How to Price Jobs So You Actually Make Money

Materials and your hourly labour rate are the obvious costs — they're also the only ones most tradies actually price for. The costs that quietly eat the margin are the ones left out: fuel and vehicle wear getting to and from site, time spent quoting jobs you don't win, insurance, tool replacement, admin time, and your own time chasing the invoice afterwards.

A job that looks profitable when you only count materials and on-tools hours can be break-even or worse once every real cost is accounted for. The fix is building a proper hourly rate that already has your overheads baked in, rather than working it out job by job from memory.

Undercharging to win the job is the most common one — pricing to beat a competitor rather than to cover your actual costs plus a margin, which works right up until you're busy and still not ahead. Guessing on materials is another, especially on jobs with any complexity, where a rough estimate can be out by a meaningful margin either way. And quoting from memory instead of a consistent method means near-identical jobs can end up priced completely differently depending on the day.

Cost-plus pricing is the most straightforward and the right default for most trade work: total up materials, labour at your fully-loaded rate, and a margin on top — typically 20-40% depending on the trade and job complexity. It's predictable and it protects your margin on every job, not just the easy ones.

Value-based pricing works for jobs where the outcome matters more to the customer than the hours involved — a same-day emergency call-out, or specialised work few other tradies in your area can do. In those cases, you can reasonably price above straight cost-plus because the customer is paying for certainty and speed, not just materials and time.

The businesses that price well aren't doing more complex maths — they're using the same method every time, so pricing stops depending on how the conversation with the customer went or how busy the week's been. That consistency is also what makes a business sellable or scalable down the track, because the numbers actually mean something.

A quote that's gone quiet doesn't mean the price was wrong — it often just means the customer's busy or comparing options. The instinct to knock 10% off to chase the sale trains customers to expect a discount and erodes your margin on every job going forward. A short, professional follow-up asking if they have any questions closes far more jobs than a discount does, without giving away the margin you priced in for a reason.

TradieCEO's AI Quoting keeps every quote's status visible — sent, viewed, accepted — so following up happens at the right moment automatically, based on your real pricing rather than a guess made under pressure.