Free job costing template for Excel (and the one step most of them skip)

Search for a free job costing template for Excel and you get a grid with a materials column, a labour column, and a price somebody typed in by hand. I built the other kind. Five sheets, two worked jobs, named ranges instead of hardcoded rates, and a check cell that tells you when the arithmetic has drifted. It is free to download at the bottom of this page, and every number in this article came out of it.

The step those templates skip is the last one. They add 35% to cost and call it a 35% margin. On an eleven-day rewire that mistake is worth £1,080.11 of profit, gone quietly, with the quote looking perfectly reasonable on the page.

Download the workbook (16,345 bytes, five sheets, no sign-up) or read on and see where the numbers came from. The file below is the one they came out of.

Markup on cost is not margin on price

Take a job that costs you £100 in materials, labour and overhead. Add 35% and you quote £135. Your profit is £35, which is 35% of the cost — and 25.9% of the price. Same job, same money, two different percentages, and only one of them is the number you set out to earn.

If you want 35% of the price to be profit, the division is the other way round: 100 / (1 - 0.35) = £153.85. The gap between the two answers grows with the size of the job, which is why it survives contact with small quotes and gets expensive on big ones.

Here is that on a real job. TS-001 in the workbook is a full rewire of a three-bed semi: sixteen material lines, four labour tasks, two subcontracted days. At a £320 day rate, £45 of overhead per working day, 8% contingency and 10% waste on materials, the cost comes to £5,731.19.

A markup template set to 35% on the same job quotes £7,737.11. Not 35% of anything: a 25.9% margin. The difference against the margin-correct price is £1,080.11, on one job, in one line of arithmetic that nobody checks because the spreadsheet has no opinion about it.

It also changes how the job looks next to the others. At the markup price the rewire clears £2,005.92 of profit across eleven days on site, or £182.36 a day. At the margin price it clears £280.55. Same labour, same risk, same customer. One number tells you the rewire is barely worth doing; the other tells the truth, which is that it pays about as well as the bathroom refit does per day.

That per-day figure is the one I would put at the top of any quote review. The bathroom job, TS-002, costs less (£4,731.93) and earns more per day on site: £339.73 against the rewire’s £280.55, because it takes seven and a half days rather than eleven. Sort those two jobs by price and the rewire wins. Sort them by profit per day and you would rather have three bathrooms. Most template shops do not show you the second column at all.

Why the order of the sums matters

Two things are added after the margin, not before it, and a third is a cost line most templates run through at the wrong rate. Getting any of the three wrong leaks money quietly.

VAT is not profit. It is collected on behalf of HMRC and it leaves again. If you divide a VAT-inclusive total by (1 - margin) you have quietly priced the VAT into your profit calculation and then charged VAT on top of it. On the rewire the price ex VAT is £8,817.22, the VAT at 20% is £1,763.44, and the invoice total is £10,580.66. The margin stays at 35% of the ex-VAT price. It does not become 45% because the invoice is bigger.

The deposit comes off the invoice total, not off the profit. Twenty-five per cent of £10,580.66 is £2,645.16. On this job the bought-in costs before anyone lifts a tool are £2,021.66: materials with waste plus the subcontracted days. So the deposit covers what you have already committed to spend, with £623.50 left over. The test I would apply to any deposit percentage: does it cover the bought-in cost of starting? On a job that is mostly materials the same 25% can land short, which is why the deposit percentage belongs next to the material total rather than in a house rule.

Subcontractor days are not your day rate. They are their invoice to you. In the workbook a sub day carries its own buy-in rate and adds nothing to the overhead recovery, because the sub is not using your van, your insurance or your time. Get that wrong by charging overhead on sub days and you over-recover against a cost you never incurred, which feels like profit until the year end.

What the workbook actually does

Price = (materials + waste) + (own days x day rate) + (sub days x their rate) + (own days x overhead per day) + contingency, all divided by (1 - target margin).

Every rate lives on the Settings sheet: day rate, overhead per day, contingency, target margin, waste, VAT yes/no, VAT rate, deposit percentage. The job sheets read those through eight named ranges, so changing the day rate once changes every job. There is an IFERROR around the price and a check cell that compares the computed price against a recomputation from the line items; if the two disagree the cell says so instead of showing a plausible wrong number.

You can break it on purpose, which is the only test that matters. Set the margin to a whole number like 35 in a cell expecting 0.35 and v1 of this file produced a negative price with no complaint. Fixed in v1.1. Seven validation rules now stop text in the rate cells and out-of-range margins, and the material block has two spare rows inside the sum so a seventeenth line no longer overwrites the subtotal. I found those by breaking the file rather than by reading it, and I would not trust a template I had not tried to break.

