Add each area by the square foot, set your own material and installation rates, then add waste, removal, subfloor prep, overhead and profit. You get the bid and the price per square foot, which is how your customer will compare you. Free, and no signup needed.
Areas to floor
Waste, preparation, overhead and profit
A margin is a share of the price, so it can never reach 100%: at 99% the bid would be a hundred times your cost. Capped at 80% here. If you meant a markup on cost, a 100% markup is a 50% margin.
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These figures are estimates to help you bid a job. Adjust the material and installation rates to match your own suppliers, your market, and whether the room is a simple rectangle or full of cuts.
It is a free tool that turns a room measurement into a priced quote. You add each area with its square footage and pick the floor going down, and the tool prices the material and the installation separately at your own rates. It adds your waste factor to the material, prices removal of the old floor and any subfloor prep across the same area, adds the flat items like stairs and moving furniture, then applies overhead and profit. It also shows the total area and what the quote works out to per square foot, which is the number your customer will use to compare you against the next quote.
Add one row per room or area, enter its square footage, and choose the floor. Each floor type starts with a typical material and installation rate, which you can change: your own supplier prices and your own crew's rates beat any average. Set the waste factor for how the floor is being laid, and enter a per-square-foot rate for removing the old floor or levelling the subfloor if the job needs it. Tick stairs, moving furniture, transitions or disposal. Finally set your overhead and profit margin. Everything updates as you type, and nothing is sent anywhere.
By the square foot, and almost always with the material and the installation priced separately. Measure each room, add the areas, and apply a material rate and an installation rate per square foot. Keeping them apart is what lets you quote the same room in carpet and in hardwood without redoing the whole estimate, and it is what lets you handle the one thing that makes flooring different from every other trade: waste.
On top of the floor itself sit the things that eat a job's profit when they are forgotten. Taking up the old floor and getting rid of it. Levelling a subfloor that turns out to be 12mm out across the room. Transitions, thresholds and trim. Stairs, which are priced per step and are slow. Moving the furniture. Each is priced here on its own, because a quote that buries them in a single rate per square foot cannot be defended when the customer compares it with another one. For more detail, see our guides on how to estimate flooring cost and how to price flooring installation.
This is the one that costs flooring contractors money in both directions. You buy more floor than the room has, for offcuts, pattern match, breakage and a spare board for the repair in two years. You do not INSTALL more floor than the room has. So the waste factor belongs on the material rate and nowhere else. Add it to the whole job and you have charged your customer to lay square feet that do not exist, which is the line an competitor will point at. Leave it off the material and you are buying the offcuts out of your own profit.
How much depends on the lay, not on the floor. A straight lay in a simple rectangle is usually around 5 to 10 percent. A diagonal lay is nearer 15. Herringbone, chevron and anything with a repeating pattern to match can run 20 percent or more, and a room full of alcoves and doorways pushes any of those up. The calculator starts at 10 and you change it per job.
This is the other one that costs money quietly. A 20% markup on a $1,000 cost gives a $1,200 bid, and your profit is $200 on $1,200, which is a 16.7% margin, not 20%. To actually keep 20% of the price you divide by 0.80 and bid $1,250. The calculator treats the profit field as a margin and divides, so the number you type is the share of the bid you keep. Overhead is applied to cost before that, because overhead is a cost, not a profit.
These are common starting points in the United States for residential work, per square foot, material and installation separately. Treat them as a baseline and replace them with your own supplier prices and your own crew's rates.
| Floor | Material and install, per sq ft |
|---|---|
| Vinyl sheet | $1.50 and $1.50 |
| Vinyl composition tile | $1.75 and $2.00 |
| Laminate | $2.00 and $2.50 |
| Carpet | $2.50 and $1.50 |
| Luxury vinyl plank | $3.50 and $2.50 |
| Ceramic or porcelain tile | $4.00 and $7.00 |
| Engineered hardwood | $6.00 and $4.00 |
| Solid hardwood | $8.00 and $5.00 |
| Natural stone tile | $9.00 and $9.00 |
| Remove and dispose of old floor | $1.00 to $3.00 |
| Waste factor, straight lay | 5% to 10% |
| Waste factor, diagonal or herringbone | 15% to 20% |
Measure every room yourself and add the doorways and closets, which is where the extra boxes go. Quote the removal of the old floor as its own line, visible, or the customer assumes it was included and you eat a day. Say in writing what happens if the subfloor turns out to need levelling, because you cannot see it until the old floor is up and it is the single most common reason a flooring job goes over. Price stairs separately and per step. Put a date on the quote: your supplier's price for the same box moves. When the job is agreed, our free flooring quote template and estimate and quote generator turn the same line items into a document you can send in seconds.
Once the estimate is accepted, invoice the job straight away and keep the payment terms short:
From our invoice data: Shorter terms bring the money in sooner: invoices due on receipt are paid in 15.9 days on average and Net 30 invoices in 47.2 days, while the share paid by the due date barely changes (39.1% against 42.3%).
Source: Billbooks invoice payment study, 53,095 paid invoices from 180 businesses, 2007 to August 2026. See the invoice payment study
This calculator provides estimates for planning purposes only. Your final quote should reflect your own supplier prices, your own crew's rates, local market rates and what you find when the old floor comes up.
Bid the job here, then send a branded estimate and invoice, collect payment online, and track it all from one Billbooks account.
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