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Free Electrical Job Pricing Calculator

Put in your numbers. Get your bid price and the profit in dollars you keep. No email required.

Enter your three job costs and the calculator does the rest. Overhead and target margin start at industry defaults you can adjust, then it works backward from your margin to the bid price that protects your profit.

Job costs

Materials and other direct job costs

$

Honest field hours for this job

hrs

Loaded rate, not raw wage. Add about 35% for taxes, comp, and benefits.

$/hr

Your targets

Pre-filled. Adjust to your shop.

Your share of the bid price. 13% is the NECA industry default.

%

Your profit as a share of the bid price.

%
Materials$30,000
Labor$7,500
Overhead (13%)$6,771
Profit (15%)$7,813
Bid price$52,083

Bid this job at $52,083 and you keep $7,813. Drop your price to $43,103 and you're working for free.

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How the numbers work

The calculator builds your bid price from five inputs for commercial electrical work, then applies overhead and target margin using the formula that actually protects your profit. Most contractors know the cost buckets. What trips them up is how those numbers flow into the final price.

A commercial electrician took a job that felt well-priced. He had done the takeoff, counted the hours, priced the materials. Six weeks later, when the final invoices cleared, the number he made was lower than what he had carried in his head the whole job. When he went back through the math, he found it: he had priced labor off his base wage, not his loaded rate. He had assumed all his hours would be billable. He had applied an overhead percentage without checking whether it matched his actual costs. Each mistake was small on its own. Together they ate his margin before the job was done. He only found out after.

That is what this calculator is built to prevent.

Material costs: what goes in, what gets marked up

Materials are the most visible number in any estimate, and usually the most accurate one. Put in your total material cost. The calculator applies markup as part of the margin formula rather than as a separate line. Per the Associated General Contractors of America's May 2026 materials report, copper is up 20.9% year over year. Build that volatility into your material number before it goes in. A quote that locks in stale material prices costs you money between bid day and delivery day. For more on how material markup affects your margin, see the full breakdown in margin vs. markup.

Labor: why your hourly rate isn't your actual cost

The rate you pay your journeyman is not the rate you put in the calculator. That rate is your base wage. What the job actually costs you is the loaded rate: base wage plus every dollar you pay on top of it. According to BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation data (Q4 2025), total compensation for construction workers runs about 43.5% above base wages (benefits, workers' comp, payroll taxes, unemployment insurance). Put the loaded rate in the calculator. That is the number that reflects your actual labor cost, not what is on the timecard. If you only know your base wage, multiply it by 1.435 to get your loaded rate. An electrician at $30/hr base runs about $43/hr all-in.

Overhead: what it actually is and where it goes in your bid

Overhead is every business cost that doesn't show up on a single job's invoice: the truck payment, insurance, tools that wear out, your phone, and the time you spend bidding jobs you don't win. Per the NECA/CFMA Financial Benchmarker, overhead runs roughly 13% of revenue for electrical contractors. The calculator uses overhead as a percentage of the bid price, pre-filled at 13%. That default matches the NECA benchmark directly.

The 13% is a calibration point. It tells you whether your overhead profile is in the right ballpark. If you want to verify your real rate, the "Find your real overhead rate" widget further down the page does that math: enter your annual overhead dollars and your actual billable hours, and it tells you what your overhead really costs per hour. Once you know your real rate, plug it in here instead of the default.

Target margin: picking a number that accounts for the risk

CFMA's 2024 Construction Financial Benchmarker puts average net income before taxes for specialty trade contractors at 6.9%. Top-quartile firms hit 11.9%. On a commercial job, your margin target needs to do more than recover costs. It needs to account for retainage (typically 5% to 10% of contract value held until completion), 30 to 60 day payment terms, and the real possibility of scope changes you didn't get paid for. A 10% target margin on a commercial job with 10% retainage and 60-day terms is thinner than it looks on paper. Most contractors doing good commercial work target 12% to 15% net. Set your target in the calculator. The bid price follows.

The billable hours trap

The most expensive mistake in commercial electrical bidding isn't getting the markup formula wrong. It's pricing labor off a number of hours that doesn't reflect reality.

Start with 2,080 hours, the theoretical maximum for one full-time employee (40 hours x 52 weeks). A lot of contractors price their overhead recovery and labor cost assuming every one of those hours is billable. Most of them aren't. Subtract paid leave: BLS data confirms paid leave represents 5.1% of total compensation for construction workers, roughly 136 to 200 hours annually. Subtract non-productive field time: per EC&M Magazine, citing the NECA Manual of Labor Units, actual installation work accounts for only 68% of a labor unit. The remaining 32% is job layout, plan study, material handling, mobilization, cleanup, and breaks. Then subtract the hours no one talks about: drive time, supply house runs, safety meetings, and callbacks.

