The floor
Pick a common job to start, then replace every rate with a mill invoice and a crew you have timed. Changing scope or pattern fills starting hours and material only when you have not already edited that field.
Hours and material rates
These start from the scope and pattern you picked. They are ballpark crew figures, not a mill catalog or a guarantee.
Your costs
Payroll burden covers employer taxes, workers’ compensation, liability insurance, and paid time off. Underestimating it is how a $2-a-yard stretch that looked profitable was not.
Your bid
- Floor
- Billed yards
- Stairs
- Travel
- Crew hours
- Loaded labor
- Carpet, pad, adhesive
- Stairs, tear-out, extras
- Travel & other
- Overhead
- Total cost
- Profit
- Price per yard
- Effective hourly rate
- Walk-away price
A bid link carries your own rates — wage, burden, overhead, and target margin — so the page reopens exactly as you left it. Send it to yourself or your crew. The numbers ride after the #, which is never sent to a server, so copying a link uploads nothing. The customer should get the price, not the link.
Same floor, four scopes
| Scope | Hours | Price |
|---|
Same floor, four stair counts
Stairs are not yards. Matching the flat living-room special on a 13-stair house is the losing bid.
| Stairs | Hours | Price | vs flat |
|---|
Where the hours go
Transparent arithmetic from your own inputs. The starting hours and material rates are common ballpark figures, not an industry standard, a benchmark, or a guarantee — time your own crews and replace them.
Hand the customer a proposal
The price above is for you. This is the page you print or save as a PDF and give to the customer — your details, their details, the scope, the deposit split, and a line for them to sign. Your business details are saved on this device so you only type them once; the customer’s details are never saved.
Everything on the printed page is text you typed or a number this calculator worked out. It contains no warranty, lien, or cancellation wording — those depend on your jurisdiction and your contract, and this tool is not the place to invent them.
Common questions
Why can a competitor advertise “$2 a yard installed”?
Usually because the special is written around one specific job, and that job is a preset here: a 400 sq ft flat living room, stretch-in over pad, solid colour, no stairs. It really does price low. What the per-yard number cannot see is scope (stretch-in vs. glue-down vs. double-stick), pattern match, stairs, transitions, tear-out, a furniture move, and haul-away. Price your actual floor beside the special and the gap becomes a list of line items you can show the homeowner instead of an argument about who is honest.
What is the real price difference between stretch-in, glue-down, and double-stick?
They are different labor and different material. Stretch-in over pad starts at 0.11 install hours per yard with a pad cost and no adhesive — the cheap-special assumption. Glue-down skips the pad but adds adhesive and runs slower at 0.18 hours per yard because it is bonded to the slab. Double-stick glues both pad and carpet and is the slowest of the three at 0.22 hours per yard. Carpet tile wastes the least roll. Changing scope here refills the starting hours and material so you can see the swing before you type a single rate.
Why are stairs priced separately instead of folded into floor yards?
Because stairs are not yards. Each stair adds its own installer hours, its own billed yardage (stair yards each), and its own wrap material cost, on top of whatever the flat floor takes. The “same floor, four stair counts” table prices the identical floor at 0, 7, 13, and 21 stairs from the suggested extra kit so you can see how much a stair house adds over the flat special before you accidentally quote a 13-stair job at the flat-floor number.
Why does a patterned carpet cost more than solid for the same square footage?
Waste and seam time both go up. Solid colour starts at 10% waste with no pattern-matching hours. Patterned carpet starts at 18% waste plus extra hours per yard to match the pattern across every seam, and berber/loop carpet starts at 14% waste with its own care-on-seams-and-stairs hours. The “same floor, four scopes” comparison uses whatever pattern you selected, so the material and labor swing shows up in the price, not just in the waste percentage field.
Is my data uploaded anywhere?
No account and no network requests — the calculator runs entirely in your browser. Your bid is saved in this browser’s local storage so it is still here next visit, and a bid link you copy carries those same numbers in the page’s address rather than sending anything to a server. The optional usage counter records only which features were used and the day, never your floor size, wages, or prices.
What’s the difference between the bid price and the walk-away price?
The bid price already includes your target margin on top of labor, materials, and overhead. The walk-away price is the total cost underneath it — crew hours, carpet and pad, stairs, tear-out, transitions, and haul-away — the point below which the install stops being profitable at all. Typing a price you are considering into “Price you’re considering” shows you the margin or the loss before you send it.
Why isn't a 20% margin the same as adding 20% to my cost?
Margin here is a share of the final price, which is how the customer's number is quoted and how your P&L reads it: price = job cost ÷ (1 − margin). Overhead, separately, is a markup on the direct cost of the job and is applied before margin, never to itself or to the profit. Marking a $3,000 cost up by 20% gives $3,600 and a 16.7% margin. Targeting a 20% margin gives $3,750 — a gap that is easy to give away across a whole season of bids typed the wrong way.