Free Appliance Repair Estimate Calculator

Add up your true direct costs — labor including burden, materials with markup, and job extras like equipment or disposal. Add a contingency for surprises if the job has any. That's your break-even, the floor you never quote below. Then add your profit on top: price = break-even × (1 + profit%). This calculator runs exactly that math as you type, and shows the result both ways — what you added on to your costs, and what share of the final price that leaves you — because the two numbers are easy to confuse and quoting on the wrong one is how a job loses money.

Burden is everything an hour of labor costs beyond the paycheck: payroll taxes (typically 8–10% of wages), workers' compensation (a few percent for low-risk trades, well over 15% for high-risk ones like roofing or concrete), liability insurance, and paid time off. All-in burden commonly lands between 15% and 40% on top of base pay — and forgetting it is one of the most common ways a profitable-looking job loses money. If you're solo and paying yourself, you can leave it at 0%.

Markup is a percentage added on top of your cost; margin is your share of the final price. Adding 100% on top — charging double your costs — is the same thing as a 50% margin. Quoting a markup when you mean a margin is one of the most common ways contractors underprice a job, so this calculator keeps it simple: you enter what you add on top — no cap — and it always shows what share of the final price that leaves you.

Work backward from your own numbers instead of copying competitors: add up what you want to earn in a year plus every cost of being in business, then divide by your realistic billable hours — most appliance techs bill far fewer hours than they work. That result is your floor. Local demand, licensing, and skill decide how far above it you can go.

Somewhere between 15% and 50% is common practice across the trades, and it isn't padding: the markup pays for sourcing time, supply runs, returns, warranty callbacks, and the money you float between buying materials and getting paid. If the customer supplies materials, price the labor accordingly — you still carry the workmanship risk.

Most of the overrun is waiting for the machine to prove itself. A refrigerator you just repaired needs hours to pull down before you know, and the ice maker needs a cycle after that, so the honest version of that job is a visit plus a return you planned for. A fully iced evaporator will not thaw in the fifteen minutes you allowed for it.

Access is the other half. A stacked pair in a hall closet, a built-in that will not clear the new flooring, a wall oven that has been in the same opening since the cabinets went in. Then there is what you find once the back panel is off: a rusted-through outer tub on what was quoted as a pump swap, a chewed harness, a previous repair held together with wire nuts.

And the supply house that ships the superseded number, which turns out not to fit the revision in front of you. Diagnosis on an intermittent fault has no honest hour count at all, since the machine will run perfectly for you and fail again on Sunday — which is why the visit that finds nothing still has to be written down as work, with the tests you ran and the conditions you could not reproduce.

This trade is parts, but not bulk parts, so there is no waste factor to add. You fit one pump or you do not. What bites instead is returnability. Control boards are commonly sold non-returnable once installed, and some carry a core charge on the old unit, so a board ordered on a hunch is a board you now own.

Numbers supersede constantly, and the number stamped on the part in your hand often lands you on a replacement with a different plug or a moved mounting boss, so order from the model and serial instead. Lead times are the other half of that: an obsolete part for a fifteen-year-old machine is a hunt through the aftermarket, and the honest answer to the customer is sometimes that the part no longer exists.

Consumables are the quiet part: braided fill hoses, vent clamps, foil tape, a fresh flexible gas connector, since a flare that has been broken loose does not seal the same way twice. Where a part came from matters too. Note on the paperwork whether you supplied it or the customer did, because a part bought online at a discount is a part with no warranty you can act on, and the second visit to fit its replacement is somebody's time.

Free and unlimited, no account needed. The math runs in your browser and your pricing setup saves only on your own device — we never see your numbers. Printing or sending the estimate it makes counts as a document: your first 2 are free, with no account.