The house
Pick a common job to start, then replace every rate with a light invoice and a crew you have timed. Changing scope, stories, or light type fills starting hours and material only when you have not already edited that field.
Hours and material rates
These start from the scope, stories, and light type you picked. They are ballpark crew figures, not a light catalog or a guarantee.
Your costs
Payroll burden covers employer taxes, workers’ compensation, liability insurance, and paid time off. Underestimating it is how a $3 / LF hang that looked profitable was not.
Your bid
- Eave length
- Travel
- Crew hours
- Loaded labor
- Lights & type
- Stories, take-down, extras
- Travel & other
- Overhead
- Total cost
- Profit
- Price per LF
- 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 house, three scopes
| Scope | Hours | Price |
|---|
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 flyer advertise “$3 a foot, hang-only”?
Because that is a real number for a real, narrow job: the first preset here, a one-story ranch, 140 feet of C9 on clips, customer-owned lights, no take-down. Hang-only skips the 45% take-down ratio and the full-service 50% ratio entirely — there is simply no second trip to price. Add a January take-down, a second story, or icicle lights and the flyer’s number stops describing your job; the gap is not padding, it is the trip the flyer left out.
Why does hang-and-takedown cost more than twice a hang-only special?
Because take-down is not half the hang labor, it is 45–50% of the hang-and-access hours billed as a second visit — a separate trip, separate travel, separate ladder-setting — on top of the original hang. Full service adds a third cost on top of that: contractor-owned lights at $2.60 a foot and a flat $95 off-season storage invoice, since nothing goes back to the customer’s garage.
What does a second story actually add?
1.6 access hours and $0.014 per foot before a single extra light is hung, plus a $165 lift invoice the calculator bills as a flat material cost. Three-story or a lift-required roofline doubles the access hours to 3.2, the per-foot premium to $0.028, and the lift invoice to $390. That is ladder-setting and working off height, not lineal footage — which is why the same 180 feet costs more on a colonial than a ranch.
What changes between C9, icicle, and commercial-grade lights?
C9 on clips is the base case: zero extra hours, zero extra material, because it is what the hang-hours-per-foot rate already assumes. Icicle adds 0.02 hours and $1.40 of material per foot for the denser clip-and-hook run. Commercial-grade LED C9 adds less labor — 0.008 hours per foot — but more material, $3.20 a foot, because the fixture itself costs more than the extra clipping time.
How are peaks, trees, bushes, and columns priced?
Each is its own line, not folded into the per-foot rate: a peak or gable adds 0.35 hours and $18 of material, a tree wrap adds 0.9 hours and $42, a bush or shrub net adds 0.25 hours and $14, and a column wrap adds 0.2 hours and $12. A timer or photocell adds 0.35 hours and a $28 invoice, and a steep-pitch roof adds a flat 0.8 access hours on top of the story premium. None of these move with eave footage, so a small house with six trees can cost more than a long, plain roofline.
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. The optional usage counter records only which features were used and the day, never your footage, wages, or prices, and you can turn it off from the checkbox in the footer.