Job Quoting & Bid Calculator

If you pay a guy $24 an hour, that hour does not cost you $24. Add payroll taxes and workers comp. Add the blades, bits, and fasteners nobody bills. Add the drive time and the load-out you pay for but cannot invoice. That hour costs about $38.

Now add the rent, the insurance, the truck payment, and the phone — none of which stop when you are between jobs. Spread across the hours you actually sell, that is another $17 an hour.

Your real break-even is $55.70, not $24. Quote at $45 an hour feeling generous and you are losing money on every job you win.

This workbook fixes that in about fifteen minutes.

Fill in the Rate Setup tab once — your wage, your tax and comp percentage, your monthly overhead, and roughly how many hours you sell. It calculates:

• Your true burdened cost per billable hour
• How much overhead every hour has to carry
• Your break-even rate
• The shop rate you must quote to hit your target margin

Then quote jobs on the Job Quote tab. Ten labor lines, ten material lines, six subcontractor and equipment lines, with your markups applied automatically and your margin showing live as you type. If the job drops below your target, it tells you so before you send it.

The Customer Quote tab is a document, not a summary: your business name, address, phone and license number as a letterhead; the customer and job site; the scope written out as the tasks and materials you actually entered; a bordered investment table with the total in a navy band; a payment schedule that turns 30/40/30 into real dollars; terms with the validity date calculated from the quote date; and two signature lines. It prints to one portrait page. Your cost build-up never leaves your computer.

And then the tab that actually makes you money.

The Job Log tracks 25 jobs: what you quoted, whether you won it, and what it really took. It calculates your win rate, your realized margin, and the number most contractors never see — your average hours variance. When it tells you that you run 13% over on quoted hours every single time, you stop guessing and start adding 13%. That one number is worth more than everything else in this file.

Built for

General contractors · framers and remodelers · concrete · roofing · electrical, plumbing, and HVAC · landscaping and excavation · handyman and repair services · anyone who bids work and wonders where the profit went.

What you get

One .xlsx file, five tabs, instant download. Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, LibreOffice. No macros, no add-ins, no subscription. Yours forever.

An example job is already filled in so you can see exactly how it works, then type over it.