← Ice dam removal bid calculator
A per-linear-foot rate card looks like it prices every job fairly: more feet, more money. But the crew, the truck, and the steam machine cost close to the same to send out whether the eave needing ice cleared is 15 feet or 150 feet — the trip's real cost is mostly fixed, not proportional to the number quoted. A rate that comfortably clears cost on a long roof can leave a short job depending entirely on the minimum service charge, and if that minimum was never actually checked against real cost, the short job is a loss.
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The long jobs hide it. An 80-foot job at $7/ft — a typical single-family eave — prices out to $560, comfortably above the roughly $332 it actually costs to dispatch a two-person crew, drive out, and run the steamer. Everything looks healthy, because on a job this size the fixed trip cost is a small share of the total.
Minimum service charges often get set once and never checked. A round number like $200 or $250 sounds like a safe floor for "a small job," until you actually add up a two-person crew's labor, travel, fuel, and equipment cost and find it comes to more than that minimum before a single foot is billed.
The risk shows up exactly on the calls that feel easiest to say yes to. A short spot over one window sounds like a quick, low-effort job — but it still needs the same truck roll and the same two-person crew as a full-house job, so it is the shortest jobs, not the longest ones, where an unchecked minimum charge actually loses money.
The default job above — an 80-foot eave, a two-person crew at $34/hr each, 2.5 estimated on-site hours, 1 hour of travel, 35 round-trip miles, $20 of steamer fuel, $15 of equipment cost, 12% overhead — costs about $332.02 to run. At the $7/ft rate card, that same crew and truck sent to a 15-foot job (one bad spot over a window) only bills $105.00 from the rate card alone — the minimum service charge is the only thing standing between that job and a loss:
| Figure | Minimum set at $375 | Minimum set at $200 |
|---|---|---|
| Rate-card price (15ft × $7/ft) | $105.00 | $105.00 |
| Minimum service charge | $375.00 | $200.00 |
| Quoted price (the higher of the two) | $375.00 | $200.00 |
| Real job cost (crew, travel, fuel, equipment, overhead) | $332.02 | $332.02 |
| Break-even rate this footage needs (ignoring the minimum) | $22.13/ft | $22.13/ft |
| Profit | $42.98 | −$132.02 |
The $7/ft rate card is nowhere near the $22.13/ft this specific 15-foot job would need to break even on its own — in both columns, only the minimum service charge is doing the work. A $375 minimum still clears the job's real cost with a thin profit; a $200 minimum, which might look perfectly reasonable next to a competitor's advertised "starting at $199," does not even cover the crew and truck that showed up. The calculator's underpriced flag catches exactly this case, and breakEvenRatePerFoot tells you the number to check your minimum against for any footage, not just this example.
Compare your per-foot rate to the break-even rate for this job's specific footage, not to what feels reasonable for a typical job. A crew, truck, and steam machine cost close to the same to send out regardless of footage, so a short job's break-even rate per foot is much higher than a long job's.
Because the minimum charge is only a backstop if it is actually set above the job's real fixed cost. A minimum that was set by guessing, or copied from a competitor's rate card, can sit below what a two-person crew, a truck, and a steam machine really cost to dispatch once labor, travel, fuel, and overhead are added up.
Only up to a point, and it makes long jobs more expensive than they need to be. Raising the minimum service charge to actually clear the job's fixed cost protects short calls without touching the price of a long run, where the per-foot rate was already working fine.
Short footage on a job that still needs a full crew dispatch is the signal — a single ice dam over one window or a short run of eave, rather than a whole house. The calculator's break-even-rate-per-foot figure recomputes for the exact footage you enter, so you can check any specific job before quoting it rather than relying on a rule of thumb.