Free Flooring 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 flooring installers 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.

Almost all of it is what comes up when the old floor comes up. Vinyl over particleboard over a second layer of vinyl, black cutback under that, and a day of scraping nobody priced. Tile means grinding thinset back to bare slab, which is slower than the demolition was. Carpet leaves a few thousand staples behind.

Once the deck is bare the straightedge finds the dip the pad was hiding, so you are pouring leveler and waiting on it to cure before a plank goes down, and soft subfloor at the toilet or the back door turns into framing work. A slab that reads wet stops the job outright, because nothing you glue down will stay down and no warranty survives ignoring it.

Access decides the rest. A third-floor walk-up with tile on your shoulder, a store you can only touch after closing, and furniture nobody moved all cost hours. So does the supply house, when the stair nose and transitions ship separately and land days after the flooring, or a run turns out to be short and the balance comes from a different lot.

This trade carries real material cost, often more than the labor, and most of it you supply and bill through. Order the whole job at once rather than room by room, because a second order rarely matches: wood, tile and carpet all run in lots and dye lots, and a reorder off a different run is visibly not the same floor.

Waste is a physical fact, not padding. Around 10% covers cuts on a straight lay, diagonal and herringbone want more, and a floor full of closets and jogs wants more again. Carpet does not work in percentages at all, since a 13-foot room off a 12-foot roll costs you a fill strip whatever the square footage says.

Trim, transitions, stair nose, underlayment and adhesive are what get counted last and counted short, and on tile the thinset, grout, membrane and edge profile are a real proportion of the job that an allowance written against the tile alone will not cover. Mill prices move on notice, so what was quoted in spring is not always what it costs in fall — and leftover material belongs with the customer, labelled, because the repair three years from now has no other source.

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.