Construction markup & margin calculator.
Enter your costs, pick markup or margin, and get the price to quote, the profit you keep, and both percentages at once. It is built to settle the one question that quietly costs contractors money on every job: markup is not the same as margin.
To price a construction job: add your direct costs (labor, materials, equipment), fold in overhead, then add markup or work back from a target margin. A 25% markup is not a 25% margin, it is a 20% margin. The calculator below shows both so you never confuse the two.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere or stored.
How this construction pricing calculator works
Pricing a job is four moves, and the calculator does all four live as you type:
- Direct cost = labor + materials + equipment and subcontractors. The hard costs of doing the work.
- Overhead is added as a percentage of direct cost. This is the part most contractors underprice: rent, insurance, the truck, the phone, software, the hours you spend quoting and chasing payment. Use your own number here, overhead varies widely by business and a borrowed percentage is just a guess. If you do not fold it in, it comes straight out of your profit.
- Job cost = direct cost + overhead. Your true, fully loaded cost.
- Price = job cost plus markup, or job cost worked back from a target margin. Profit is the difference between price and cost.
The formulas, if you want them: price = cost × (1 + markup) in markup mode, and price = cost ÷ (1 − margin) in margin mode.
Markup vs margin: the difference that costs contractors money
Markup and margin describe the same dollars of profit from two different angles. Markup measures profit against your cost. Margin measures profit against your price. Because price is always bigger than cost, the margin percentage is always smaller than the markup percentage that produced it.
The trap: a contractor decides they want to "make 30%," sets a 30% markup, and assumes they are keeping 30 cents on the dollar. They are actually keeping 23 cents. On a $300,000 year, that gap is real money. Here is the conversion at common rates:
| Markup on cost | Equals a margin of |
|---|---|
| 10% | 9.1% |
| 15% | 13.0% |
| 20% | 16.7% |
| 25% | 20.0% |
| 30% | 23.1% |
| 40% | 28.6% |
| 50% | 33.3% |
| 100% | 50.0% |
If you think in margin, price in margin (use the Margin tab above). If you think in markup, price in markup. Just do not set one and expect the other.
How much should a contractor mark up a job?
There is no single correct number, but there are honest ranges. The figures below are markup on fully loaded cost, applied after overhead is folded into cost, so here the markup is your profit. On that basis most small construction businesses land between 15% and 35%:
- High-volume, low-complexity work (repetitive installs, simple service calls) tends to run leaner, often 10–20% markup, and makes it up on throughput.
- General remodeling and custom work commonly sits in the 20–35% range to cover the coordination, change orders, and risk.
- Specialty trades and high-risk or low-frequency jobs often need 35%+ to be worth doing at all.
One reason "typical markup" figures vary so much between sources is that the base differs. Marking up fully loaded cost, with overhead already in the cost, takes a smaller percentage, because the markup only has to cover profit. Marking up direct cost alone, with overhead still buried in the markup, takes a larger percentage to cover the same overhead plus profit. Before you copy a number, check which base it uses. The calculator above folds overhead into cost first, so the markup you enter is profit on top.
The mistake is copying someone else's percentage. The right markup is whatever covers your overhead and leaves your target profit on your mix of jobs. Run a few real jobs through the calculator with your actual overhead rate and the number that keeps you whole becomes obvious quickly.
From a number to a quote
A calculator gets you the price. Turning that into a quote a customer actually signs, with the right line items, scope, terms, and a branded PDF, is the next step, and the place most jobs are won or lost on speed. Our construction quote guide walks through the nine sections every winning quote needs.
This free calculator is one of the tools we publish at Shinpo Capital. Our construction platform, Sitetraq, takes it further: it remembers your overhead and markup, drafts line items from a job description with AI, reuses pricing across similar jobs, and converts an approved quote straight into a job and invoices, so the number you calculate here is the number that flows through the whole project. See how Sitetraq handles construction quoting.
Markup & margin FAQ
Markup is profit as a percentage of cost; margin is profit as a percentage of the price you charge. A 25% markup on a $1,000 cost is $250 of profit and a $1,250 price, which is a 20% margin. Markup is always a larger percentage than the margin it produces.
No. A 20% markup produces only a 16.7% margin. Pricing every job at 20% markup while expecting a 20% margin leaves roughly 3 points of profit on the table on every job, one of the most common and most expensive pricing mistakes in construction.
Markup = margin ÷ (1 − margin). For a 20% target margin: 0.20 / 0.80 = 0.25, or a 25% markup. To go the other way, margin = markup ÷ (1 + markup).
Yes. Enter overhead as a percentage of direct cost and the calculator folds it into your job cost before applying markup or margin, so your price covers indirect costs, not just labor and materials.
It is your profit on that job after the overhead you entered, closer to operating profit than to gross margin. It is not the same as company-wide net profit, which for contractors often runs in the single digits, roughly 5–10%. The usual gap is under-counted overhead: if the percentage you enter does not capture all your indirect and office costs, the margin here will look better than what actually reaches your bank account. Load overhead honestly and the two move closer together.