The quote is written. The number is sitting at the bottom of it, and you have typed it three times: once at what you think the job is worth, once lower because they might say no, and once lower again. Your cursor is on send and you have no idea whether the figure is right.
To check whether a quote is fair, build the price up from your own costs first: the hours, what an hour of your time actually costs you, materials at what you really pay, and a margin. That gives you a floor you must not go below. Then compare it against what the work pays in your area. A fair quote clears your floor and sits inside that range.
This guide covers why so many quotes get priced on a feeling, what that habit quietly costs, a ten minute check you can run on the quote in front of you, and what to do if you have already sent one you regret.
Is this you?
- You have thought about posting the quote in a forum or a trade group to ask strangers whether the price sounds right.
- You price low enough that nobody could object, then hope the job goes quickly.
- You could not say what an hour of your time costs you once tax, insurance, fuel, tools and the hours you never bill are in there.
- You have charged roughly the same rate for a year or more without sitting down and looking at it.
- You drop the price before the client has said a single word about it.
- The only quotes you feel confident about are the ones for jobs you have done many times.
If three or more of those fit, the problem is not that you are bad at pricing. It is that you have never set a floor, so every number you write is a guess dressed up as a decision.
Why the number feels impossible to judge
You are pricing against a feeling, not a floor. Without a figure you know you cannot go below, there is nothing to measure the quote against. So you measure it against your nerve instead, and your nerve moves depending on how much work is booked in that week.
Nobody tells you when you are too cheap. This is the part that does the real damage. A quote that is too low gets accepted quietly and quickly. A quote that is too high gets a reaction: a question, a wince, sometimes silence. So the only feedback you ever receive points in one direction, downward, and after a year of it a low price feels like the normal price.
The cost of being you is invisible. When you worked for someone else, your employer covered the van, the insurance, the quiet weeks, the tax and the hour you spent writing this quote. Now you cover all of it, out of the same number. Most owners price as though they were still being paid a wage, because the wage is the only number they have ever seen written down.
You are scared of the conversation, not the number. Very few people worry that the price is objectively wrong. They worry about the pause after they say it. That is a different problem, and it is worth naming, because lowering the price to avoid an awkward moment is an expensive way to buy comfort.
Prices stay where you first set them. Not because owners decide to hold them, but because nothing ever prompts a review. There is no date in the year when your rate comes up for discussion, so it does not.
What it costs if nothing changes
That last habit shows up clearly in our own invoice data, and it is bigger than most owners expect.
At least half of small businesses charge no more for their regular items than they did 18 months earlier: the typical price change is 0% (saved catalogue items, 86 businesses).
Source: Billbooks invoice data, 8,483 invoices from 112 small businesses, September 2024 to September 2026 (aggregate only, figures shown only where 25+ businesses contribute). The wider working is in our invoice payment study.
A flat price is not a held price. Over 18 months your materials moved, your insurance moved and your own bills moved, so a rate that stood still has already fallen in real terms. Nobody decided that. It simply happened while everyone was busy.
The margin is the whole job. On service work the profit is usually a thin layer on top of the cost. Take a hundred pounds or dollars off a quote to be safe and you are rarely taking it off the profit, you are taking away the profit.
You pay for your own mistake twice. An underpriced job costs you the missing money and the days you cannot sell to anyone else while you are doing it. The second cost is the one people forget when they say yes to a cheap job because the diary looks empty.
It sets the price for the next one. Clients talk, and repeat clients remember. A number you pulled out of the air on a nervous Tuesday becomes the number you are held to for years.
You end up with the clients who chose you on price. They are the ones who query the invoice, add to the scope and shop around next time. Pricing to be the cheapest reliably attracts the people least interested in anything except cheap.
Find out whether you are undercharging
Put in your trade, your area and your experience. The What Should I Charge check gives you the local market range for the work and works out the break even rate you need to cover your own costs. Free, and nothing you type is saved.
The ten minute check, on the quote in front of you
Run these four steps in order. The first is the one that does most of the work, and it is the one almost nobody does.
