Free Electrician 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 electricians 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.

The deadfront comes off and the panel is not the panel the quote assumed. The bus is full, there are three conductors under one screw on the neutral bar, the breakers are a line nobody has made in twenty years, or half the branch circuits are aluminum and every device now needs a pigtail.

Walls do not cooperate either. A fish that should take ten minutes meets fire blocking, blown-in insulation, or a brick chimney chase behind the plaster, and the run has to go somewhere else entirely. Plaster and lath, balloon framing and a finished basement ceiling each add their own half day. An attic in July gives you about forty minutes at a stretch before you come down.

A service change waits on the utility rather than on you, and a reconnect can eat the afternoon. Add the drive to the supply house for the one part that panel accepts, and a re-inspection scheduled on somebody else's calendar. Troubleshooting has no honest hour count at all until you find it: an intermittent fault will not perform while you stand there with a meter on it, and the box it lives in is behind whatever somebody built last.

Service and troubleshooting work is mostly labour and a handful of parts off the van. Rough-in and rewires are the opposite. Wire comes in fixed lengths, so a run that measures ninety feet costs you a whole spool and the remainder sits on the shelf until a job wants that gauge again. Measure long. You leave free conductor at every box, slack to reach the far side of the panel, the vertical drops, and whatever the run has to detour around.

Copper moves with the metals market, so a materials figure you wrote a month ago may not survive the counter. The things that fall out of a count are the small ones: boxes, connectors, staples, straps, wire nuts, plaster rings, counted once per opening and then forgotten.

Breakers have to match the panel, and older lines get scarce and sometimes only turn up reconditioned — which is a decision to make with the customer rather than for them. Fixtures and gear are where the lead times live: a panel, a meter socket, a transfer switch or a commercial light package can be weeks out while the wire sits on site. Customer-supplied fixtures arrive without the mounting hardware, or with a driver that will not dim on the switch they already bought.

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.