone will spend on this job. Count the setup and the cleanup.

What an hour of labor costs you

Wages plus what you pay on top of them. Not the rate you charge the client: that is what this page is working out.

Materials for the job

What the materials will cost you at the counter, before tax.

Markup you add to materials

What you charge on top of the counter price for picking it up, storing it and standing behind it. Enter 0 if you pass materials through at cost.

Margin you want to keep

Margin is the part of the PRICE you keep. It is not a percent added to the cost. To get the price we divide the cost by 1 minus the margin. A 30% margin on a $700 cost gives a $1,000 price, because 700 ÷ 0.7 = 1,000.

Result

Fill in a few more boxes and the answer will show here.

Opens your print dialog. Choose Save as PDF. Your figures stay on this device.

Loading the calculator.

This is a calculator, not advice. Check the numbers against your own records before you price a job.

How a job price is built

A price is built from the bottom, not picked off the top. Add up what the labor will cost, what the materials will cost, the overhead this job has to carry and a contingency for what the walkthrough did not show. That total is the floor. The price is whatever leaves the margin you want standing on top of it.

Two of those numbers carry most of the price. The first is the hours. An estimate that is two hours light on a two-day job is not a rounding error. It is most of the profit. The second is the margin, and it is divided into the cost rather than added to it. A 30 percent margin means the cost divided by 0.7. Adding 30 percent to the cost instead leaves you a 23 percent margin, which is a different job at the same price.

Read profit per labor hour before you read the price. It tells you whether the day is worth working. If an hour of labor costs 35 dollars and the job leaves only 20 dollars of profit an hour, the price is doing less work than the crew is, and any overrun comes straight out of your pocket.

The common mistake is pricing off last year's figures. Supplier prices move between the quote and the purchase order, and the margin absorbs every cent of the difference. The fix is boring: quote from real numbers you wrote down on the last job like this one. Zeus keeps the hours, the material costs and the accepted price together on the job record, so the next quote starts from what actually happened.

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