By QuoteIron TeamUpdated 13 min read
Key takeaways
- Each job is priced once, as a template built from your labor rate, materials markup and rounding. Change one number and the whole book moves.
- Your labor rate is (take-home + overhead) ÷ realistic billable hours. Illustration: ($70,000 + $18,000) ÷ 1,000 hours = $88/hour.
- Keep labor hours and materials as separate numbers on every template, and round up.
- Template the repeatable 80% of your week; hand-price the rest (a rewire, a repipe, fire damage).
Related: Pricing jobs as a new solo tradesman · How to price a water heater replacement · How to price an electrical panel upgrade · free book builder · handyman price book
What "Flat Rate" Actually Means (And What It Isn't)
Flat rate vs. hourly billing. Hourly billing pays you for every minute, but it creates a standoff at the door: the customer wants to know what the job costs, and your time cost isn't that answer. Run short, and the customer feels they overpaid. Run long, and you're explaining a bigger number mid-job. Flat rate skips the standoff: you quote the job, not the clock.
Flat rate vs. a publisher's "market rate" book. A flat-rate price book you build yourself is not the same product as a pay-per-ticket database you rent from someone else. Profit Rhino prices flat-rate for a fleet — $39–59 per tech per month, plus a "Success Coaching & Implementation" package at $1,499 on its Pro tier, per its own pricing page (source). FieldEdge's Coolfront tool runs roughly $1.65–1.73 per work order, on top of the subscription (source). Both are real, well-built products for a company with technicians to manage. A book you build yourself is the opposite bet: the structure comes from a template, but the price comes from your rate, not a publisher's guess at your market.
Why Solo Contractors Move to Flat Rate
The homeowner's side: certainty beats an open-ended clock. An hourly quote answers a question nobody asked. One solo electrical contractor put it plainly on the Mike Holt Forum in December 2023: "Homeowners can't stand getting a per hour price when they don't know if they have a 2 hour fix or a 3 week rewire situation" (source).
The contractor's side: pricing without getting put on the spot, alone. It cuts the other way too. A newly licensed solo electrician described it on r/electricians in March 2024: "I'm working by myself right now and have been put on the spot at times with pricing on jobs" (source). When you're the only person in the truck, there's no office to call for a second opinion — you either have a price ready or you're doing math out loud in front of the person paying for it.
The honest trade-off: what flat rate doesn't fix. A price book prices the jobs you've done a hundred times. It doesn't price the ones you haven't. A full rewire, a repipe, a fire-damage repair, anything first-of-its-kind on your truck that day — those still need your judgment and a custom number, same as always. Flat rate isn't a replacement for estimating.
“Homeowners can’t stand getting a per hour price when they don’t know if they have a 2 hour fix or a 3 week rewire situation”
The Three Numbers That Price Your Whole Book
Every template in a flat-rate book runs through the same three numbers.
Labor rate: what it needs to cover, and how to set yours. Your labor rate isn't your hourly wage. It's every dollar the business needs per billable hour to pay you, cover the truck, and turn a profit. No universal formula gets this right for every shop, so work through these four questions in order:
- What do you actually need to take home in a year? Not revenue — take-home pay, after the business pays its own bills.
- How many hours will you really bill? Not 2,080 (40 hours × 52 weeks) — subtract drive time, estimates that don't close, admin, slow weeks, sick days, and anything else that isn't a wrench turning on a paid job.
- What does the truck cost to run, per year? Insurance, tools, vehicle payment and fuel, licenses, software, marketing, a repair contingency — add it up as an annual number, separate from your take-home target.
- What does your market actually bear? Check what competitors in your area are charging for comparable work. A rate that pencils out perfectly on paper but sits far outside local norms will cost you jobs before it ever proves itself on a spreadsheet.
One way to combine the first three answers into a starting number: add your desired take-home income to your annual overhead, then divide by your realistic billable hours. That gives you a floor, not a final answer — you still weigh it against question four and adjust for profit margin on top.
Illustrative only, not a recommendation: a contractor who wants $70,000 take-home, carries $18,000 in annual overhead, and realistically bills 1,000 hours a year gets ($70,000 + $18,000) ÷ 1,000 = $88/hour as a break-even floor, before profit margin and the market check. The honest inputs are the hard part.
Materials markup: why parts and labor stay separate line items. Keep labor hours and materials cost as two separate numbers on every template. That lets you raise your labor rate next year without re-pricing every part, or move your markup when a supplier raises prices without touching your labor math. The examples here use a flat 30% markup, a round number; the right one depends on your supplier terms and how much you carry before it gets billed.
Rounding: the plain reason a firm number reads better than a decimal. A price like $161.30 sounds like it came out of a spreadsheet. A price like $160 sounds like someone decided it. Round up, not to the nearest number: you never eat the difference on a job. Take a job with 1.5 hours of labor and $40 of materials, at an illustrative $95/hour rate and 30% markup: (1.5 × $95) + ($40 × 1.30) = $194.50. Rounded up to the next $5, that's $195 — a number you can say out loud without doing the math twice.