Hours component Low High Basis
Paid hours (base) 2,080 2,080 40 hrs x 52 weeks
Less: PTO and holidays (136) (200) BLS ECEC Q4 2025
Less: training, safety meetings (40) (80) Practitioner consensus
Less: drive time, supply runs, callbacks (50) (250) High variance by shop type
Less: quoting, admin, shop time (100) (200) Practitioner consensus
Estimated billable project hours ~1,350 ~1,650

The midpoint is roughly 1,450 to 1,500 hours. Price your overhead recovery off 2,080 and you're systematically undercharging. Use the widget below to find your real overhead rate: enter your annual overhead dollars and slide the billable hours down from 2,080 to your honest estimate. Watch what happens to the per-hour rate. Once you know your real number, make sure the overhead % you entered in the bid calculator above actually covers it.

Find your real overhead rate

Insurance, truck, tools, phone, office, and the time you spend bidding

$
1500

Your real billable hours, not the 2,080 theoretical max

Your real overhead rate

$40.00/hr

Not $28.85/hr. Price off the 2,080 hours you don't actually bill and you under-recover overhead on every job.

Pricing commercial electrical work: what's different

Most "how to price electrical work" guides are written for residential jobs. Commercial electrical work has a different cost structure. The math isn't harder, but ignoring the differences will cost you.

GC coordination adds real non-billable hours

On a commercial job you coordinate with a general contractor, wait on other subs to clear your work area, attend site meetings, and handle RFIs. That time never shows up on a labor unit count. It is overhead. It needs to be in your overhead rate, or it disappears from your margin.

Retainage affects cash flow, and cash flow affects your margin target

Most commercial contracts hold back 5% to 10% of each progress payment until the job is complete. On a $40,000 job with 10% retainage, $4,000 of your revenue doesn't arrive for months after your labor and materials are already paid out. Your margin target needs to account for that carrying cost.

T&M vs. fixed-price changes where the risk sits

On time and materials, the customer carries the risk of the unknown. On fixed-price, you carry it. A fixed-price bid with unclear scope or incomplete drawings should carry a higher margin target than a T&M job for a facility manager you've worked with for years. The math doesn't change. Your target margin input does.

Payment terms are a real cost

Per Commerce Bank's U.S. Construction Industry Report, it takes construction companies an average of three months to collect payment on invoices. On a 60-day invoice with $30,000 outstanding, you've effectively lent your customer $30,000 for two months. Factor it into your margin target, or price it separately as a payment terms line.

A worked example: a $75,600 commercial medical office buildout

This is a real anonymized bid, consolidated and stripped of identifying details. The job was a commercial eye care clinic fit-out: hospital-grade power in exam and consult rooms, general power and devices, lighting with emergency and exit fixtures, data rough-in, rooftop HVAC connections, and a fire alarm sublet. 404 field labor hours on 118 line items. The contractor priced it the way most experienced commercial electricians do: line-by-line markups, 22% on most material lines, 83% on labor. The job was won. Then the math got interesting.

Cost component Detail Amount
Power and patient-care devices Hospital-grade receptacles, plates, boxes ~$10,500
Wiring, conduit, and cable Branch, feeder, data runs ~$11,000
Lighting, fire alarm, data, controls, consumables Consolidated remaining material scope ~$8,154
Materials and other direct costs $29,654
Field labor 404 hrs x $52/hr (loaded rate) $20,982
Total direct cost $50,636

The reveal is the part that matters. The contractor applied a 22% markup on materials and an 83% markup on labor. Those numbers feel large. But blended across a job where materials outweigh labor nearly 1.4 to 1, the combined result is a 33% gross margin on a $75,600 bid. Almost no contractor pricing job by job with line-level markups can tell you that blended number while they're building the estimate.

Thirty-three percent gross sounds healthy, but gross margin is not profit. That 33% splits two ways: overhead and net profit. At the NECA benchmark of 13% of revenue, overhead takes $9,825 of the bid price. The remaining 20% is net profit, $15,115.

