Enter your real overhead, labor costs, and profit target. Get the exact number to charge. Not a guess, not a markup, not what the last guy quoted.
Free PDF: Net Profit Pricing Worksheet20% net profit · covers all costs
Most pricing tools are either too simple to be useful or too complicated to touch. This one does three things that matter.
Base wage is not your labor cost. The calculator adds burden (payroll taxes, workers comp, benefits) so the number you're pricing off is what you're actually paying.
Rent, insurance, trucks, office staff. All of it gets divided across your real billable hours. Every job you quote carries its share of the cost to keep the doors open.
Markup and net profit are not the same number. A 25% markup is not 25% net profit. The formula here (Selling Price = Cost divided by (1 minus Profit%)) is the one that actually delivers what you target.
Enter your overhead and labor rates once. Every item in your book prices itself automatically.
| Item | Hours | Parts | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Capacitor Replacement | 0.5 hr | $35.00 | $189.00 |
| Contactor Replacement | 0.75 hr | $45.00 | $241.00 |
| Refrigerant Leak Check | 1 hr | $0.00 | $198.00 |
| Item | Hours | Parts | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ignitor Replacement | 0.5 hr | $55.00 | $212.00 |
| Pressure Switch Replacement | 0.75 hr | $40.00 | $237.00 |
| Heat Exchanger Inspection | 1.5 hr | $0.00 | $319.00 |
Swipe to scroll the table
Sample data shown above. Your prices will reflect your real overhead, labor rates, and profit targets.
I spent 7 years in the field watching contractors work themselves to exhaustion and still not understand why the money never added up. I saw it as an installer and I saw it again from the sales side when I started sitting at kitchen tables quoting jobs. The pricing was almost always built on markup, gut feel, or whatever the last guy charged. Nobody was accounting for what a crew actually costs to put on a job once you factor in burden, overhead, and non-billable time.
I was doing it too. Busy as ever. Bank account said otherwise.
The frustration was not just personal. It was watching good tradespeople run real businesses into the ground, not because they were bad at HVAC, but because nobody ever showed them the math. The spreadsheets that existed required an accounting background to build and maintain. The flat rate books were either copied from someone else or built off industry averages that had nothing to do with my actual cost structure.
So I built something that starts with your profit target and works backwards through your real numbers. Not a template. Not a guess. Your labor burden, your overhead, your crew, your margin.
That is the honest answer. And it is a better answer than most founders can give about why they built what they built, because it came from a decade of firsthand frustration, not a market research report.
And I built it for my future self, for when I own a service business.
A PDF that walks through the full pricing formula by hand: labor burden, overhead per hour, and the exact math to price any HVAC job. No account required.
Free PDF · instant delivery · no account required
A spreadsheet requires you to build and maintain the formula yourself, and most contractors either use the wrong formula or skip overhead entirely. This calculator has the correct net profit formula baked in, handles division allocation between service and install, and updates every number in real time as you adjust inputs. No formulas to debug, no cells to break.
Yes, but you only do it once. Enter your monthly overhead costs (rent, insurance, vehicles, utilities, etc.) and your billable hours, and the calculator handles the math from there. If your numbers change, update them in one place and every quote adjusts automatically.
The overhead allocation slider is built specifically for this. You set the percentage of overhead that belongs to service versus install, and the calculator splits it correctly. Most contractors who run both divisions under-allocate overhead to service, which is exactly where profit leaks happen.
The formula is: Selling Price = Total Cost divided by (1 minus Target Profit %). The complexity is in calculating total cost correctly, which means true labor burden plus accurate overhead per hour plus parts. That is what this tool handles. The formula itself is the same one used by profitable HVAC businesses across the country.
Enter your overhead once. Every quote you run after that is priced from your real numbers.