How do you price a job as a tradesperson?
Build the number up, never guess it down from what you think they will pay. Hours at your own rate, materials at what they actually cost you, the costs everyone forgets — travel, parking, waste, access, the second visit — and then margin, which is the buffer that pays for the job that goes wrong. Check the total against what your week has to earn before you send it. What follows is a method; the rate itself is yours, and depends on your trade, your overheads and where you work.
Start with the hours, not the price
The most common pricing mistake is not charging too little per hour. It is counting the wrong hours. Work through the job the way the day actually goes: getting there, getting set up, protecting the floor, the work itself, clearing up, the trip to the merchant you forgot about, and the visit back to finish the bit you could not do because the plasterer had not been.
Estimate that honestly, then write it down. The value of writing it is that you can compare it with what the job really took afterwards, and within a dozen jobs you will know which kinds you consistently underestimate. Almost everybody underestimates something specific — it is rarely random.
Your rate is yours, and it is not your wage
No guide should tell you your hourly or day rate: it depends on your trade, your area, your overheads and how much work you can actually get. But it is worth being clear about what the rate has to cover, because a rate set by thinking “I want to earn X a day” will quietly lose money.
Your rate carries the van and its fuel, tools and replacing them, insurance, scheme registration and certification, your phone, accountancy, the hours you spend quoting and invoicing, holidays, sick days, pension, and the days with no work in them. Chargeable hours are a fraction of working hours, and the rate is what turns one into the other. If you have never worked out that fraction for a year of your own diary, it is the single most useful afternoon of admin available to you.
Materials at what they cost you
Price materials at your real cost, including the collection or delivery, and decide once whether you mark them up. Both approaches are defensible — a markup pays for sourcing, storing, carrying, returning and warrantying them, which is real work; passing them on at cost and charging the time separately is cleaner to explain. What loses money is not deciding, and doing it differently on each quote.
Count waste and returns in the figure too. Cable and timber do not come in the lengths the job needs, and the offcut is yours.
The costs everyone forgets
- Travel and parking — an hour each way on a city job is a real cost, and a permit or a daily charge is a line, not a rounding error.
- Waste — a skip, tip runs, and the fees that come with them.
- Access — towers, scaffold, a hire platform for one afternoon.
- Protection and making good — sheeting, dust control, filling.
- The second visit — commissioning, testing, snagging, or coming back because another trade was in the way.
None of these is large on its own. Together they are routinely the difference between a job that paid and a job that nearly did.
Margin is not greed
Margin on top of cost is what pays for the jobs that go wrong: the wall that was not what it looked like, the part that failed inside its warranty, the day you went back for free because it was the right thing to do. Price every job at exactly break-even and the first bad one comes out of your own pocket, because there is nothing else for it to come out of.
Check the number before you send it
Two quick tests. Divide the total by the days you expect it to take: is that a day rate you would accept for that work? And ask whether a week of jobs like this one would cover a week of your business. A price can look healthy in isolation and still be a week you cannot afford to repeat.
If the answer is no, the fix is the price or the scope, not hoping it will go quicker than you think. It will not.
Write it down so you only work it out once
Most of what you price you have priced before. A consumer unit change, a power flush, a radiator, an hour of labour — these should not be re-derived from first principles every time, because that is where inconsistency and under-pricing creep in. Keep a list of what you charge for the things you do repeatedly, and use it.
That is what the price book in Speak to Quote is: put “Consumer unit change — 10-way” in it once at your price, and every future job that mentions one comes back priced from your own list rather than from a guess. Anything not in the book comes back at £0 for you to fill in, never with an invented figure — you can also import your existing prices from past quotes in one pass. The electrician page shows a dictated job priced that way.
Do not price against the other quote
You will sometimes be told what the other tradesperson said. It is worth almost nothing as information: you do not know what they included, what they excluded, whether they are registered, or whether they have priced it properly either. Dropping to beat a number you cannot see means taking on someone else's mistake.
What does work is making yours easier to say yes to — itemised, so they can see what the money buys; clear about what is not included; and specific about certification and what they end up holding. A customer choosing between a lower number and a quote they actually understand does not always choose the lower number.