The floor
Start from a common job, then replace every rate with numbers from your own crew and invoices. Picking a method or stain fills hours-per-100, coats, and extra coats only if you have not already changed them.
Your costs
Payroll burden covers employer taxes, workers’ compensation, liability insurance, and paid time off. A $42/h finisher loaded at 30% is $54.60. Quoting the raw wage is how a per-square-foot special that looked fine turns into a loss after the first stair run.
Your bid
- Field / treads / closets
- Finish area (field + stairs)
- Finish + stain
- Crew hours
- Loaded labor
- Materials
- Travel + containment
- Overhead
- Total cost
- Profit at this price
- Price per field sq ft
- Effective hourly rate
- Walk-away price
Where the hours go
Where the cost goes
Transparent arithmetic from your own inputs. Starting hours and coverage are common ballpark figures, not an industry standard, a benchmark, or a flooring specification — replace them with your own takeoff.
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 is a 250 sq ft hallway with 14 treads a losing job at a per-square-foot rate?
Because stair treads are billed at their own hours per tread, not folded into the field square footage — each tread is estimated at about 4 sq ft of tread-and-riser for the finish and stain math, but its labor is a separate line entirely. A small hallway with a lot of stairs can carry more total labor hours than a much larger open room with none, which a flat rate written for the room square footage cannot see.
Why does full sand cost so much more than screen and recoat on the same floor?
Screen and recoat starts at 3.5 hours per 100 sq ft with 2 base coats; full sand — cutting in and sanding the field down to bare wood — starts at 8 hours per 100 sq ft with 3 base coats. Both the labor rate and the coat count are higher, so the gap between the two methods compounds rather than adding once, which matters most on a same-color job where the temptation is to assume the cheaper method looks the same when it’s done.
Why does a stain color change add a whole extra coat, not just stain time?
A poly-only job needs no stain step at all. Stain-then-finish adds stain application time across the full finish area, but a color change adds an additional finish coat on top of that — because covering an existing color evenly typically takes one more pass than staining bare wood. That extra coat’s hours and gallons are counted separately from the base coats the method itself sets.
Why does the gallon count round up instead of matching the math exactly?
Because you can’t buy a fraction of a gallon of finish or stain. Gallons needed is finish area times coat count divided by coverage per gallon, then rounded up to the next whole gallon — so a job that calculates to 4.05 gallons still buys 5, and that rounding happens independently for the clear finish and for the stain, since they don’t share a coverage rate.
Do closets and furniture moving get folded into the field square footage?
No — each closet adds its own fixed hours per closet regardless of its size, and furniture-move and repair hours are flat inputs on top of everything else, none of which scale with floor square footage. A job with several small closets and a furniture-heavy room can carry meaningfully more labor than the field square footage alone would suggest.
What does “Copy share link” send, and does anything leave my browser?
It copies the current page’s address with the field square footage, stair and closet counts, method, stain choice, coats, and every rate encoded after a # in the URL. A browser never sends the part after # to a server, so pasting that link into a text or email is the only way the figures travel — opening it re-runs the same bid immediately, so a partner, estimator, or customer sees the exact job you priced rather than a screenshot of the total. Your business name, licence, and the customer’s name and address are never included; those stay on this device.