How to Price a Job So You Still Make Money in Week 43

Ask ten tradespeople how they price a job and you'll hear versions of the same answer: what the last one cost, plus a bit, minus whatever it takes to win it. It works — right up until week 43, when the van needs tyres, the insurance renews, and the busy summer somehow hasn't turned into money.

Here's the pricing method that survives week 43.

Start from the rate, not the job

Before any individual job can be priced properly, you need one number: what an hour of your time must earn for the business to hit its targets. Not the going rate. Not what the bloke two streets over charges. Yours.

The calculation is unglamorous: target income plus annual overheads, divided by the hours you can honestly bill in a year. For most one-van businesses that's 25–32 hours a week across 44–48 working weeks — the rest of the week is quoting, driving, collecting materials, and chasing money, and none of it invoices. Divide by those hours, add a real profit margin on top, and you have your rate. (Our free Day Rate Calculator does this in about ninety seconds, with trade presets.)

Everything else in pricing is applying that rate honestly.

Estimate hours like a pessimist

The rate is only half the equation; the other half is how long the job takes. And nearly everyone estimates the version of the job where nothing goes wrong — the wall chases cleanly, the merchant has stock, the customer's "small extra bit" doesn't exist.

Two corrections fix most under-estimates. First, price the job you'll actually do, including the half-day of snags, second visits, and making good that domestic work always contains. Second, keep score: compare estimated hours to actual hours on every job for a month. The pattern — and it will be a pattern — is your personal correction factor.

Materials: cost plus handling, never cost

Materials should carry a markup — 10–20% is normal — and it isn't profiteering. That margin pays for the time to spec and order them, collect and return them, warranty them when a fitting fails in eight months, and finance them between your card statement and the customer's payment. Pass materials through at cost and you're providing a free procurement service with your own overdraft.

Present the price so it defends itself

An itemised quote wins twice. Customers approve it faster because they can see what they're buying — and when someone asks for a discount, an itemised quote turns "can you do it for less?" into "which of these lines would you like to remove?". That's a conversation about scope, not about your worth.

Put your assumptions in writing on every quote — access, existing services being serviceable, making good excluded. The assumptions section is where margins go to survive.

Review the rate annually, not nostalgically

Costs move every year — wages (the JIB uplift alone was ~4% this January), insurance, fuel, materials. A rate set in 2024 and defended out of habit is a pay cut you gave yourself. Diary one afternoon a year to re-run the numbers.

The part software does

None of this requires software — a spreadsheet and discipline will do. What software removes is the discipline requirement. Field Forge keeps your labour rates in one place, drafts itemised quotes from a plain-English job description in under a minute, tracks actual hours and materials against every estimate, and shows the margin per job in real time. The pricing method above stops being a January resolution and becomes just how the system works.

One thing you can do right now

Work out your true break-even hourly rate — honestly, with real overheads and real billable hours. If it's higher than what you're charging, you haven't found a maths error. You've found the reason week 43 keeps happening.