Electrical Job Pricing Calculator
Price your own electrical work. Build a burdened labor rate, add materials and overhead, and print a branded estimate free — no signup, no email.
Your Job
Read in your browser and drawn straight onto the estimate. It is never uploaded.
Prefilled with the national median for electricians, $30.38/hr — 25th percentile $23.76, 75th $40.36. Source: BLS OEWS, May 2025 (SOC 47-2111). Replace it with what you actually pay.
Craftsman 1.32× — A merit-shop journeyman buildup — payroll taxes, insurance, and workers' comp, without a union benefits package or paid leave. Source: Craftsman Book Co., National Electrical Estimator — published labour buildup method.
BLS ECEC 1.45× — Derived from benefits being 30.8% of total compensation in construction. Includes union shops and paid leave, so it sits at the top of the range. Source: BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, construction, March 2026.
No single free source gives “the” burden for an electrical contractor, so this ships both ends of the published range instead of averaging them into a number nobody wrote down.
This indexes employee wages — nothing else. Not your billing rate, not material prices, not what your local market will pay for a job. A ZIP resolves at prefix level, so check the area name above before you use the number. Source: BLS OEWS, May 2025 (SOC 47-2111), mapped via the Census ZCTA and CBSA files.
Hours are yours to enter. This tool ships published labour hours for one task only — a 200 A panel upgrade, at 8–12 man-hours solo — because that is the only one we could verify against two independent sources.
What you pay at the counter. Markup happens once, through the margin below — don't mark materials up here as well or you will double-count it.
This default is a placeholder, not a benchmark. Work out your own: last year's overhead — rent, trucks, insurance, phones, unbilled office time — divided by last year's direct job costs. No free source publishes a credible overhead rate for a shop your size, so we are not going to pretend one exists.
The share of the price you keep — not a markup on cost. Published gross margins for electrical contractors run 35–62% on residential service and low-to-mid 40s on project work (Lightning Path Partners and Profitability Partners, 2026). Margin vs. markup, side by side →
Your Estimate
Where the money goes
Overhead is recovered inside the cost your margin is taken on. Taking the margin first lands on the same price but quietly under-recovers overhead — the classic way a shop stays busy and still ends the year short.
Customer estimate
Your Business Name
Estimate
August 10, 2026
Prepared for
—
Job
200 A panel upgrade
| Description | Amount |
|---|---|
| Panel swap and terminations | $770.94 |
| Panel, breakers, and wire | $1,245.84 |
| Total | $2,016.78 |
Estimate only. Final price may change if the scope or site conditions change.
Free, with your name and logo on it. No account, no email, no watermark — and your logo never leaves this browser.
Want this e-signed and tracked? SignedBid turns the same estimate into a branded proposal with good/better/best options, an e-signature line, and a notification the moment your customer opens it.
Turn it into a SignedBid quote →What these jobs sell for
Consumer-survey installed price — what a homeowner pays, not what the job costs you. Nothing here feeds the calculation above; it is here so you can see whether your own buildup lands in the market.
Labour: 8–12 man-hours solo, 6–7 with a helper — The only task here with hours we could verify twice.
Source: HomeGuide (“8 to 10 hours”) and ElectricianTalk contractor consensus, 2026
Source: Two independent consumer price surveys, 2026. No labour hours — every hours figure we found traced back to contractor marketing blogs or SEO calculators, and Craftsman has no EV line item at all.
Source: Two independent consumer price surveys, 2026. No labour hours — published sources give labour *dollars*, never hours.
Source: Two independent consumer price surveys, 2026. No labour hours — forums quote price per can, never hours.
Labour: ≈1 hr swap, 2–3 hr with new wiring — Single-sourced, from a consumer guide rather than an estimating reference. Treat it as weaker than the panel figure.
Source: Consumer price survey, 2026
Four of these five carry no labour hours on purpose. Free sources publish installed price, not contractor cost, and the sites that do print hours could not show where they came from — one advertises defaults “derived from NECA” with no table or page to check. We would rather ship four numbers than five with one invented.
How this works
What you pay an employee and what that hour actually costs you are two different numbers. The second one, the fully burdened labor rate, adds payroll taxes, workers' comp, liability insurance, benefits, and paid time off on top of the wage, and it's the number your price has to cover, not the wage alone.
There's no single accepted multiplier. BLS's Employer Costs for Employee Compensation report for March 2026 puts benefits at 30.8% of total construction compensation, which works out to roughly 1.45 times wages. Craftsman's published journeyman buildup lands closer to 1.32 times. The gap comes down to what each figure includes, union benefits and paid leave push the BLS number up, so 1.32 to 1.45 is a reasonable range to build from rather than a single correct answer.
This calculator takes that rate, adds your hours and materials with a markup in the 25% to 40% range published guidance points to for electrical contractors, applies your overhead and target margin, and prints a line-itemed estimate with your business name on it. No signup, no email required to use it.
Worked example
A panel swap: $30/hr base wage at 35% burden, 8 hours with a 2-person crew, $350 of materials, 15% overhead, a 30% target margin.
The estimate prices at $1,639.57, with $491.87 of profit built in after overhead is recovered, not before it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is fully burdened labor rate?↓
The fully burdened labor rate is what an hour of an employee's time actually costs the company: their base wage plus payroll taxes, workers' comp, liability insurance, benefits, and paid time off. Two free, citable sources bracket the multiplier. BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (March 2026, construction) puts benefits at 30.8% of total compensation, which works out to about 1.45x wages. Craftsman's published journeyman buildup lands at about 1.32x. The gap is explainable — the BLS figure includes union shops and paid leave, Craftsman assumes a merit shop — so treat 1.32x to 1.45x as the honest range rather than picking a single number.
How much should I mark up electrical materials?↓
Published guidance for electrical contractors puts material markup around 25% to 40% (Lightning Path Partners, 2026). It covers waste, obsolescence, cost of capital, and the admin of buying — below about 20% you are financing the customer. Small components are commonly marked up higher and large expensive items lower, so the blended number on a job matters more than any single line.
Should I charge flat rate or time and materials?↓
Flat rate pricing often leads to higher profitability and happier customers since the price is known upfront. Time and materials is lower risk for unknown troubleshooting, but limits profit potential.
Related calculators
Want this with your logo, good/better/best options, and an e-signature line? Turn it into a SignedBid quote — your calculator inputs become your first real proposal.
Turn it into a SignedBid quote →