The yard
Pick a common job to start, then replace every rate with a light invoice and a crew you have timed. Changing scope, soil, or transformer fills starting hours and material only when you have not already edited that field.
Hours and material rates
These start from the scope, soil, and transformer 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 $150 / light install that looked profitable was not.
Your bid
- Fixtures
- Trench
- Travel
- Crew hours
- Loaded labor
- Fixtures, wire, transformer
- Trench, soil, extras
- Travel & other
- Overhead
- Total cost
- Profit
- Price per fixture
- 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 yard, 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.
Common questions
Why is my price so much higher than a $150-a-light quote I saw?
A flat per-light number usually assumes the cheapest scenario in this tool: fixtures-only on an existing transformer, easy soil, no trench. Switching to a new-system job adds trench footage, wire, and a transformer that a per-fixture rate cannot see. Use the “Same yard, three scopes” comparison to see exactly how much of the gap is trench and transformer.
What is the difference between the fixtures-only, new-system, and existing-add-on presets?
Fixtures-only assumes you are hanging lights on a transformer that is already there — no trench, no wire run. New-system assumes you are trenching, running wire, and installing a transformer from scratch. Existing-add-on assumes a shorter home-run trench back into a system already on the house. Picking the wrong one under- or over-fills your starting trench and transformer hours.
Does the walk-away price include any profit for me?
No. The walk-away price is your total cost with zero margin built in — labor, fixtures, wire, transformer, and overhead, but no profit. The price above it is the one that includes your target net margin; quoting at or below the walk-away number means the job cannot lose money, but it also cannot pay you.
Do irrigated turf and rocky soil actually change the price, or just the hours?
Both. Harder soil adds trenching hours at your loaded wage, and irrigated turf also adds a turf-repair material cost per lineal foot for the sod you disturb. Picking “easy” soil on a yard with an irrigation system underprices the trench twice — once in time, once in material.
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.