Bid price $75,600
Overhead (13% of bid price, NECA/CFMA benchmark) $9,825
Net profit (20% of bid price) $15,115
Direct cost $50,636
Check: $50,636 + $9,825 + $15,115 = $75,576 ≈ $75,600

A 20% net on commercial work is healthy. But the contractor only confirmed that number after running the full math. The 83% labor markup obscured it the whole time. Put the same job into the calculator with the right inputs and you get the same bid:

Calculator input Value
Material & direct costs $29,654
Labor hours 404
Labor rate (loaded) $52/hr
Overhead 13%
Target margin 20%
Bid price $75,576

Formula check: job cost $50,636 ÷ (1 - 0.13 - 0.20) = $50,636 ÷ 0.67 = $75,576.

The calculator works backward from a margin target rather than layering markups. You know your margin before you send. With line-by-line markups, you find out after. And if your shop actually runs closer to 1,500 billable hours than 2,080, the real overhead rate your 13% needs to cover is larger. Use the "Find your real overhead rate" widget above to check whether your overhead percentage actually covers your fixed costs. If it comes back higher than 13%, raise the overhead field in the bid calculator to match.

Common pricing mistakes that eat your margin

These are the five places margin goes missing on commercial electrical work. Each maps directly to an input in the calculator.

  1. 1. Pricing overhead off theoretical hours, not actual hours

    If you run 1,450 billable hours instead of 2,080, and your annual overhead is $60,000, your overhead cost per hour is $41.38, not $28.85. That $12.53 difference across 140 hours on a job is $1,754 in unrecovered overhead. The "Find your real overhead rate" widget above shows you exactly where you land.

  2. 2. Confusing the markup percentage with the margin percentage

    A 20% markup on $30,000 in costs gives you a $36,000 bid. But your margin isn't 20%. It's 16.7%. If your business needs a 20% margin, apply the correct markup: $30,000 ÷ (1 - 0.20) = $37,500. That's a $1,500 difference on one job. For the full explanation, see margin vs. markup.

  3. 3. Using base wage as the labor rate

    An electrician at $30/hr base costs you about $43 to $44/hr fully loaded (BLS ECEC Q4 2025: total benefits = 43.5% above base wages). Price labor at the base wage and you're not recovering $13 to $14/hr on every hour worked. On a 140-hour job, that's $1,820 in unrecovered labor cost.

  4. 4. Using the benchmark overhead rate without checking whether it fits your shop

    The NECA/CFMA benchmark of roughly 13% of revenue is a starting point, not a fact about your business. The calculator pre-fills 13% because that's the industry midpoint. A one-person shop with a newer truck, high workers' comp, and expensive materials storage will run higher; a veteran with low debt and minimal insurance may run lower. Use the "Find your real overhead rate" widget above to compute your actual rate. If it comes back at 16%, price at 16%, not 13%.

  5. 5. Not adjusting your margin target for commercial job risk

    Retainage, extended payment terms, and change order exposure are real costs on commercial work. A 10% margin target that looked solid when you bid the job can feel very thin when you're waiting 90 days to collect the final 10% of contract value while next month's bills are already due.

What to do after you have your number

You have a bid price you can defend. Now the job is to present it in a way that matches the quality of your work. A number on a spreadsheet or a rough PDF doesn't build confidence with a commercial client. They're comparing your proposal to other contractors' proposals. If yours looks like a draft, it gets treated like one.

Bring your estimate into VoltPro. Import the CSV, or build it directly from your takeoff. Your costs flow into a professional branded proposal with a clean layout, your logo, and a clear scope of work. Your margin is visible before you send. The math you just ran is the foundation. The proposal is what the client sees.

For the proposal document itself, see the free electrical estimate template. For real annotated commercial bids with line-by-line breakdowns, electrical bid examples are publishing soon. To see how professional proposals look, learn more about VoltPro's contractor software.

Frequently asked questions

Add up your material costs, your labor hours times your fully burdened hourly rate, and your overhead allocation for the job. That total is your job cost. Apply your target margin using the formula: Bid Price = Job Cost ÷ (1 - Target Margin %). Most contractors underprice because they use their base wage instead of their burdened rate, and because they assume more billable hours per week than they actually achieve.

Sources

Every published figure on this page traces to a named source below. The billable-hours component estimates (training, drive time, shop and admin time) are practitioner estimates, not survey figures. Retainage (5% to 10%) and 30 to 60 day payment terms are standard commercial contract terms.

Price every job like this, automatically.

VoltPro builds your estimate from real costs and shows your profit before you send. Set your margin target and watch the bid price update as you add materials and labor.

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