How to Price a Contractor Job

Pricing a job properly means starting from your real costs, not from a gut feeling or what a competitor charges. Here's a practical process.

1. Add up direct costs

List every direct cost the job will involve: materials, labour hours at your real labour cost (not just wages — see labour burden), equipment hire, travel, subcontractors and permits.

2. Allocate overhead

Your business has fixed costs whether or not this particular job happens — vehicle, insurance, tools, admin. Work out your overhead (our overhead calculator helps here) and allocate a fair share to each job.

3. Add your profit margin

Profit isn't what's left over by accident — it should be a deliberate percentage built into the price. Most contractors think in margin (profit as a percentage of price) rather than markup (profit as a percentage of cost) — see our guide on markup vs margin.

4. Add tax if required

Add GST, VAT or sales tax as required in your region, and decide whether to show it separately on your quote.

5. Sanity check with a risk simulator

Before you send the quote, check what happens to your profit if materials or labour run over. Our job pricing calculator does all of the above in one place, including a built-in risk simulator.