Job Quote Builder
Labor, materials and a share of overhead, priced to the margin you actually want to keep.
- Labor + materials
- —
- Overhead applied
- —
- Total cost
- —
- You keep
- —
- That's a markup of
- —
Why overhead goes into the job
Rent, insurance, the truck payment and the phone that rings all get paid out of jobs, because there is nowhere else for the money to come from. Quoting labor plus materials plus a margin and calling it profit is how a shop books a "35% job" that actually loses money.
Overhead per billable hour is your annual overhead divided by your annual billable hours. Get that figure from the true hourly rate calculator and reuse it on every quote.
Worked example
A four-hour service job with $200 of parts:
- Labor: 4 × $45 = $180. Materials: $200. Direct cost $380
- Overhead: 4 × $25 = $100
- Total cost $480
- At a 35% margin: $480 ÷ 0.65 = $738.46
- You keep $258.46 — which is a 35% margin and a 53.8% markup
Quote the same job at $648 by adding 35% to cost instead, and you keep $168 — a 26% margin. The wrong formula costs $90 on a single afternoon.
Common questions
- Should I mark up materials separately?
- You can, and many shops do. Pricing the whole job to a target margin achieves the same thing with one less number to argue about. If you prefer a separate materials markup, add it to the materials figure before entering it here.
- What if the job runs long?
- Re-run it with the real hours. The gap between the quoted and actual figures is the most useful number in your business — if jobs consistently run 20% over, your estimating is the problem, not your pricing.
- Is gross margin the same as profit?
- No. Gross margin is what is left after the direct cost of doing the work. Because this calculator also charges overhead to the job, what is left here is much closer to real profit than a labor-and-materials gross margin — but it is still a per-job estimate, not your year-end number.