Pricing & Profit
Every contractor faces the same question: what do I charge for this job? Answering it well means stacking several numbers on top of each other — what the work costs you directly, what the business costs you whether or not the job exists, and what you need to keep as profit. The calculators in this section each handle one of those layers.
Job pricing starts with direct costs — labor, materials, subcontractors, travel — then adds an overhead allowance so the business itself gets paid, and finishes with your target margin applied to the total. The most common failure in contractor pricing is skipping a layer: a quote that covers materials and wages but never recovers insurance, trucks or software is a busy month moving backwards.
The other classic trap is markup versus margin. They measure the same profit against different bases — cost for markup, price for margin — so the numbers never match: a 25% markup is a 20% margin. Which one you use matters less than knowing which one you're using, and the tools below show both on every result.
Contractor Markup Calculator
Enter your job costs, choose a markup, and see the exact selling price, profit dollars and gross margin .
Contractor Margin Calculator
Work backwards.
Job Pricing Calculator
The full picture in one place.
Flat Rate Pricing Calculator
Build a fixed price for a service call from the real costs behind it .
Break-Even Calculator
Enter your monthly fixed costs, your average job price and what an average job costs you to deliver, and see exactly how many jobs per month you need just to break even .
The terms, in plain language
Job pricing: Building a price from the job's real parts: burdened labor, materials, subs, travel and other direct costs, plus overhead and your target margin.
Markup: Profit measured against cost: Price = Cost × (1 + Markup). Easy to apply, easy to confuse with margin.
Margin: Profit measured against price: Margin = Profit ÷ Price. The share of every quote that survives to cover overhead and net profit.
Flat-rate pricing: One fixed price for a defined job — a service call, a swap, an install — built from the same cost math, priced before you arrive.