Free Drywall 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 drywall contractors 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.

Drying, not labor, is what breaks a drywall schedule. A cold basement with the heat off, a humid stretch of weather, or a heavy fill over a deep patch, and yesterday's coat is still grey in the middle at eight the next morning. You wait, or you switch to setting compound and work faster than you would like to.

The other one is what the opening shows you. A one-foot patch becomes a four-foot cut when water tracked along the top plate, and old plaster keys let go two feet past the crack the moment you lean on it, so the repair keeps growing until you reach something solid. Walls out of plane cost coats, because a flat patch across a bowed stud bay reads high until you feather it wide.

Then lifts for anything over twelve feet, sheets hand-carried up a stairwell turn, and a supply house with 1/2 inch all day but no 54 inch and no abuse-resistant. Occupied houses add the rest: containment before every sand, a vacuum pass at the end of every visit, and a customer who cannot have the room out of service as long as the coats actually take.

Board is cheap by the sheet, heavy, fragile and awkward, so what it costs you lives in handling rather than the material. Count sheets wall by wall instead of by the room, and add roughly ten percent for cuts; a chopped-up remodel with a lot of openings runs higher, because the offcut from a window rarely lands where you need it next.

Thickness and width get miscounted more often than count does: 5/8 on ceilings and garages, 1/2 on walls, 54 inch for nine-foot walls, and one wrong pallet is a lost day. Specialty board — Type X, mold-resistant, abuse-resistant, cement board — is ordered rather than stocked, and substituting down is a code question, not a preference.

Compound is the sleeper. All-purpose in buckets is heavy and has a shelf life, setting compound is bought by its set time and you are committed the moment you mix it, and neither survives a night below freezing in the truck. Gypsum moves with mill announcements and freight rather than the season, and delivery and stocking are usually quoted apart from the board — a boom truck that cannot reach the second floor turns a delivery into a day of carrying.

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.