Cost estimator
Price a job line by line and get a total you can put on a quote.
Estimate
A free construction cost estimator for contractors. Price materials with waste, labor in hours, disposal and permits, then add overhead, markup and a contingency, and get a job total you can put on a quote. Nothing you enter is stored.
It is free and needs no signup. Signed in, the AI fills your usual rates from your own past documents and the estimate saves to your dashboard.
An estimate has two halves. The first is what the job costs you: materials, the waste you will throw in a dumpster, the hours, the equipment rental, the dump fees. The second is what keeps your business alive: overhead, markup and a contingency. Most estimates that lose money get the first half roughly right and skip the second half entirely.
This page prices both halves and shows the arithmetic while you work, so you can see the moment a discount eats your margin. Leave a rate at zero and the line is flagged rather than counted, because a total built on a missing price is worse than no total at all.
The scope changes with the work. Pick your trade and the estimator loads the sections and the units that trade bills in, whether you are a plumber, electrician, HVAC technician, general contractor, carpenter, painter, roofer, landscaper, handyman, locksmith, flooring installer, tiler, auto mechanic, appliance engineer, pest controller, cleaner, mover or welder. Creative and professional work is covered the same way, from photographers and videographers to designers, developers, consultants, accountants, lawyers, architects, engineers and translators, along with tutors, personal trainers, therapists, event planners, caterers, salons, pet services, driving instructors and childcare. Forty six in total, matching the professions in the invoice generator.
A construction cost estimate holds up when labor and materials are priced apart rather than rolled into one figure. Each section totals on its own, so you can see what the materials cost, what the hours cost, and what is left for overhead and profit before you commit to a price.
Add a section for subcontractors and one for equipment when the job has them. A subcontractor goes in as a line at the price they quoted you, and rented equipment or plant as a day rate times the days. For quantities, the paint calculator works out the gallons for a paint line and the concrete calculator the cubic yards for a concrete pour. Once the estimate is accepted, order the materials you priced with a purchase order and send the crew with a work order.
Dumpster rental, dump fees and the trip to the tip. On a strip-out this is hundreds of dollars that almost never reaches the estimate, and it comes straight out of your margin.
Masking, floor protection, moving furniture, scaffolding. It is an hour or three before the real work starts, every single day of the job.
Permit fees, inspection call-out and the time spent waiting for it. Commercial clients expect to see this line; leaving it off does not make it free. Once the estimate is accepted, the progress billing guide shows how to bill a long job in stages, and the change orders guide covers pricing the work that was not on the estimate.
Offcuts, spoiled mix, the extra gallon. Ten percent on materials is a normal allowance, and it applies to what you buy, not to the hours you work.
The supplier run, loading the van, the drive. Two hours of a day that nobody bills for, on a job you priced by the hour.
The thing behind the wall. Renovation work finds it roughly every time, and a contingency line is the difference between a variation conversation and an argument.
The estimator opens with a sample job: repainting three bedrooms and a hallway for Harbor Property Group. This is how its total is built.
That makes an estimate total of $3,453.91, with a 30 percent deposit of $1,036.17 to book the job. Change any quantity, rate or percentage in the tool and every figure after it moves with it.
Construction costs are often compared per square foot, and you can get that figure from your own estimate. Price the job line by line here, then divide the estimate total by the area the work covers: floor area for a remodel or new flooring, wall area for painting, roof area for roofing. The result is your cost per square foot for that job, built from your own quantities and rates rather than a regional average. Use it to compare jobs and to sanity check a new price, not in place of the line items.
Add 20 percent to your costs and you have a 16.7 percent margin, because the markup is measured against cost while the margin is measured against the sale. Contractors who set a markup equal to the margin they wanted are the ones who cannot work out where the money went. The estimate shows both figures side by side. If you need to hit a specific margin, work backwards with the markup calculator or the profit margin calculator.
Price the job here, then turn the accepted numbers into a document the client can sign. An estimate can move if the job changes; the quote generator produces the fixed-price version with validity dates and deposit terms. To print the figures on a designed layout instead, pick one of the estimate templates. A saved estimate becomes an invoice once the work is done.
Yes. Labor is priced on its own first, hours by rate for each trade on the job, and materials get their own total with a waste allowance. The two are then added, so when a job comes in over you can see which of them moved. Price the burdened labor rate rather than the wage, because payroll taxes, insurance and unproductive time are real costs that the wage figure hides.
An estimator is priced per bid or as a share of the contract value, which makes sense on large or complex work. On residential and light commercial jobs the arithmetic here is the same arithmetic, and it takes minutes rather than days.
