How it works

Every figure on this site comes from somewhere you can check, and every line says where.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes what each trade earns in every state and in 530 metropolitan areas. A calculator here uses the figure for the place you pick, so spreading mulch in California is not priced at the same rate as spreading it in Texas - the gap between the two is about a quarter.

What BLS publishes is a wage. An hour costs an employer about a third more once payroll taxes, insurance and workers’ compensation are counted, so that is added and the breakdown says so. Estimating off the published wage is a common way a job that looked profitable turns out not to be.

There is no federal dataset of what your yard charges you. So each material starts from a figure we publish, carried forward by the producer price index for that commodity - gypsum for board, prepared paint for paint, construction sand for sand. The breakdown names the series and the reading it used.

Ours is a starting point and nothing more. Click any unit price and put your own in its place; it is kept and used in every estimate you work out afterwards. Your prices are the ones worth having, and no public dataset knows them.

Set a markup on material, labour and subcontract separately, and the panel shows the margin that produces - which is not the same number. A 50% markup is a 33% margin, and mistaking one for the other is how a trade prices itself out of a profit.

Overhead is then taken out of the revenue rather than added to the price, so you see what is actually left once the job carries its share of the business. That gap, between a gross margin that looks comfortable and a net one that does not, is the part most estimates never show.

You can work it backwards too. Enter the price you have been given - a client’s budget, a number a competitor put in - and see whether it clears your floor. Often the question is not what to charge but whether to take the job.

Saving an estimate freezes it: the figures stay as they stood, so what you put in front of a client does not change underneath you when the data moves. Each one gets a link you can send - it carries the prices and none of your costs - and a place on a board that runs from draft through sent to won or lost.

Ten estimates are free. Start one, or work something out on a calculator first and save it from there.