What a quote has to contain, and what to leave off

The quote that causes trouble is rarely the expensive one. It is the one-pager with a total and a start date, because in week three there is nothing in it to argue with. I built the job sheets so that every figure has a source line. The quote needs the same discipline in words, and the test for each sentence is the same: could I stand in the customer’s hallway and point at the part that covers this?

If I cannot, it is either scope creep waiting to happen or a favour I never agreed to do.

A reference and the site address. TS-001, not “the Wilson job”. The reference follows the quote to the invoice, to the photos, to the certificate, and when a customer has three quotes open the reference is what stops them paying the wrong one. The site address belongs on the quote because the billing address is sometimes a different property, and that is where access arguments start.

Scope as operations, with counts. “Remove the existing consumer unit, fit a 10-way metal unit with SPD, test and certify” is a scope. “Electrical works” is a wish. Numbers do most of the work here: 45 double sockets, 18 fire-rated downlights, 60 back boxes. Nobody argues that 45 meant 52 when the number is on the page. In the workbook those counts sit in the quantity column, which is also why the materials subtotal is worth trusting.

Exclusions, named. Making good after chasing. Decoration. Floor coverings. Waste removal. Access equipment. Parking permits. Asbestos survey. Any room not listed. Seven short lines, and the row about the plasterer never happens — the quote already says the plasterer is a separate trade at £180 a day, because that is the rate in TS-001 and there is no reason to hide it.

Assumptions. “Existing wiring is in serviceable condition” is the sentence that decides whether a rewire makes money. Find a lash-up of a ring main in week one and the price changes, but you said in advance that it would. Same for water pressure, same for “no hidden services where we are drilling”, same for the customer clearing the room before you arrive.

Validity. Thirty days, with the date written on it. Wholesaler prices move and so does your diary. “Prices subject to change” on its own reads as “the price is not real”. A date reads as a decision.

Payment terms. Deposit, balance, how many days, which account. Ask for seven days rather than thirty. On a business debt, where the contract says nothing, statutory interest is 8% above the Bank of England base rate (gov.uk). You only get the default when you have not written something better. The quote is the page where you choose your terms or accept someone else’s.

Variations, in one sentence. “Any change is priced before it is carried out, confirmed by text or email, and appears as its own line on the invoice.” Without that sentence every extra is a negotiation at the end, when the customer has the finished job and your remaining card is a polite request to be paid this month.

Notification and certificates. Who tells building control, who pays the fee, when the certificate arrives. On a rewire the certificate is part of what is being sold. It is not a favour a fortnight later.

What comes off the quote: the cost, the margin, the day rate split by task, and the profit per day. The customer is buying a working kitchen circuit, not an audit of your business. The Quote summary sheet shows all four on one screen so they can be checked without ever reaching the page that goes out.

The deposit is the other thing one-van quotes leave vague. Put it on the quote as a number and a date: 25% on acceptance, £2,645.16, balance within seven days of completion. “A deposit to secure materials” is the sentence that starts the argument in week three, because it never says how much. Ask for nothing up front and you have lent the customer two thousand pounds for eleven days, at no interest, out of the money the next job’s materials were going to come from.

One limit on all of this. I have built the arithmetic and broken the workbook until it stopped lying to me, but I have not sat in a dispute over one of these quotes, and a 25% deposit that is normal in one trade loses the job in another. Treat the wording above as a draft to take to somebody who quotes every day. Treat the numbers as the part you can check yourself.

Two jobs, walked through the sheet

Both samples use placeholder supplier prices from a 2026 wholesaler list, not your merchant and not last month’s invoice. The arithmetic is the part that transfers.

TS-001 is a full rewire of a three-bed semi: sixteen material lines, four labour tasks, two subcontracted days for the plasterer.

Divide by 0.65 for a 35% margin and the price is £8,817.22. VAT on top takes the invoice to £10,580.66, the 25% deposit is £2,645.16, and the profit left after the sub and the materials is £3,086.03. Over eleven days on site that is £280.55 a day.

Five material lines carry 57% of that materials figure: eighteen downlights at £12.50 (£225.00), forty-five double sockets at £4.20 (£189.00), two drums of 2.5mm T&E at £78.00 (£156.00), the consumer unit at £145.00, and ten RCBOs at £14.50 (£145.00). That concentration is worth knowing before you haggle. Five percent off those five lines is £43.00, which becomes £47.30 once the waste allowance is applied, which is £72.77 off the quoted price at a 35% margin — or £47.30 straight onto profit if you hold the price where it was. The discount is real money. Where it lands is your decision.

