PRICING
How to Price a Construction Job
A repeatable pricing process: gather real costs, add overhead, apply profit and check the result before you send the estimate.
Pricing a job is not a lucky guess. It is a sequence: collect the real costs, add the overhead those costs must support, apply the profit you want, and sanity-check the number before it reaches the customer. This guide walks through each step and puts the estimate builder to work for you.
Gather the real costs first
Nothing you do later can fix an estimate built on bad numbers. Collect labor, materials, subcontractor quotes and equipment. If a measurement or a material price is uncertain, get a number you can defend before you start adding percentages.
- Labor hours and the full employee cost
- Materials with current supplier prices
- Subcontractor quotes in writing
- Equipment, permits and disposal
Add overhead, then profit
Your price has to cover more than direct costs. Add the overhead that the job must support, then apply profit on top. That order matters: overhead is a cost, profit is the return, and recovering both is what keeps the business going.
Build the estimate with your tool
Enter labor, materials and subcontracts, then set the overhead and profit percentages. The estimate builder handles the stacking for you and shows the resulting price and gross margin.
Decide markup or margin deliberately
Know whether the percentage you use is markup (on cost) or margin (on price) — the two are not interchangeable. Pick one, understand its equivalent in the other, and use it consistently so your pricing stays comparable job to job.
Sanity-check before you send it
Read the estimate once as the customer and once as the person who has to deliver the work. Confirm the scope is clear, the numbers add up and the price actually covers everything the job will consume. A small correction now beats a loss, a dispute or badwill later.