Free General Contractor 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 general 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.

What is behind the wall decides the schedule. A partition that turns out to be carrying load, a stack or a duct sitting exactly where the new opening goes, knob-and-tube feeding two rooms, or a floor out of level by more than an inch across a kitchen will each add days no walkthrough could have priced. Rot under a window you were only replacing keeps spreading until you reach sound wood.

Inspections set their own pace. Nothing gets covered until rough-in passes, the inspector arrives on their own schedule, and a single cited item can cost a day plus the re-inspection. Subs and lead times do the rest. Template to countertop install is dead time in the middle of a kitchen, cabinets quoted at six weeks land at twelve, and your electrician takes a larger job.

In an occupied house you also lose hours daily to protection, cleanup and one working bathroom. And decisions run longer than the work waiting on them: a tile the owner has not picked, a fixture that arrived in the wrong finish, or a change they are still discussing stops a crew that cannot start the next thing until this one is settled.

You buy across every trade at once, so every trade's waste factor lands on your job. Tile wants roughly ten percent extra for cuts and more on a diagonal or a large format, and flooring, trim and framing lumber each carry their own.

Lumber and sheet goods move week to week, and the quote from the yard has an expiry date on it that means what it says, so a bid you hold open across a season is exposure you are carrying yourself. Long-lead windows, cabinets and doors are held at order, not at bid.

Owner-supplied material is where the count breaks. It arrives short, damaged, or without the trim kit, and the lost day is yours. Allowances go the same way when the number covered tile but not thinset, edge trim or the waterproofing under it — so write what an allowance includes at the moment you set it. Fasteners, shims, adhesive, blocking and blades rarely reach a takeoff at all, and neither does the material you buy twice because a delivery sat in the weather on a site nobody was standing on.

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.