Free Excavation Invoice & Estimate Template (Word, Excel, PDF)

As a band on every trench line, because depth is what makes one foot cost more than another. Price in bands — 24 inch, 36 inch, 48 inch — and name the band on each run: a water line set under the local frost depth and a low-voltage run at 18 inches are not the same foot. At five feet, federal trench rules require a protective system: a box, shoring, or a sloped or benched cut, and benching is not allowed in loose sand and gravel. Trench box set-up and removal is its own line, not a fatter per-foot number. Rock is the other break point, billed as rock trenching by the foot at a rock rate or as the hydraulic breaker by the hour, never inside the ordinary footage. Frozen ground does the same in January; frost ripping is a line too.

It has to name the finish state, because four different jobs go by that word. Trees pushed over and windrowed is one. Root balls pulled, grubbed out and the holes filled is another. Forestry mulching leaves the lot on site as chip. Machine raking to a seedbed is the one a customer reads as finished. Write which of those you sold, and say where the wood and the root balls ended up, burned and the ash buried, hauled off, or dropped in a pit on the property, which a future buyer's inspector will go looking for. Clearing bills by the acre where the ground is open and by the machine hour where it is not, and rock picking after grubbing is separate work.

The hole you dug, which is bigger than the building. State the dug footprint and the depth reached, and say the over-dig outside the footing line is working room for forms and waterproofing rather than something you added. Topsoil strip and stockpile is its own line apart from the spoils, because one of those piles is coming back and one is not. If the bottom would not bear and somebody called for over-excavation and structural fill, name who called it and what went back in the hole. And give backfill its own line and its own date, since it happens once the walls are braced, days or weeks behind the dig: one job to the customer, two trips on your calendar.

Against what the job spends, as it spends it. Money leaves before the machine turns — a culvert and its headwall rock ordered from the yard, a pit load of stone, the lowboy move to get the machines there — so an up-front payment against those named purchases is ordinary on dirt work. List them by name so the customer sees what it bought, and check your state's rules, since some cap what a residential contractor collects up front. Then bill at the hold points the dig already has, mobilization and rough grade now, final grade when it comes. Site work goes in first and comes back last, so the finish pass on a build can land months behind the hole; invoice the dig when the dig is done.