The Rain Day: What Weather Costs an Outdoor Trade

You lost 49 days to weather last year. Here's what they cost — and what to charge for the next 49.

A rain day is not a free day. The crew gets show-up pay. The truck and the office cost exactly what they cost on a working day. And the day itself is either gone — the season ends when it ends — or bought back on a Saturday at overtime. Add it up and the sample crew's rain day costs $1,474, sixty-one cents on every dollar it would have billed.

Twelve months of your own weather. Type the lost days per month from your timesheets, and the workbook prices every month and the year: $72,236 for the sample crew, 11.9% of revenue. A chart shows which months hurt.

The bid. Pick the job's crew-days and the month it runs. The workbook gives the expected lost days, the weather cost in dollars, the buffer per crew-day that month's weather earns, how short your quote is today — and the working days and weeks to promise so the date holds.

The dashboard grades it — weather as a share of revenue, lost days, fixed cost per day, buffer in the price, Saturday recovery, the rained-out week against your cash — HEALTHY, WATCH or ALERT, with a chart of the year. One portrait page.

Built for

Roofers · exterior painters · paving and sealcoating · landscapers and hardscapers · concrete and flatwork · fencing · gutters · tree services · anyone whose day depends on the sky.

What you get

One .xlsx file, five tabs, instant download. Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, LibreOffice. No macros, no add-ins, no subscription. A realistic sample is loaded so you see every color of the grading before you type over it.