TS-002 is a bathroom refit on the plumbing side: sixteen material lines, five labour tasks, half a day of an electrician for bonding and the certificate.

At the same 35% margin the price is £7,279.90, the invoice with VAT is £8,735.88, the deposit £2,183.97, and the profit £2,547.97. Seven and a half days on site: £339.73 a day.

Now put them side by side, which is what the Quote summary sheet does. The rewire invoices for £1,844.78 more. It also eats three and a half more days, and it pays £59.18 a day less. Fill a month with bathrooms instead of rewires and the same days earn about 21% more.

The reason is in the material figures, not the labour. £1,661.66 against £1,696.42: the two jobs buy roughly the same amount of stuff. The rewire’s larger invoice is bought almost entirely with days, and days are what you sell at a fixed rate regardless of the job. Sorted by price the rewire leads. Sorted by profit per day the bathroom does, and the bathroom is the job you can start on Monday and finish before the rewire would have got its first fix in.

Two honest caveats. Profit per day ignores how long a job ties up the diary before and after — quotes, ordering, the snag visit three weeks later — and those costs are not evenly spread between a bathroom and a rewire. The second is the sample size. Two jobs are not a benchmark. Both are priced at 35%, which flatters the comparison: a firm that asks 45% on bathrooms and 30% on rewires gets a different ranking from the same sheet. The next section prices them that way.

The margin ladder, and why 35% is not a rule

Thirty-five per cent is a convention. Nobody regulates it, it is not the average of anything measured, and it did not come from a survey of what one-van firms actually earn. It came from a template that someone copied from someone else, and it sits in the Settings sheet because it is the number people expect to see there.

What the margin has to pay for is wider than the job in front of you. It pays for the days you never invoice: quote visits, ordering, the run back to the merchant for the part that was wrong on the picking list, the snag visit three weeks after you thought you had finished. It pays for the callback you do for nothing because a valve you fitted dripped. It pays for the quotes you priced and lost. On an eleven-day job there is also a fortnight of admin around it that no customer ever sees a line for.

Here are the same two jobs at six different targets. The cost does not move, because the cost is what the job costs you.

Read the last two columns rather than the prices. Going from 20% to 45% raises the rewire’s price by 45% and its profit per day by 227%. That asymmetry is the argument for caring about margin at all. The day count is fixed by the work. The cost is fixed by your suppliers and your own rate. The margin is the only number in the sheet that changes what an hour on site is worth.

The two jobs diverge as the setting moves: the bathroom stays ahead at every rung, because the rewire buys its bigger invoice with more days. No single margin closes that gap. To make both jobs earn the same per day you have to work backwards.

The formula for that is short. Price must be cost plus the day rate you want, times the days on site. Then the margin that produces that price is one minus cost over price.

At £350 a day the bathroom needs 35.7% and the rewire needs 40.2%. The gap widens as the target rises, because every extra pound of day rate is multiplied by more days on the longer job, so more of the price has to come from margin. This is why “what margin do you use?” is the wrong question and “what does a day need to earn?” is the right one.

There is a second lever, and it is usually better. At 35% the rewire clears £280.55 a day. To reach £300 a day at that same price the cost has to fall by £213.97, which is 3.7% of the job. One merchant conversation on cable and half a day off the estimate gets you there, with no awkward conversation about price. Raising margin is the fast lever. Cutting cost is the one that keeps the quote competitive. Do the second before you lean on the first.

Now, job type. The honest position is that I have no reliable public data on margins by trade, and neither does the person who told you 35%. A figure quoted by trade is a convention with a trade name attached to it. What the arithmetic does tell you is where the risk sits, and that is what should move the target.

On a materials-heavy job most of the cost is bought in, and most of the overrun risk is price: the merchant’s quote expires, the spec changes, the customer adds a line. Margin absorbs that. On a labour-heavy job like the rewire the risk is days, and margin does not buy back a day. It only makes the day you already spent worth more.

Which job is more exposed is not obvious, so here is the arithmetic. Two extra days on the rewire add £730 of cost, two days at £320 plus £45 of overhead, and it comes off the profit: 24% of it. On the bathroom the same overrun takes 29%. The short job loses the bigger share, and I had that backwards until I worked it through. What the long job has instead is eleven days of exposure rather than seven and a half, and more profit in the firing line, £3,086 against £2,548. That is the argument for a higher target on long work. Not that the work is harder, but that there is more of it to get wrong.

Setting your own number without borrowing anyone else’s is dull and reliable. Take your last twenty finished jobs. For each one, put the invoice net of variations next to what it actually cost — materials as bought, days as spent, subs as invoiced. Divide. That is your realised margin. If more than half of the twenty come in under your target, the target is fiction, and you have the evidence in front of you.

