Price the job properly — and protect your margin
Build a full quote from the ground up — materials and markup, labour, travel, overhead, profit and GST — then see your true margin and effective hourly rate before you ever send it.
Takes ~3 minutes · All figures stay in your browser until you choose to share them
Materials & Markup
Line items with waste & handling
Labour & Travel
Charge-out rate plus 88c/km
Overhead & Profit
Keep the business funded
Margin & GST
A quote you can stand behind
About this tool
Tradie Job Quoting Calculator
For most Australian trades businesses, quoting is where the money is quietly won or lost. It's easy to price the parts and an hourly labour figure, then send a number that feels about right — only to find, weeks later, that travel wasn't counted, overheads weren't recovered, and the job barely broke even. The Tradie Job Quoting Calculator is a free, plain-English tool that helps you build a quote from the ground up: materials with markup, labour, travel, overhead allocation, profit and GST, all in one place. Its real job is to show you the true margin and effective hourly rate behind a quote before you send it, so a busy-looking job doesn't turn out to be an expensive one.
How it works
You enter your trade and job type, then list your materials line by line with a quantity, unit cost and a markup percentage that covers supply, waste, storage and handling. You add your estimated labour hours and charge-out rate, travel details (one-way distance, number of trips and a per-kilometre vehicle rate), and your overhead-allocation and profit-margin percentages. From those inputs the calculator layers cost on cost the way a proper quote should: materials plus markup, labour, travel, then overhead applied on top, then your profit margin, and finally GST at the current statutory rate — using your own figures and the current ATO cents-per-kilometre rate as the vehicle default rather than baked-in assumptions. It then works backwards to two numbers that matter most: your profit margin on the job, and your effective hourly rate once travel time is counted. If that effective rate looks thin, or if an emergency job is under-priced, labour is an unusually small share of the quote, or the job runs long, it flags exactly where the quote deserves a second look. Everything stays in your browser until you choose to unlock the full breakdown.
Who it’s for
Owner-operators and small trades businesses — plumbers, electricians, carpenters, painters, tilers, roofers, landscapers and general builders — who want to quote with confidence and stop under-pricing work.
- A quote is only as good as what sits underneath it: materials markup, labour, travel, overhead and profit each have to be recovered, or the shortfall comes out of your own pocket.
- The number that really tells you whether a job is worth taking is your effective hourly rate once travel and non-billable time are counted — not the headline charge-out rate.
- Travel, callbacks, cleanup and site complexity are the costs most often left out of quotes; pricing them in deliberately is the difference between a healthy margin and a break-even job.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my quote need overhead and profit as separate lines?
They do different jobs. Overhead recovers the fixed cost of simply running the business — rent, insurance, admin, accounting, tools and the quiet weeks — spread across your jobs so each one carries its share. Profit is what's left after every cost is covered; it funds growth, equipment, emergencies and your own income during downtime. If you fold them together, or leave profit out, you can win the job and still go backwards. The calculator applies overhead on top of your direct costs, then your profit margin on top of that, so both are visible and neither gets quietly absorbed.
What is an effective hourly rate, and why is it lower than my charge-out rate?
Your charge-out rate is what you bill per hour on site. Your effective hourly rate is the whole quote divided by all the hours the job actually eats, including travel to and from site and material pickups. Because travel time is real time you can't bill elsewhere, the effective rate is almost always lower than your headline rate. It's the honest measure of what a job pays you per hour of your day. The calculator surfaces this figure and flags it when it drops below a healthy floor, so a long-drive job that looked fine on paper gets a second look before you commit to it.
Does the calculator handle GST and the vehicle cents-per-kilometre rate correctly?
Yes. It treats your quote as ex-GST and adds GST at the current statutory rate on top, so the total you show a customer is the GST-inclusive figure — a common thing to forget when quoting from parts and labour. For travel it uses the ATO's current cents-per-kilometre rate as the default vehicle rate, which you can override if your real running cost differs. As with any tool, official ATO and Fair Work figures change over time, so treat the output as general information to sense-check your pricing rather than tax or financial advice, and confirm current rates with your accountant.
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