The Contractor Pricing Playbook — The Complete Guide to Pricing for Profit
You already know your trade. That was never the problem. The problem is the number you charge for it — guessed at the start, repeated until it felt right, and never actually calculated. Most contractors who run the math for the first time find they have been $10–$20 short per hour. At 1,350 billable hours a year, $15 low is $20,250 gone — from every job, all year, quietly. This is the calculation you should have done first.20 pages. Plain English. Real numbers. Yours forever.Pricing is the only number in your business that you set yourself.Everything else — materials, fuel, insurance, permits, what subs charge — you absorb or negotiate. The rate? You decide. And the way most contractors decide it is by feel. What sounds competitive. What a friend charges. What got them the last job.That works well enough to stay busy. It does not work well enough to build a business.The tell is at year-end. The jobs were there. The hours were there. The work was good. And still the number is smaller than it should be. Most contractors spend two or three years chasing that gap before they realise it started at the rate — and that the rate was never calculated. It was guessed, repeated, and gradually accepted as correct.This playbook is the calculation you should have done first.WHAT'S INSIDE — 14 SECTIONS + WORKSHEET + CHEAT SHEET How your real billable hours work. There are 2,080 working hours in a full year. By the time you subtract holidays, admin, quoting, driving, and slow weeks, you can bill roughly 1,350. Every calculation in this guide uses billable hours — because billable hours are the only ones that earn. How to build your rate from the inside out. Wage, overhead per hour, and profit stacked into one number. A real worked example starts at $50/hr and lands at $66.16. That $16 gap, on 1,350 hours, is $21,600 a year — from work you are already doing. The markup vs margin split. A 30% markup is not a 30% margin. It is 23%. That 7-point gap comes out of your pocket on every job you have ever priced using the wrong one. One diagram makes it impossible to confuse them again. The thirteen things most contractors forget to charge for. Travel time, call-out fees, materials markup, after-hours rates, disposal, annual rate review — each one with a realistic annual dollar figure showing what it costs per year to keep ignoring it. A six-step quoting system. Any job, any scope, any trade. Labor, materials, overhead, profit, contingency — in order, every time. The before and after on a real water heater replacement shows a $340 difference between gut-feel and the six steps. Three word-for-word scripts. Raising your rate. Handling 'can you come down?' Following up on a quote that went quiet. Written for contractors, not salespeople. A seven-day reset plan. One action per day to go from gut-feel pricing to a system that holds. ALSO INCLUDED Four-part fillable worksheet (Parts A–D) — walks you from overhead total to real recommended rate in your own numbers. Takes one sitting. One-page cheat sheet — every formula, every key number, every script trigger on one page. Designed to go on the wall of the van. 20 pages | PDF instant download | Plain English, no filler | 2026 US rate and margin data throughout.Instant download. Read on any device. No subscription, no login, no app. One payment, yours forever.Pairs with any trade-specific calculator bundle — the Playbook shows you the thinking, the bundle runs it on every job.GUARANTEERead Section 1. If the billable hours calculation does not show you a gap between what you thought you were earning per hour and what you actually are — refund within 30 days. No questions, no forms. The risk is ours.tradetoolcalc.com
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