Service price calculator.

How it works: enter your hourly rate, the hours you expect, and the materials. The calculator adds your overhead share (rent, insurance, the truck, software — the costs that exist whether or not you take the job) and then applies your target margin the correct way: as margin on price, not markup on cost. The difference between those two is where most owners silently lose 5–10%.

Margin is not markup, and the difference is your wage

This is the mistake that quietly costs the most. Markup is added to your cost; margin is taken out of your price. Add 20% to a $100 job and you charge $120, but your margin is $20 on $120, which is 16.7%. To actually keep 20% you must charge $125. On a year of jobs that gap is a month of income, and nobody ever sends an invoice for it.

The calculator above does it the second way, every time. Enter what the job costs you and the margin you intend to keep, and the price it returns is the price that keeps it.

What counts as overhead

Overhead is everything you pay whether or not you take the next job: the van and its fuel, insurance, licensing, phone and software, the accountant, the yard or garage, and the hours you spend quoting work you do not win. Add those up for a year, divide by the hours you actually bill in a year — not the hours you work — and you have your overhead per billable hour. It is almost always higher than owners guess, because unbilled hours are invisible.

A trade with a lot of driving and diagnosis carries a heavier overhead share than one where most hours are billable on site. That is why the calculator starts from a per-trade preset rather than one number for everyone.

Three pricing rules that pay for themselves

• Charge for diagnosis. Your judgment is the product; a free diagnosis prices it at zero, and attracts the customers who were never going to buy.
• Quote a range, invoice the exact figure. A range with a cap survives surprises without eating the margin, and it is easier to say yes to than a single number that might move.
• Raise the price of your busiest service first. A service you are always booked for is the market telling you it is underpriced. Move it 5%, watch for a month.

What to do with the number

A price only earns anything once a customer sees it. Put your common jobs and their starting prices on your own website, where people compare you at eleven at night: published starting prices filter out the callers who were shopping on price alone and reassure the ones who were not. Onelios builds that site and the quote form that comes with it, and the free estimate template turns this number into something you can send today.

Questions