Price the work in four layers: materials with a waste allowance, labor in hours at your rate, the job costs people forget such as disposal, permits and access, then the money that keeps the business alive: overhead, markup and a contingency. Estimating what the job costs you is the easy half. The half that decides whether you make money is what you add on top.
Only as accurate as its scope and its quantities. A line-item estimate built from measured quantities and current supplier prices is usually closer than a rough per-square-foot figure, but anything you cannot see, behind a wall or under the ground, is a guess until it is opened. That is what the contingency line is for, and why the document says it is an estimate rather than a fixed quote.
Estimate the hours for each task, multiply by the hourly rate and add the lines up. Use the burdened rate: the wage plus payroll taxes, workers' compensation, insurance and paid time that is not spent on site. Travel, setup and cleanup are hours too, so give them their own line rather than hoping they fit.
An estimate is your considered best figure and can move if the job changes. A quote is a fixed price you are offering to hold. Give an estimate when the scope has unknowns behind a wall or under the ground, and a quote when you can see everything you are pricing. Say which one it is on the document, because a client who thinks an estimate was a quote will argue about the final bill.
Five to ten percent covers a job you have done many times before. Fifteen to twenty is closer to right for renovation work where you cannot see behind the surfaces until you open them. Contingency is not padding: it is the money that pays for the thing that was always going to be discovered on day three.
Markup varies by trade and by risk, and it is not the same as margin. Adding 20 percent markup to your costs gives you a 16.7 percent margin, not 20. If you need a specific margin, work backwards from it with the markup calculator rather than adding the margin figure as a markup.
Either works if you do it once. Building overhead into the labor rate spreads it over the hours you sell, which suits labor-heavy work. Adding it as a separate percentage, as this estimator does, keeps it visible when materials make up most of the job. The mistake is doing both, or neither.
Disposal, permits, access and protection, and the trip to the supplier. Dumpster rental and dump fees are real money that rarely make it onto the sheet. So is masking, floor protection and the hour spent moving furniture. These are the lines this page proposes for you, because they cost the job whether or not they are on the estimate.
Break labor into hours times your rate while you are building the estimate, even if the client only ever sees a single labor line. Hours are what you check the job against afterwards. A lump sum tells you nothing about whether you were fast or slow on the day.
Divide the estimate total by the area the job covers. Use the area that drives the work: floor area for flooring or a remodel, wall area for painting, roof area for roofing. The figure is useful for comparing your own jobs, but price each new job from its line items rather than from the ratio.
Direct costs belong to one job: its materials, the labor on it, equipment hired for it, disposal and permits. Indirect costs keep the business running across every job: rent, insurance, vehicles, software and office time. Direct costs go on the estimate as lines; indirect costs are recovered through the overhead percentage.
Yes. Save the estimate to your dashboard with a free account and it stays there as a document you can turn into an invoice once the work is approved and done. The line items carry across, so the invoice matches what the client agreed to.
Yes, and there is no signup for the calculator itself. A free account adds saving to your dashboard and lets the AI use your past documents to fill in your usual rates.
Send it as a link from your account instead of downloading it, and the document gets its own page. You see when it was opened, how long they stayed on it and which lines they questioned, all on your dashboard. The first four documents you send that way are free with an account. Building and downloading is free with no account, and nothing you type is uploaded unless you sign in to send a tracked link or use the optional AI helper.
Yes. Sent as a tracked link, your client signs on the page with a finger or a mouse, with no account and nothing to install. The signature is kept with the document along with the date, the time and the address it came from, and it appears on the copy you export.
Yes. For hire cost, put the equipment or plant in as a line with the day rate and the days, and it sits alongside the labor and materials so the total reflects what the job actually costs to hire for. For a job bid, build the estimate here first and carry it into the quote generator, which is the document a bid is actually submitted on. An estimate is the arithmetic; the bid is the commitment.
Tracking and signing are explained on the invoice tracking page: what is recorded, what is stored and what stays free with no account.
An estimate template is a design you fill in. A generator, like this page, fills it in your browser and exports the finished estimate as a PDF or image, free and with no signup. Invoicing software goes further with accounts, stored customers, online payments and automatic reminders, which is what paid apps add. If you need a clean estimate today, a template in a generator is the quick route. If you want accounts and stored customers across many jobs, software suits that better.
Free and in your browser, like this one: Quote generator · Invoice generator · Work order generator · Purchase order generator.
Ask the client to sign with a finger or a stylus. It is stored with this estimate only.