1. Work out your floor
Your floor is the number below which this job costs you money to do. Three parts:
- Hours, honestly counted. Include travel, setup, clearing up, the trip to the supplier and the paperwork afterwards. Most people count only the hours with their hands on the work, which is why jobs run over.
- What an hour of your time really costs. Take what you need to earn in a year, add tax, insurance, fuel, tools, phone, software and anything else the business pays for, then divide by the hours you can actually bill. That last number is the trap: nobody bills 40 hours a week. Quoting, chasing, buying materials and travelling are all unpaid, so a realistic figure is often 25 to 30 billable hours in a 45 hour week.
- Materials at what you actually pay today. Not last year's price, and not before waste. Then add your margin on top.
Hours multiplied by your real hourly cost, plus materials, plus margin. That is the floor. Write it at the top of the page before you look at the quote again.
2. Compare it with what the work pays locally
A floor tells you what you must charge. It does not tell you what the work is worth, and you need both. For a rough anchor, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes annual wage data by occupation and state through its Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics programme, which is what our own rate check reads.
One caveat matters here, and it cuts in your favour. That survey covers employees only: it does not cover the self employed, owners and partners in unincorporated firms. So an employee wage is a floor for what the skill is worth, not a target. Working for yourself, you have to clear it and then cover everything an employer used to pay on top.
Local evidence beats national data where you can get it. Ask a supplier what the going day rate is, look at what competitors publish, or ask a friendly business a town over who is not competing with you for the same customers.
3. Price this job, not the average job
The standard number is for the standard job. Adjust for what is actually in front of you:
- Access and condition. A second floor flat with no parking, or a property that has been neglected for years, is not the same job as the one in your head.
- Travel and dead time between jobs.
- Risk of rework. If the client has changed their mind twice already while you were quoting, they will change it again while you are working.
- Payment risk. A client who is already negotiating terms before there is a price is telling you something worth listening to.
- Timing. Work that has to happen at a weekend, at short notice or around someone else's trades costs you more to deliver.
4. The sanity check
Finally, step back and ask whether this is a number a client in your market actually pays. Ours is an invoicing business, so the figure we can offer is the size of the bills that get sent and paid.
The typical invoice is about $1,000; the middle half run from about $390 to $2,790 (US dollar invoices, per business).
That is a reference point rather than a rule, and it covers every trade and job size in the data. Use it the way you would use a map scale. If your quote for a full day's skilled work with materials has come out at $150, something in your floor calculation is wrong. If a two hour job has come out at $4,000, you need a very good reason ready, because you will be asked for one.
A worked example
Illustrative numbers, to show the shape of the calculation rather than to tell you what to charge. A solo cleaner quoting a first deep clean on a three bedroom house:
- Hours: 7 on site, plus 1 for travel, loading and the supermarket run. 8 in total.
- Real hourly cost: needs $45,000 a year before tax, plus $9,000 of running costs, over roughly 1,300 genuinely billable hours a year. That is about $41 an hour.
- Materials and consumables for the job: $35.
- Floor: 8 x $41, plus $35, which is $363.
- Margin at 20%: about $436.
Now the reason this matters. The number that felt safe before doing the sum was $250, because a competitor advertises $30 an hour. At $250 this job pays about $27 an hour before costs and loses money once the materials and the unbilled hour are counted. The quote was never too high. The fear was.
If you have already sent it
If it has not been accepted yet and you have realised the number is below your floor, you can still correct it. Send a short, unapologetic message: you have gone back through the scope, the quote missed something, and here is the revised figure. Most clients accept this without drama, particularly if you name what changed. A quote is an offer, and until it is accepted you are allowed to withdraw or replace it.
If it has been accepted, do the job properly at the agreed price. Walking away from a low price you offered costs you more in reputation than the job costs you in money, and in most places an accepted quote is a contract. Two things make it worth something: record the actual hours the job took, every one of them, and use that record to price the next one. A job you underpriced is expensive data, but it is still data, and it is more reliable than anything you can guess.
