Free Handyman 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 handymen 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.

One item on the list is never the item. The sticking window is a rotted sill. The running toilet is a flange snapped off at the floor. The loose towel bar has no blocking behind it, so ten minutes becomes an access hole, a backer, a patch, and a return trip once the mud is dry.

Old houses cost you on fasteners alone: stripped hinge screws, sashes painted shut, a shut-off under the sink that will not close, so the whole house goes off at the main. Nothing is square, nothing is plumb, and every piece gets scribed instead of cut to a number.

Then the supply house. A cartridge for a discontinued faucet, a matching baluster, a screen roller nobody stocks — that is an afternoon across three stores or a second visit. Exterior items like gutters, deck boards and staining hold for weather and reshuffle everything you had lined up indoors. And the list itself grows: you are already there, the customer thinks of two more things, and each one sounds like five minutes to the person who is not doing it.

Handyman work is mostly labour, but it carries a wide, shallow materials load. One faucet, six deck boards, a tube of caulk, a bag of anchors, and none of it in the quantities that earn trade pricing. You buy retail off the shelf, usually mid-job, and the receipts are scattered across three stores in one day.

What gets miscounted is the consumables, because they come off your own stock rather than a receipt: mud, tape, sandpaper, blades, screws, batteries, drop cloths. Nobody itemises a tube of caulk, and half a tube does not survive to the next job. On anything cut to length, whether baseboard, trim, deck boards or plank flooring, order about ten percent over for cuts and defects.

Customer-supplied parts are common here and worth naming on the document, because whose part it is decides who owns the warranty and who covers the second trip. Matching is the other trap: a single replacement board, tile, baluster or piece of trim in a house finished twenty years ago will not match what is around it, and that is a conversation to have before you buy rather than after you fit it.

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.