Guide
Most tradespeople quote labour and materials, then eat the cost of blades, tape, PPE and tip fees. Here's the leak list, two ways to recover it, and what it's actually costing you over a year.
You quote the boiler, the pipe, the labour hours. You don't quote the jubilee clips, the PTFE tape, the hacksaw blade you snapped, the gloves, the sandpaper, or the half-tank of fuel your grinder burned through. None of that is "materials" in the sense of things the customer can point to and say "yes, that's in my house." But it all cost you money.
Here's a working leak list, across most trades:
None of it is expensive on its own. A box of blades is $30. A tube of sealant is $8. That's exactly why it gets ignored. But it adds up across every job, every week, and most owner-operators have never actually totalled it.
Pull your receipts for consumables over three months (not materials you bill line-by-line, just the small stuff you buy in bulk and never invoice separately) and divide by your total job revenue for that period. For most trades this lands between 3% and 8%:
| Trade | Typical consumables share of job cost | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Cleaning | 3-5% | Mostly chemicals and cloths, low tool wear |
| Handyman / general repairs | 4-6% | Wide mix of fixings, tape, small hardware |
| Plumbing | 4-7% | PTFE, fittings, sealant, blade wear on pipe cuts |
| Electrical | 3-5% | Connectors, tape, PPE, low blade use |
| HVAC | 5-7% | Refrigerant handling consumables, brazing gas, filters |
| Landscaping / grounds | 5-8% | Fuel-heavy: blades, string, mower/trimmer fuel |
If you've never checked, guess low. Most people who do this exercise are surprised it's not 1-2%.
The cleanest fix is a visible line on the quote: "Consumables and small tools: 4-6% of labour plus materials." You calculate it after you've priced everything else. On a $1,500 job (labour plus materials, before markup), 5% is $75.
This works best if your job sizes vary a lot, because a flat rate under- or over-charges on odd-sized jobs, while a percentage tracks the actual job scale reasonably well. It's also the more transparent option: customers who ask "what's this?" get a straight answer, and it's easy to defend against a competitor who's quietly not charging for it (and therefore losing money, which is not your problem to match).
Downside: it's an extra line customers notice, and on very small jobs (say, under $200) a percentage-based line can look like nitpicking. For those, consider a flat minimum instead, like $8-$12.
The alternative is to load it into your hourly rate as a fixed dollar amount, typically $4-$9 per billable hour depending on trade. This suits trades where consumable use tracks hours worked more reliably than job value: HVAC techs burning brazing gas by the hour, landscapers burning fuel by the hour, electricians going through tape and connectors roughly per hour on site.
If you already run your pricing through a hourly rate calculator, this is the natural place to add it. Work out your average monthly consumables spend, divide by your billable hours for the month, and add that per-hour figure into your loaded rate alongside overhead and profit margin. It disappears into the number you already quote, no separate line, no explaining.
Downside: it can under-recover on jobs with heavy one-off consumable use (a big sanding job, a job needing a new blade) and over-recover on light jobs. Fine as a long-run average, less accurate job-by-job.
Rule of thumb: use the percentage line if your jobs vary widely in size and materials cost. Use the hourly load if your jobs are fairly similar in shape and mostly billed by time. Some businesses run both: hourly load for day-rate work, percentage line for fixed-price quotes.
Dump fees are a different animal to consumables and deserve separate, honest pricing rather than a vague "$50 disposal fee" tacked on. Price it as:
Tip fee + load/haul time + the trip itself.
Worked example: you're clearing a bathroom refit. The tip charges $60 for the load size. Loading the van and unloading at the tip takes 40 minutes of your labour, billed at your loaded rate, say $65/hr, so $43. The round trip to the tip and back is 25 minutes of drive time, effectively another $27 in labour time, plus maybe $6 in fuel. Total disposal cost: $60 + $43 + $27 + $6 = $136.
That's a real number you can quote with a straight face, and it survives a customer asking "why so much for a skip run?" A flat $50 guess doesn't survive that question, and it usually doesn't cover the actual cost either.
Take a $1,500 job (labour plus materials, no consumables line, no separate disposal charge because "it's included"). Consumables actually used: blades, sealant, tape, fixings, PPE, fuel, roughly 5% of the job, so $75. Disposal actually incurred, using the method above: $20 in extra hidden cost the customer never saw a line for (say a small trip to the tip that wasn't separately billed). Total quietly absorbed: $95.
That's 6.3% of the job's value gone before you've thought about profit margin at all. Run 100 similar jobs a year and that's $9,500 of unrecovered cost, money that looks like it disappeared from your bank account with no invoice to explain it.
Check this against your own numbers with a job profitability calculator: it's usually the gap between the margin you thought you made and the margin your bank balance shows.
Consumables and disposal aren't profit, they're cost recovery, so they should be worked out before you apply markup, not folded into your margin figure. If you're using a markup and margin calculator, add consumables (as a percentage or hourly load) and disposal (as an actual costed line) to your base cost first, then apply your markup on top. Otherwise you're marking up a number that's already 5-8% short, and your margin looks better on paper than it is in the bank.
Pull three months of receipts for the small stuff, blades, sealant, tape, fixings, PPE, fuel, and total it against three months of job revenue. That's your real consumables percentage, not a guess. Pick method one or two based on how much your job sizes vary. Then price your next skip run or tip trip using the tip fee plus time plus trip formula, not a round number. That's the whole fix, and it's worth roughly $9,500 a year on 100 jobs.
The Small Business Operations Kit ($19) turns guides like this one into fill-in-once worksheets: rate card, quoting sheet, job costing, payment terms and follow-up templates. Built by the same people who write these guides.