How to price a job you won't resent in three months
2 October 2026 · 9 min read
Most bad jobs were bad before anyone picked up a tool. They were priced in a doorway, in forty seconds, with a customer watching. Three months later you're back for the third time on a snag, unpaid, wondering why you ever took it. This post is about the four ways a quote goes wrong and the simple fixes — including the arithmetic to work out what an hour of your time actually has to earn.
The four ways a price goes wrong
Almost every regretted job traces back to one of these. They're not complicated. They're just easy to do when you're standing in someone's kitchen with your next appointment in twenty minutes.
- Quoting under time pressure. The customer asks "roughly, what are we talking?" and you answer. That number is now the price, whatever you write down later.
- Pricing the labour but not the business. You charge for the six hours on site and forget the van, the insurance, the hour at the merchant, the unpaid quoting time and the evening doing invoices.
- Underpricing to win it. You want the work, so you shave it. Then you resent every hour of a job you talked yourself into.
- No scope. You never wrote down what's included, so every "while you're here" lands on your side of the ledger.
Work out what an hour actually has to earn
Most people price off what the bloke down the road charges. That's a guess layered on someone else's guess. Do this instead — it takes twenty minutes once a year and it changes how you feel about every quote after it.
Start with the hours you can genuinely sell. Not the hours you work. The hours a customer pays for.
Do the maths: your real hourly cost
Assume you take four weeks' holiday and lose a week to bank holidays and illness. That's 47 working weeks. At 45 hours a week, that's 2,115 hours in the business.
Now take out the hours nobody pays for: quoting, merchant runs, invoicing, chasing payment, sorting the van, doing your books. For a lot of one-man trades that's a third to 40% of the week. Say 40% — you're left with roughly 1,270 chargeable hours a year.
Add up your fixed overhead. Say: van lease and fuel £6,000, insurance and public liability £1,200, tools and replacements £1,500, phone, software and accountant £1,800, workwear and consumables £600, advertising and website £1,200. Total £12,300.
Decide what you want the business to pay you before tax. Say £45,000.
£45,000 + £12,300 = £57,300 ÷ 1,270 hours = £45 an hour just to stand still. Not a profit. That's break-even on your own target wage.
If you want a genuine profit margin on top — a buffer for bad debts, a quiet February, a new van — add 15–20%. Now you're at £52–£54 an hour.
Change the assumptions to your own numbers. The point isn't my figures, it's that you have a figure at all.
The moment you have that number, the "what should I charge?" question changes shape. It's no longer a confidence problem. It's arithmetic. A job you estimate at eight hours on site plus two hours of travel and collection is ten hours of your 1,270. At £52, that's £520 of labour before a single fitting.
The costs that quietly fall off the quote
Overhead is the big one, and the maths above handles it. These are the smaller leaks. Individually they're £20 or £40. Across a year they're a holiday.
| Usually forgotten | How to put it back |
|---|---|
| Travel time and fuel | Price door-to-door, not site hours. A job 40 minutes away costs you 80 minutes of chargeable time. |
| Merchant runs and collection | Add the real time, or charge a materials handling margin and say so. |
| Parking, congestion and ULEZ | List it as a line. Customers in city centres expect it. |
| Waste and skip hire | Especially on rip-outs. Ask who's disposing of the old unit before you quote. |
| Materials wastage and offcuts | Order what you actually order, not the theoretical minimum. |
| Snagging and the return visit | Build a half-day into anything complicated. You'll use it more often than not. |
| Payment terms | If a commercial customer pays at 60 days, you're financing them. Price it or shorten the terms. |
| The quote itself | Site visits and write-ups are unpaid hours. They're already in your 40% — just don't do twelve of them a week for one job. |
Fixed price, day rate or cost-plus
Which shape you quote in matters as much as the number. Pick the one that matches how much you actually know.
| Model | Works when | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| Fixed price | You've done this exact job before and the scope is clear | You carry every surprise. One rotten joist eats the margin |
| Day rate | Scope is vague, old property, unknown behind the plaster | Customer feels the meter running and may push for speed |
| Cost-plus (materials + margin + labour) | Larger refurb work, trusting client | Needs good record-keeping or it turns into an argument |
| Fixed price with named exclusions | Most domestic work | Only as good as your exclusions list |
For most small trades and service businesses, the fourth row is the sweet spot. A fixed price gives the customer certainty. A short exclusions list gives you a door out. Three lines is usually enough: "Price assumes existing pipework is sound. Price excludes making good plasterwork. Any additional work quoted separately before it starts."
