Free Pool Service 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 pool service techs 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.

Green-to-clean has no honest hour count until the filter tells you what it is dealing with. A pool that sat all summer takes rounds of shock, run, clean the filter and do it again, and if there is a foot of leaves on the plaster you are vacuuming to waste, refilling and rebalancing before the first round even starts.

Leak work runs the same way. The bucket test proves the loss, then every line gets pressure tested one at a time before a shovel goes in the ground.

Old equipment pads eat the rest. Rigid PVC with no unions turns a pump swap into a re-plumb, and twenty-year-old threads snap instead of turning. You do not learn about the rodent nest in the heater or the corroded exchanger until the top is off, and then you are waiting on a board. Narrow gates, stairs down to the water and fill time on a garden hose finish it — and on a route, one long job at the second stop is felt at every stop after it.

Routine service is labour and chemicals, and the chemical draw is never steady. August with a full house of swimmers burns chlorine far faster than May does, so a season figure written in spring is not the season you get.

Liquid chlorine loses strength sitting in a hot jug, so old stock is weaker than the label says. Tab supply has been unsteady from one season to the next, and a chemicals-included agreement carries whatever the drum costs when you refill it. Dose off measured gallons, never the number the homeowner gives you, because the pool is rarely the size they believe.

Buy in bag units and expect to round up. Sand comes in fifty-pound bags against a fixed fill weight, salt in forty, DE at roughly a pound per ten square feet of grid. A cartridge filter often takes a set of four elements rather than the single one people picture. Liners are made to order and do not come back. Equipment is increasingly brand-tied and increasingly electronic, so a variable speed pump, a heater board or an automation panel is an order with a lead time rather than something you carry — and the pool is out of service while it ships.

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.