What Goes Into a Single Job Template
A usable template needs four things: a name the customer recognizes, a typical labor-hour figure, a materials cost, and a line describing what's included.
Labor hours: typical, not a promise. The hours on a template are a typical figure under normal conditions, not a promise. If a job runs long for a reason outside the template's assumptions (an obstruction, a code issue, a part that isn't in stock), that's a scope conversation with the customer, not a difference you eat silently.
Materials cost: a mid-grade baseline, not the cheapest or priciest option. Price the materials line at what you'd typically install — not the bargain-bin part, not the top-shelf upgrade. Customers who want cheaper or nicer are a good/better/best conversation, not a reason to rebuild the base template.
The description line: what's included, so nobody argues about scope later. One plain sentence stating what the price covers. "Replace GFCI receptacle, existing wiring, standard cover plate" tells the customer exactly what they're getting, and gives you something to point to if they later expect more.
Building Your Book, Trade by Trade
Three ways people build one. Roughly in order of effort: buy a pre-built database from a publisher like Profit Rhino — fast, but it's someone else's labor-hour assumptions and someone else's idea of your market, priced and supported like you're running a fleet. Build your own from scratch in a spreadsheet — free, fully yours, but a real weekend of work, maintained by hand every time a rate or a material cost changes. Or start from job templates and swap in your own numbers — the templates carry the structure (typical hours, a mid-grade parts cost), you supply the rate, the markup, and the rounding. Whichever path you pick, what changes things is having numbers written down before the job.
Start with your top 15–20 repeat jobs, not the whole catalog. You don't need every job you might ever do templated on day one. Pull your invoices or your memory for the jobs you run most often, template those first, and add more as new repeat work shows up. A book with 20 accurate templates beats one with 80 you never finish setting up.
Categorize the way you already think about your day. Every trade groups its repeat work differently. Electrical splits into Service Calls, Outlets & Switches, Lighting, Panels & Breakers, Fans & Fixtures, and EV & Special. Lawn and landscaping splits into Mowing & Recurring Service, Cleanups, Trimming & Pruning, Mulch & Beds, Fertilization & Weed Control, and Installs & Sod. Appliance repair splits by the machine, not the task: Service & Diagnostics, Refrigeration, Laundry, Cooking, Dishwashers, and Installs & Disposals. Garage door work follows the parts of the door: Service & Diagnostics, Springs, Openers, Rollers/Tracks/Cables, Panels & Weatherproofing, and Tune-Ups & Safety. Six or so categories is usually enough to find any job on your list in a couple of taps.
The 80/20 rule: template the repeatable jobs, hand-price the rest. Most solo shops run a small set of jobs on repeat and a long tail of one-offs. Leave the long tail as custom line items priced with your own judgment, every time. That's the book working as intended.
Sample books by trade: plumbers, electricians, HVAC, handyman, pressure washing, lawn and landscaping, appliance repair, garage door, painting, drywall, roofing, and flooring.
Try Before You Build
Before you spend a weekend keying in templates, test the math on a handful of real jobs for free. A useful sample reprices instantly as you change your rate, markup or rounding, and needs no signup or card. If it passes, either keep building the book in your own spreadsheet or pay for price book software that keeps it organized for quoting on the job.
From Price Book to a 90-Second Quote
A price book only pays off once it's fast in front of a customer. First, tap preset jobs instead of typing line items and doing arithmetic on-site. Second, offering more than one price on a single quote: a good/better/best structure lets the customer pick the tier they want instead of you guessing in advance which single number they'll say yes to. Third, a signed quote should become an invoice without re-entering anything — the moment a customer accepts, the paperwork should already exist. None of that requires expensive software; a paper price book you flip through fast gets you most of the way there. Software just removes the flipping.
Common Mistakes When Building a Flat-Rate Book
Copying someone else's "market rate" numbers wholesale. A downloaded price list is a publisher's guess at a regional average, not built from your labor rate, supplier costs or market. Use it as a rough structure if you have nothing else, never as the final price.
Over-templating: too many near-duplicate line items to maintain. A book with five slightly different versions of the same job is harder to use than one clean template with an honest range. If two templates only differ by a part size, that's a note on one template, not two rows to maintain forever.
No escape hatch for the custom job. A book without a fast way to add a custom, hand-priced line item breaks the first time a job doesn't fit a template. Keep that path open and easy, every time — it's not a failure of the book, it's the book doing its job.
Setting the three numbers once and never revisiting them. Labor costs rise. Material prices move, sometimes overnight. A rate that was right when you set it can be quietly wrong a year later. Put a date on the calendar to check your three numbers against reality and adjust the whole book at once.
