The wall
Pick a common job to start, then replace every rate with a mortar ticket and a crew you have timed. Changing method, access, or mortar fills starting hours and material only when you have not already edited that field.
Hours and material rates
These start from the method, access, and mortar you picked. They are ballpark crew figures, not a mortar catalog or a guarantee.
Your costs
Payroll burden covers employer taxes, workers’ compensation, liability insurance, and paid time off. Underestimating it is how an $8 / sq ft smear that looked profitable was not.
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 homeowner — 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.
Your bid
- Wall area
- Joint lineal feet
- Travel
- Crew hours
- Loaded labor
- Mortar
- Access, grind, extras
- Travel & other
- Overhead
- Total cost
- Profit
- Price per sq ft
- Price per joint 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 wall, three methods
| Method | 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 does grind-and-point cost so much more than a smear on the exact same wall?
Because a smear skips the grind step entirely — 0 grind hours and 0.055 point hours per sq ft — while grind-and-point adds 0.095 grind hours on top of 0.125 point hours, roughly four times the total labor per sq ft. Mortar follows the same jump, from $0.42 to $0.88 per sq ft, and grind-and-point is the only method that consumes grind blades at all. The method comparison prices the same wall all three ways so the gap shows up before you quote off a single per-square-foot number.
Why does scaffold or swing-stage access cost so much even though it's not part of the wall itself?
Because access is a flat setup cost tied to how the crew reaches the wall, not to how much wall there is. Ground access runs 0.7 hours and no equipment cost; scaffold runs 5.5 hours plus $480 of equipment; a swing stage or mast runs 9.2 hours plus $1,450. That charge is the same whether the wall being pointed is 20 sq ft or 200 — a small three-story job can carry more access cost than a large one-story job.
Why does historic lime mortar cost more than Type N even on the identical method and wall?
Type N portland comes premixed in bags and needs 0.4 hours of mix time with no per-square-foot premium. Historic lime putty needs 1.8 hours of mix time and carries a $1.35-per-sq-ft premium on top of the base mortar rate, because lime mortar is mixed and cured differently. Custom color-matched mortar goes further still — 2.6 mix hours, a $185 sample invoice, and a $2.15-per-sq-ft premium — all independent of which method (smear, grind, or rebuild) is doing the pointing.
How is joint lineal footage worked out from the wall dimensions?
From wall area times a joint density figure — length times height gives square footage, and that's multiplied by a lineal-feet-of-joint-per-square-foot rate to estimate how much joint the crew is actually working, not just how much wall face there is. That figure feeds the price-per-joint-foot number, which stays more consistent across walls of different proportions than price-per-square-foot alone.
Do replacement bricks and lintels only add material cost?
No — each replacement brick adds its own labor time on top of its own unit cost, and each lintel adds a much larger block of hours (1.8 hours per lintel) alongside its own material cost, because a lintel replacement is structural work, not a joint repair. Power-washing and control-joint caulk work the same way: each is a toggle or a quantity that adds its own hours and its own material line, contributing nothing when left off or at zero.