If the client comes back and says it is too expensive, do not cut the price on the spot. Ask what part of the scope they want to change, then change the scope and the price together. Taking work out is negotiating. Taking money out is just agreeing that your first number was not serious. If you do want to offer a discount, work out what it really costs you first: the discount cost calculator shows how much extra work a discount has to win back before it breaks even.
If you hear nothing at all, that is the far more common outcome and it is usually not about the price. Our quote follow up planner gives you the dates and the wording for the three messages worth sending.
How to stop guessing every time
All five of these work in a notebook. None of them needs software.
- Write the floor before you write the quote. Always in that order. Once the floor is on the page, the quote stops being a feeling and becomes a decision you can defend, including to yourself.
- Keep a two column job diary. Hours quoted, hours actually taken. After ten jobs you will know exactly where you underestimate, and it is usually the same thing every time.
- Review your rates on a date, not on a mood. Put one day in the calendar every six months. A rate that only ever changes when you feel brave will not change.
- Quote options rather than a single number. Two or three levels of scope turns the conversation from yes or no into which one, and it lets a client who genuinely cannot afford the full job buy the part that helps most.
- Put the reasoning in the quote. Hours, materials and what is excluded, laid out plainly. A price with its working shown is queried far less often than a single total, because the client can see what they are buying.
If you want the record to keep itself, this is where invoicing software earns its place. In Billbooks you save your rates and materials once as items, so every new quote starts from your current prices instead of whatever you charged last time, and an approved quote turns into an invoice in one click with the same lines on it. Because the items are saved, you can see at a glance when a price last moved, which is the thing the data above says most businesses never look at. Quotes and invoices are unlimited on every plan, which starts at $7.95 a month, with a 30 day free trial and no credit card.
More problems like this one, each with a first step, are on our pricing and invoicing problems hub. If you want the method behind the number, our guide to pricing service jobs covers the three ways to price and when each one fits, and how to write an estimate covers what the document itself should contain.
One next step
Take the last quote you sent, before you touch the one you are about to send. Work out its floor: honest hours, your real hourly cost, materials at today's prices. Then compare. You will learn more in ten minutes about your own pricing than in a month of wondering, and you will never need to ask strangers whether a number sounds fair again.
Three free tools to check the number before you send it
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if my quote is fair?
Build the price up from your own costs first: honest hours including travel and paperwork, what an hour of your time really costs you once tax and overheads are counted, materials at today's prices, and a margin. That total is your floor. A fair quote clears the floor and sits inside the range the work pays locally. If you only ever compare against what a competitor advertises, you are checking your price against someone else's guess.
How do I know if I am undercharging?
The clearest sign is that you have never worked out your real hourly cost, so you cannot say whether a job made money. Other signs are a rate that has not changed in a year or more, quotes accepted immediately and without question, and being busy while the bank balance stays flat. Work out what you need to earn plus your running costs, divide by the hours you can genuinely bill, and compare that with what you charge.
What margin should I add to a quote?
There is no single correct figure, because it depends on the trade, the risk and what the work pays in your area. What matters more is that the margin sits on top of a floor that already includes every cost, rather than being the only cushion in a number you guessed. If a small reduction wipes out your profit entirely, the margin is doing too much work and the costs underneath it are probably understated.
Should I lower my quote if the client says it is too expensive?
Change the scope rather than the number. Ask which part of the job they want to remove or defer, then quote the smaller job. Cutting the price while keeping the work the same teaches the client that your first figure was negotiable, and it takes the money straight out of your profit rather than out of your costs.
How can I find out what others charge for the same work?
Ask a supplier what the going rate is locally, look at what competitors publish, and ask a business in the same trade a town or two away, where you are not competing for the same customers. For a wider anchor, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes wage data by occupation and state, though it covers employees only, so a self employed rate needs to clear it rather than match it.
Can I change a quote after I have sent it?
Before it is accepted, yes. A quote is an offer, so you can withdraw or replace it, and the cleanest way is a short message saying you have reviewed the scope and naming what the revised figure covers. Once the client has accepted, it is usually a binding agreement, so the job should be done at the agreed price and the lesson applied to the next quote instead.