Stop quoting in the doorway
The single biggest fix costs nothing. When the customer asks for a number on site, say: "I'll have it with you tonight." Then leave, sit down, and do it with a calculator and your hourly figure in front of you.
If they push — and some will — give a range with a condition attached. "Jobs like this usually land between £1,800 and £2,400 depending on what's behind that wall. I'll confirm tonight." A range isn't a commitment. A single number is.
The other half of this is speed. A quote that takes you four days loses to one that arrives the same evening, even at a higher price. So the goal isn't to slow down — it's to move the quoting off the doorstep and into a ten-minute slot where you're thinking straight. If the bottleneck is that quotes pile up until 9pm, that's a workflow problem worth fixing on its own; we wrote about approving quotes from the van separately.
Why the discount costs more than you think
"I'll knock a bit off to get it over the line" feels like a small concession. It isn't, because discounts come out of margin, not out of price.
Do the maths: a 10% discount
You quote a job at £2,000. Your materials, labour cost and share of overhead come to £1,600. Profit: £400.
Customer asks for 10% off. You agree. Price is now £1,800. Your costs haven't moved — still £1,600. Profit: £200.
A 10% discount cut your profit in half. To earn the same £400 at the discounted price, you'd need to win and deliver two of those jobs instead of one.
Run it the other way too. If you'd held the price and lost the job, you'd have £400 less — but you'd also have two days free to do another job. Walking away is rarely as expensive as it feels.
If you want to flex, flex the scope, not the number. Take something out. "I can do £1,800 if you handle the disposal." The customer gets a lower price, you keep your margin, and you haven't taught them that your first number was soft.
The ten-minute review that fixes next year's pricing
Quoting gets accurate through feedback, and most people never collect any. When a job finishes, write down two numbers: hours quoted and hours actually spent. Materials quoted and materials actually bought. That's it.
After ten jobs you'll see the pattern. Most people find the same thing — they're broadly right on materials and consistently 20–30% light on time. Once you know your own bias, you correct for it. Nobody ever fixed that by trying harder to be accurate in the moment.
Also log the ones you lost and, where you can, why. If you win nearly everything you quote, you're too cheap. Losing some work on price is a sign your pricing has a spine. Losing nearly all of it means something else is wrong — often response time rather than the number itself, which is worth checking before you cut prices. We've put honest arithmetic on that in what missed calls really cost a UK trades business.
Where this approach doesn't fit
This is a cost-up method. It tells you the floor — what you can't go below without working for free. It doesn't tell you the ceiling, and in some businesses the ceiling is the number that matters.
- Work priced on value, not time. If you fix a problem in an hour that saves a commercial client a day of downtime, hourly cost is the wrong anchor. Price the outcome.
- Fixed-price markets. Some work has a going rate the customer already knows — an MOT, a standard service, a cut and blow-dry. You can sit above it, but you need a reason the customer can see.
- Tendered and contract work. If you're bidding against a sheet of competitors, your cost floor tells you when to walk away, not how to win.
- Genuine loss-leaders. Taking a first job cheap to open a relationship can be a real decision. It's only a mistake when it's accidental. Decide it on purpose, write down what you're buying with the discount, and don't let it become the standard rate.
- Businesses where capacity is the constraint, not price. If you're turning work away, the pricing question is simpler: put the price up until you stop being full.
And one honest caveat on the hourly figure itself. It's a planning number, not a law. If a job comes out at £45 an hour instead of £52 because you want it, that's fine — as long as you know that's the trade you made. The regret three months later never comes from a job that was priced tight on purpose. It comes from the one where you never knew what it was worth until the work was already done.