Guide
Thirty days used to be safe. With copper, steel and equipment prices moving the way they have through 2026, a 30-day quote on a material-heavy job is a bet you did not know you were placing. Here is how to set the window by trade and job type.
Most quote templates say "valid for 30 days" because that is what the template said when you downloaded it. Nobody picked that number for your business. It came from an era when a copper price you quoted in March was still roughly the copper price you paid in April.
That has not been the case recently. Through the first half of 2026, contractor-facing reporting has flagged the same pressure points: tariffs on imported steel, aluminum and copper running as high as 50 percent, copper wire and cable up sharply year over year, and construction input prices climbing at their fastest pace in several years. HVAC contractors are getting it from a different direction — refrigerant transition costs and equipment repricing on top. Whether those exact conditions still hold when you read this, the lesson survives: your supplier's price list changes faster than your quote template assumes.
The result is a quiet margin leak. You do not see it as a loss. You see it as a job that "came in tight."
Take a $4,200 residential panel upgrade. Materials are $1,500 — about 36 percent of the price — and after labor, truck, and overhead you were pricing for roughly 12 percent net, or about $504.
Now the customer sits on it for five weeks, comes back, and your supplier has moved copper-heavy items up 15 percent.
Extra material cost: $1,500 × 15% = $225
Net profit left: $504 − $225 = $279
You just gave away 45% of the profit on that job by honoring an old number.
Note what did not happen: your price did not go down, your hours did not go up, you did not make a mistake. You simply held a number too long. Run your own version through the job profitability calculator before you decide a stale quote is harmless.
The math gets worse the more material-heavy the work is. On a $9,000 HVAC changeout where equipment alone is $4,200, a 6 percent equipment increase is $252 straight off the bottom line — and equipment is exactly the category that gets repriced without much warning.
Here is the rule that actually works. Look at what percentage of the quoted price is materials or equipment you have not yet bought, then set the window accordingly.
The one-line version: never quote a customer for longer than your supplier holds their price to you.
If you do not know how long your supplier holds a price, ask them this week. Most counter staff will tell you straight out, and some will put a written hold on a big-ticket item if you ask. That single question is worth more than any pricing article.
Contractors resist expiration dates because they feel like pressure tactics. Written well, they read as professionalism. Two lines is all you need on a residential quote:
"This price is valid through [date]. Material pricing is as of [date]; if supplier costs on major items rise more than 5% before we order, we'll put the updated number in writing for your approval before any work begins — and you can cancel at that point with your deposit refunded in full."
That does three things at once. It gives you a hard end date. It gives you a threshold — most operators use somewhere between 5 and 10 percent — so you are not re-quoting over $12. And the refund promise is what makes it land as fair rather than as a trapdoor, which matters more in residential work than in commercial.
Whether a quote is a binding offer, and what a signed acceptance changes, varies by state and by how the document is worded — check with your attorney before relying on any language you found online, including this.
This will happen, and how you handle it is a real revenue decision. Three options, in order of how often you should use them:
What you should never do is eat a large increase silently to avoid an awkward conversation, then try to make it back by rushing the job. That is how a profitable job becomes a callback.
Here is the underrated part. An expiration date gives you a reason to call that is not "just checking in."
A sequence that works on quoted-and-waiting jobs: a short message the day after you send it, confirming they got it and asking if anything needs explaining; a check-in around a week out; then a note three days before expiry saying plainly that the price holds until Friday and you are happy to re-quote after that. That last one is not a pressure tactic — it is true, and customers can tell the difference.
Most single-truck operators lose more money to quotes that never got a second contact than to price increases. Check what a normal quote win rate looks like before you assume your pricing is the problem. And if chasing quotes and re-pricing stale ones is the admin that never gets done, that is exactly the sort of repetitive work we set up for people.
Shortening your quote window protects the margin you have. It does not fix a margin that was too thin to begin with. If a 15 percent material increase erases 45 percent of a job's profit, part of the problem is that the job was priced at 12 percent net. Run your numbers through the markup and margin calculator — plenty of operators find they have been applying a markup they thought was a margin, which is a bigger leak than any commodity swing.
Shorter windows, a written threshold, and a real markup. Those three keep a busy quarter from turning into a break-even one.
Thirty days is the old convention, but it is only a convention, not a rule. The right window depends on how much of the job is materials. Labor-heavy work like drain cleaning, cleaning or landscaping can safely hold 30 days. Jobs where materials are more than about 40 percent of the price, or that involve copper, steel or quoted equipment, are better at 7 to 14 days. The practical rule: never quote a customer for longer than your supplier holds their price to you.
Before the customer accepts and before the expiration date passes, you generally should honor what you wrote. After the stated expiration date, the quote is an expired offer and you can re-price. The clean way to handle it is to put an expiration date on the document at the time you issue it, plus a short line saying material pricing is as of that date and that increases above a set threshold will be re-quoted in writing before any work starts. Rules on what makes a quote binding vary by state and by whether the document was signed, so check locally or with your attorney before relying on any wording.
Yes, on every single one, including small ones. An estimate with no end date is an open-ended promise, and customers reasonably assume it still stands weeks or months later. A dated quote also gives you a legitimate, non-pushy reason to follow up: telling someone their price holds until Friday is a real deadline rather than a sales tactic, and it moves stalled quotes without a discount.
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.