How to Quote a Job: A Contractor's Step-by-Step Walkthrough

Quoting is two different jobs pretending to be one. There's pricing — figuring out the number — and there's quoting — turning that number into a document the customer says yes to.

Most contractors are decent at the first and lose work on the second. This walks through both, in the order you actually do them.

Step 1: Qualify before you drive

The cheapest quote is the one you never had to produce. Before you burn ninety minutes and a tank of gas, get three things on the phone:

• What, exactly. "Bathroom reno" can mean $4,000 or $40,000. Push for specifics.
• When. "This month" and "sometime next year" are different businesses.
• Roughly what they expected to spend. People will tell you if you ask casually: "Most jobs like this land between eight and fourteen — does that sound like the ballpark you had in mind?" If they say they were thinking three, you both just saved an afternoon.

You're not being difficult. You're finding out whether there's a job here.

Step 2: The site visit

Measure everything, even things you're sure about. Photograph everything, especially the ugly parts — the panel, the crawl space, the wall you suspect is hiding something. Those photos are what save you during a change-order conversation two months later.

Ask the questions that turn into surprises later:

• Who else is working on this, and when?
• Is anyone living here during the work?
• Where does material get staged? Where do I park?
• Has anyone worked on this before, and do you know what they did?
• Are there permits, an HOA, a strata, a landlord?

Then say what you're going to do next and put a time on it: "I'll have this to you Thursday." Then hit Thursday. Half of winning the job is being the one contractor who did what he said he'd do on the first small promise.

Step 3: Build the number

Price from the parts, not from a feeling.

Materials. Priced today, not from memory. Add 10–15% for waste and for the fact that prices move between quote and purchase.

Labour. Hours × your loaded hourly rate. Loaded means your actual cost of having a person on site — wage plus payroll burden, insurance, vehicle, phone, tools. If you're pricing off take-home wage, you're losing money on every hour and calling it a busy year.

Subs. Get their number in writing before you send yours. A verbal from a sub is not a price.

Overhead. Rent, software, accounting, the truck, the hours you spend quoting jobs you don't get. It has to live in every quote, because it has nowhere else to go.

Profit. A separate line in your own math, not the thing that's left over when everything else is paid. If profit is a leftover, it will be zero.

Contingency. For anything involving demolition, old buildings, or the words "while you're in there" — 10% or more.

Then look at the total and ask one question: if this job goes 20% worse than expected, do I still get paid for my time? If not, the number is wrong, no matter how competitive it looks.

We go deeper on the math in how to price a job. The rest of this page is about the document.

Step 4: Write the quote

The number is only part of what you're sending. The document is doing a second job: making you look like the safest person on the list.

Include:

• Your business name, licence number, and insurance. Top of the page.
• A plain-language scope. What you will do, in sentences a homeowner understands.
• What's excluded. This is the single most valuable section and most quotes skip it. "Does not include: painting, permit fees, disposal of existing fixtures." Exclusions prevent 90% of the fights.
• Materials and grade. "Mid-grade fixtures, allowance of $900" beats "fixtures."
• Timeline. Start window and rough duration, not a promise to the day.
• Payment terms. Deposit, progress payments, final. Say it here, not later.
• How long the price holds. 30 days is standard and it protects you from material swings.
• How to say yes. A signature line, a link, a "reply YES to this email." Do not make them figure it out.

Leave out: your internal hourly rate, your margin, and a full parts breakdown. An itemized list invites line-by-line negotiation on items the customer isn't qualified to price. Give sections, not spreadsheets. If they specifically ask for a breakdown, there's a right way to handle that.

Step 5: Present it, don't just email it

The highest-converting move in this whole process costs four minutes: call them, then send it.

"Hi Dave, sending the quote over now. Short version — we're at $8,400, that covers X and Y, doesn't include Z, and I could start the second week of October. I'll send it right now so you can read it properly."

Now the number arrives in their inbox already explained by a human. A quote that lands cold, with no voice attached, gets processed as a price. A quote that lands after a two-minute call gets processed as a plan.

Step 6: Assume you'll follow up

Here's the part that separates a quoting process from a quoting habit: you are not done when you hit send.

Most quotes don't get a yes or a no. They get silence. The customer gets busy, waits on a spouse, or lines you up against two other numbers and never mentions it. If your process ends at "sent," you're leaving the outcome to whoever follows up — and it might not be you.

Plan for it from the start. Two days after sending, confirm it landed. A week in, give them an easy out. Two weeks in, come back with something new. Around day 30, close the file cleanly.

That's the whole difference between a shop that quotes $80,000 a month and closes a quarter of it, and one that quotes the same $80,000 and closes a third. Same driving, same measuring, same evenings at the kitchen table with a calculator.

Keep reading: How to price a job · Free estimate template for contractors · How to get a customer to sign an estimate · Contractor lead follow-up: the full system