The building
Pick a common job to start, then replace every rate with your lumber ticket and a crew you have timed. Changing floor, insulation, or electrical fills starting hours and material only when you have not already edited that field.
Hours and material rates
These start from the floor, insulation, and electrical you picked. They are ballpark crew figures, not a lumber catalog or a guarantee.
Your costs
Payroll burden covers employer taxes, workers’ compensation, liability insurance, and paid time off. Underestimating it is how a per-foot special that looked profitable was not.
Your bid
- Building area
- Bays / posts / trusses
- Wall / roof steel
- Floor volume
- Lean-to
- Crew hours
- Loaded labor
- Shell (posts, trusses, steel)
- Floor, doors, extras
- Travel & other
- Overhead
- Total cost
- Profit
- Price per sq ft
- 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 barn, three floors
| Floor | 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 different from a $45-a-square-foot special?
A flat per-square-foot number treats a bare gravel ag shell as the same job as a shop with extra eave height, overhead doors, a slab, and a lean-to. This calculator prices those separately — bays and posts from the spacing, extra hours for eave height, doors, lean-to, and floor type — so two buildings with the same footprint but different specs come out at different prices, the way real material and labor tickets do.
Does switching from gravel to a slab only change the floor cost?
No. Picking a floor preset also fills in that floor's own hours-per-square-foot, concrete or gravel rate, and rebar rate, because pouring and finishing a 6-inch reinforced slab takes real crew time a gravel floor does not. Once you have hand-edited a rate it stops auto-filling on preset changes, so your own numbers are never silently overwritten.
Does the walk-away price include any profit for me?
No. The walk-away price is your total cost with zero margin — labor, shell material, floor, doors, and overhead, but no profit. The price above it is the one built from your target net margin; quoting at the walk-away number means the job cannot lose money, but it also cannot pay you.
Does my bid data leave my browser?
No. Every calculation runs locally, and a copied bid link carries your own rates in the URL rather than on a server — send it to yourself or your crew, not the customer. Your saved bid lives in this browser only; “Start a fresh bid” deletes it.
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.