Free Restoration 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 water & fire damage crews 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.

Water travels further than the first call describes. You show up for one room and the meter walks you down a hallway, into a closet on the far side of that wall, and twenty feet along a top plate into a room nobody mentioned.

What sits under the floor decides the rest. A mud bed tile, double layer drywall, plaster over lath, or hardwood glued to a slab holds moisture days past the schedule you quoted, and you cannot argue a reading down. Then comes the day everything stops for a lab, because sheet vinyl or a popcorn ceiling of the right age sits in the demolition path and nobody cuts until the sample comes back.

Power is a hard limit, since a house circuit will not carry the fans the room needs and you end up on cords or a generator. Occupied buildings give you nights. A crawl space gives you one technician moving equipment on his knees. And the file has its own delays: an adjuster who has not approved the scope, a mitigation limit reached, or an owner deciding between repair and replacement while the equipment runs.

Mitigation is labor and equipment far more than material, and the thing you are really counting is unit days rather than quantities. What material there is behaves like a consumable and vanishes into the job.

Six mil poly and tape go faster than anyone estimates, because containment gets built, torn out when the scope changes, and built again. Filters are consumed rather than owned, since prefilters on a scrubber change daily on a soot job and the HEPA behind them rarely leaves for a second house. Antimicrobial and encapsulant are bought concentrated and applied diluted, so what you record is the dilution and the area covered.

Shellac odor primer is the one that fools people, because raw and charred framing drinks it at a fraction of the coverage printed on the can. On the rebuild the real trouble is not waste. It is that the flooring you tore out has been discontinued, so a partial repair becomes a whole room and that conversation belongs in the estimate rather than in a phone call. Equipment itself is the largest carried cost in this trade, and a unit sitting in a customer's living room is a unit not earning on the next loss.

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.