Free calculator

Price a job without losing money

Confusing markup with margin is the most expensive arithmetic mistake in small business. Enter your costs and target margin — get the price you should quote.

Materials cost Parts, supplies, anything you buy for this job

Labour cost Your hours or your crew's, at cost

Other direct costs Permits, disposal, subcontractors, travel

Target profit margin (%) Profit as a share of the final price. 20–35% is common.

Quote this price

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total job cost

your profit

markup required

Get the pricing cheat-sheet

Markup-vs-margin table plus the three costs most owners forget to include in a quote.

Markup and margin are not the same thing

Margin is profit as a percentage of the price. Markup is profit as a percentage of the cost. They're different numbers for the same job, and mixing them up quietly erodes profit on every quote.

A 30% margin needs a 42.9% markup. If you add 30% to cost thinking you've got a 30% margin, you actually earn about 23% — and you've given away roughly a quarter of your profit without noticing.

Price = total cost ÷ (1 − margin).
Markup % = (price − cost) ÷ cost × 100.

Don't forget overhead

The costs above are the direct ones. Insurance, vehicle, phone, software and the hours spent quoting are real too — they come out of the profit shown here. If your margin only just covers overhead, the job pays you nothing for the risk of doing it.