HOME STAGING PRICING
The search is usually “how much to charge for home staging.” Most of the answers are a rate card from a franchise with a warehouse team, or a lead form. This page is the method an independent stager can actually check against their own invoices, and it pairs with a free browser calculator that does the arithmetic locally — nothing you type leaves your device.
Install day and pickup day are fixed. Crew hours, the truck, the round trip, the equipment, the consultation: those cost the same whether the listing closes in three weeks or sits until spring. Then there is the part nobody quotes — the package itself is off the market for the whole term. Storage, insurance, and wear keep running, and that sofa cannot be delivered to a second listing while it is in the first one.
The trap is that the first cost is easy to see on an invoice and the second one is not. It shows up as a warehouse bill you would be paying anyway, so it gets treated as overhead rather than as a cost this specific job is consuming.
Add the fixed cost: crew hours at a loaded rate, mileage at whatever you actually reimburse, equipment, the flat consultation fee, and anything else the job carries. Then add the furniture package’s own carrying cost, per month, multiplied by the term you are including. That total is your break-even for a job that finishes exactly on schedule. Overhead as a share of direct cost and a target margin as a share of price sit on top of it.
Note what this means: two jobs with identical room counts have different floors if one ties up your good package for two months and the other borrows a spare bedroom set for three weeks.
The extension fee is where independent stagers lose the margin they priced. It is easy to set it by feel — a round number that sounds reasonable to a nervous seller who has already dropped the asking price once. If that number is below what the package costs you to carry for a month, the fee is not compensation, it is a subscription you are paying to the listing.
The calculator states this as a straight comparison: profit per extension month, and how many extra months the job can absorb before the whole thing goes negative. When the fee clears the carrying cost, a slow listing is merely disappointing. When it does not, a slow listing is expensive, and it gets worse every month for a reason you cannot influence.
Time on market is unknowable at quote time, so the estimate was always a planning number. Once the listing closes, put the real months back in and look at what the job actually earned. Do that a dozen times and you have something better than a rate card: your own distribution of how long your listings really take, in your market, at your price point. That is the figure that should set your included term.
Not a quote on your behalf, not an industry rate card, not legal, tax, or business advice, and not a prediction of how long any home will take to sell. It models a vacant-listing furniture package; occupied-home staging consultations are priced differently. Verify every figure against your own invoices, storage bills, and mileage log before you send a price.
Open the home staging bid calculator — it stays in your browser.
There is no single rate, because a staging job is not one price but two. The first is a fixed cost paid on delivery day and pickup day: crew hours, the truck, mileage, equipment, and the consultation. The second is a monthly cost that runs for as long as the furniture sits in the house: storage you are still paying for, insurance, and wear on a package that cannot be rented to anyone else. Price the included term to cover the fixed cost plus the carrying cost for that many months, then add overhead and your target margin.
At an absolute minimum, more than what one month of that furniture package actually costs you to keep off the market. Work out storage, insurance, and depreciation per month for the package itself, not for the whole warehouse, and treat that figure as the floor. An extension fee set below it turns every extra month on the market into a larger loss, and the loss has no ceiling because you do not control when the home sells.
Because the quote covered a term and the cost ran for a duration. Install and de-install cost the same whether the listing sells in three weeks or four months, so a term price that looks healthy on a fast sale is doing all its work in the first few weeks. Every month past the included term draws down the same margin unless the extension fee covers the carrying cost on its own. A job can be quoted at a thirty percent margin and finish near zero without a single number in the quote being wrong.
A room count is useful for describing the job to a seller and useless for costing it. Four rooms of furniture you already own, stored ten minutes away, is a different cost from four rooms that empty your inventory for a quarter. What the money runs on is the carrying cost of the specific package you are committing and how long you expect to be without it, so quote in rooms if that is what the agent asks for, but build the number from the package.