Free tool · no signup
What should you charge for this job?
Put in what the job costs you and what you want to keep. It works out the price — and shows you the difference between a markup and a margin, which is where most quotes quietly lose money.
$0
Quote this to break even on cost and keep your margin.
| Materials | $0 |
|---|---|
| Labour | $0 |
| Overhead | $0 |
| What the job costs you | $0 |
| Profit | $0 |
| Price to quote | $0 |
Nothing you type here is sent anywhere — it is worked out in your browser and forgotten when you close the tab. There is no signup, and there is nothing to download.
The bit that costs people money
A 20% markup is not a 20% margin.
Add 20% to a $1,000 job and you quote $1,200. Your profit is $200 on a $1,200 price — which is a 16.7% margin, not 20%. The gap widens the higher you go: a 50% markup is a 33% margin.
To actually keep 20%, you divide by 0.8 rather than multiplying by 1.2 — $1,250, not $1,200. That $50 is the whole difference between a year that works and a year that nearly does. This calculator does the division.
The other half is overhead. Trucks, insurance, phones, the evening you spend on paperwork — if that is not in your hourly number, it comes out of the profit you thought you had.
If the paperwork is the problem
Pricing a job is quick. Everything after it isn’t.
Quoting takes ten minutes. Chasing the quote, scheduling the crew, getting the photos off someone’s phone, raising the invoice and chasing that too — that is the evening. Runzek builds the system that does it, shaped around how your jobs already move.