Free Job Estimate Calculator

How to use it

1. Enter the labour. Workers, hours, hourly rate. Say whether those hours are per worker or the crew total — on a two-person job that setting doubles or halves the labour cost, and it’s the first thing most calculators get vague about.
2. Add the rest of the costs. Materials, equipment, anything else the job eats. Then your overhead percentage, charged on all direct costs or on labour only.
3. Set your profit. Margin or markup. Both figures show whichever you pick, so you can’t accidentally price at one and think you got the other.
4. Read the two panels below the total. One says what your discount cost you. The other says how far the job can run over before it stops paying. Nothing else on this search does either.

Nothing is uploaded, and there’s no share link on this tool on purpose. The form holds your cost basis, your hourly rate and the margin you work to — a link carrying those would sit in your browser history and in the referrer of the next thing you click. Print or copy the estimate instead. Those contain the price, not your costs.

The order of operations, which nobody else shows you

Two job cost calculators can take the same numbers and give different totals. That’s not a bug in either of them — it’s the order. Overhead before or after profit, tax on the discounted or undiscounted amount, margin or markup. Every one of those choices moves the price, and almost no free job pricing calculator tells you which it made.

This is ours, fixed, and printed with every estimate so you can check the total by hand:

That last line matters more than it looks. A total that blends the tax you collected into “what the job made” flatters every job by exactly the tax rate. You’re holding that money for someone else.

Margin and markup are not the same number

This is the most expensive arithmetic mistake in the trades, and it’s an easy one to make because both are written as a percentage and both are called “profit”.

Markup is a percentage added to your cost. Margin is a percentage of the final price. Add 25% to a cost of 1,800 and you get 2,250 — but that’s a 20% margin, not 25%. To actually make 25% you need to price at 2,400. The gap is 150 on one job, and it widens as the percentage climbs.

The formula is markup = margin ÷ (1 − margin). You never have to use it here: pick either mode and the calculator shows you both numbers, every time.

One consequence worth knowing. A margin of 100% or more is impossible — margin is a share of the price, so 100% would mean the job costs you nothing. If you type it, the tool says so and tells you what you probably meant. A 100% markup is perfectly ordinary: it doubles the price.

What a discount really costs you

Here’s the part no free job estimate calculator on page one will tell you.

A discount doesn’t reduce your margin by its own percentage. It reduces it by much more, because the whole discount comes out of profit while your costs sit exactly where they were.

Take a job that costs 100 and price it at a 20% margin. That’s 125. Now knock 10% off to win the work.

Ten percent off cost you half the profit. Twenty percent off — at a 20% margin — is the entire thing.

The rule of thumb this gives you

There’s a clean identity hiding in that table, and it’s worth carrying around:

A discount of d% at a margin of m% costs you d/m of your profit.

10% off at a 20% margin is 10/20 — half your profit. 10% off at a 30% margin is a third. 10% off at a 10% margin is all of it. The cost of the job doesn’t come into it, which is what makes it usable in your head while someone’s asking you for a better price.

Thin margins can’t absorb discounts. That’s not an opinion about how you should run your business — it’s division.

How far can this job slip before it stops paying?

The second thing the other calculators leave out. You’ve priced the job. Now: how badly can it go before you’re working for free?

The instinct is to divide the profit by your hourly rate. That’s wrong, and it’s wrong in the comfortable direction. An extra crew hour doesn’t cost you the rate — it costs the rate plus the overhead riding on it, because overhead is a percentage of your costs and labour is a cost.

At 50 an hour with 20% overhead, every extra hour costs 60. So a job with 600 of profit has ten spare crew hours, not twelve. That’s a fifth of your slack gone before you started, and it’s the difference between a job that came in tight and one that came in short.

The tool gives you both framings, because both are how people actually think about it: how many extra crew hours, and what percentage cost overrun. It also gives you the break-even price — the number below which you should walk away.

A worked example, start to finish

Two people, ten hours each, at 50 an hour. Four hundred in materials, a hundred in equipment hire. Twenty percent overhead. You want a 25% margin, you agree to knock 10% off, and sales tax is 10%.

Every figure there can be checked on paper, which is the point. Now the two things the other tools stop short of:

• The discount. Your margin went from 25% to 16.7%. You gave away 240 of the 600 you were going to make — 40% of your profit, for 10% off the price. (10 ÷ 25 = 40%, as the rule says.)
• The headroom. That 360 buys you six extra crew hours at 60 an hour all-in, which is 30% over the twenty you planned. Without the discount it would have been ten hours. The discount didn’t just cost money — it cost you most of your margin for error.

Break-even on this job is 1,800. If the customer pushes past a 25% discount, hand it to someone else.

What to put in each field

Working out your overhead percentage

The one field people guess at. Don’t — it’s a division you can do once a year and then reuse.

Add up everything the business costs you whether or not you work: rent, insurance, vehicles and their fuel, phones, software, accountancy, tools, and your own unbilled admin time. Divide by the hours you genuinely billed last year — not the hours you worked, the hours a customer paid for. That gives you an overhead cost per billable hour. Compare it to your direct costs per hour and you have the percentage.

Anyone quoting you a single overhead figure for your trade is guessing. It depends on whether you have premises, how much you drive, and how much of your week is unbillable.

What this tool won’t do

It won’t tell you what your trade “should” charge. Job type here labels the estimate and nothing else, and the page says so where you pick it. There is no correct margin for plumbing. It varies by region, by season, by how you count overhead, and by how much you want the work.

It isn’t a quote, and it isn’t tax advice. Whether sales tax applies to labour, to materials or to both depends on where you are, and so does whether it’s charged before or after a discount. This applies your percentage to the discounted subtotal, which is the normal treatment, and leaves the rules to you.

And it doesn’t save anything. Close the tab and it’s gone — no account, no history, no file on a server. That’s a deliberate trade: the numbers in this form are the ones you’d least like to leak.