I have two jobs here, not two hundred. The arithmetic generalises. The target does not. Treat 35% as a starting position you will move within a month of keeping the numbers.

The three-cell fix

If you are keeping the template you already have — the one with materials in column B and a total at the bottom — you do not need to rebuild it. You need to change three cells. Everything else can wait.

Put the job’s total cost in B2, the target margin in B3 as a percentage, the price in B4, and a check in B5:

B4  =ROUND(B2/(1-B3),2)
B5  =ROUND(B4*(1-B3)-B2,2)

On the rewire, with £5,731.19 in B2 and 35% in B3, B4 reads £8,817.22 and B5 reads 0.00. That zero is the point. It is a live proof that the price in front of you returns the margin you asked for, on the cost you entered. If B5 reads anything else, one of the three cells is wrong, and you find out before the customer does rather than after the job.

Rounding matters more than it looks. Quote figures go to the penny, and an unrounded price multiplied back by the margin leaves pennies of drift that make the check cell look broken when it is not. Round the price, then check the rounded price.

Then guard the input, because a percentage cell will accept nonsense:

B4  =IF(OR(B3<=0,B3>=0.9),"check margin",ROUND(B2/(1-B3),2))

Typing 35 instead of 35% into a percentage-formatted cell is the most common way these templates break. Excel reads it as 3500%, and the division returns a negative price that looks like a typo in the formula rather than a typo in the setting. I found that defect by doing exactly that to my own workbook. It is why the shipped version carries a guard and a check cell instead of trust.

What the fix is worth: on the rewire it moves the price from £7,737.11 to £8,817.22. That is £1,080.11, a 14% rise. On the bathroom it is £891.79, the same 14%. The percentage is not a coincidence. A 35% markup on cost is a 25.9% margin, and the distance between those two numbers is fixed by arithmetic rather than by the size of the job. Every job you quoted with the markup method was short by that same fraction.

Expect the rise to cost you some quotes. It will. Some of the jobs you lose were going to eat a fortnight for £180 a day, and losing them is the mechanism working, not a problem with it. The check cell is still not a pricing strategy. It tells you the price returns the margin you chose. It has nothing to say about whether that margin is right, and on a competitive job it will happily confirm a number nobody will pay.

Three cells do not cover VAT, deposits or subcontract labour. Those are the next three, and the order matters: materials at cost, then waste, then own days, then sub days at their own rate, then overheads on own days only, then contingency, then divide. If you only ever do the first three, do these next. Without them the sheet prices a job correctly and still tells you nothing about the cash it needs before you start.

Limits, stated plainly

The unit costs are 2026 placeholders, not supplier quotes. The arithmetic is the product; the prices are yours to replace. If your merchant is 12% cheaper on cable, the template does not know that and will not learn it.

There is no retention, no CIS deduction, no quote-versus-actual on completion and no supplier price history. If you are a subcontractor working under CIS, this workbook will price the job correctly and then tell you nothing about what actually lands in your account.

Also: nobody has opened v1.1 in Excel yet. I verified it by parsing the shipped formula strings and recomputing 270 cells across five setting sets (margin 15%, margin 45%, VAT off, VAT 5% with no deposit, and the defaults), with zero mismatches. That is a strong check on the formulas and no check at all on how Excel renders the print areas on your printer. If something looks wrong when you open it, tell me and I will fix it.

The file itself

job-costing-v1.1.xlsx, 16,345 bytes. sha256sum on your copy should return 9cf49cdd941fe5f3dc95a77e4677615cd4cca40ca12bdcb3e14ccdea0bd926a6. If it does not, the download went wrong somewhere rather than your Excel.

Five sheets: Settings, the rewire, the bathroom, Quote summary, Read me. Eight settings on the first one drive both jobs through named ranges, so a new day rate is one cell and not sixteen. The two worked jobs are there to be broken before you break a live quote: put 35 into the margin cell instead of 35% and the guard should stop you, which is what v1 failed to do.

Free for your own jobs and your own business, including the ones you invoice. Not for resale, and not to be republished under another name.

If you work in plumbing rather than electrics, the plumber’s version of this walkthrough runs a combi swap and a bathroom through the same model, and shows the deposit shortfall a 25% rule leaves on a materials-heavy job. And if you want the plain definition first, what job costing is, with the rewire above as the worked example, takes the same numbers apart line by line without assuming you have opened the file.

Read the limits above before you trust a number in it. I would rather you knew what it does not do than found out on a job.