How to price a countertop job
Most shops price by finding out what the shop down the road charges and going slightly under. That works until it doesn't, and it never tells you which jobs make money. Here is the build-up method, and the one number it gives you that everything else depends on.
Build the price up from your own costs. Slab cost including delivery, divided by usable square footage after real waste. Add fabrication labour at your loaded hourly rate, then the job-specific extras - edge profile, cutouts, seams, splashback - then install and travel, then overhead recovery, then margin. The per-square-foot number is an output of that, never an input.
This page deliberately contains no dollar figures. Slab costs, labour rates and what a market will bear differ so much between cities, materials and years that any number we printed would be wrong for most readers and out of date for the rest. What does not change is the method, and the method is where shops go wrong.
The usual failure is pricing off a blended square-foot rate that was reverse-engineered from a competitor's advertised price. That rate carries no information about your slab costs, your waste or your labour, so it prices every job as though it were the average job. The consequence is predictable: simple jobs are overpriced and you lose them, complicated jobs are underpriced and you win them. You end up busy and poor.
The build-up, step by step
1. Material, divided by usable square footage
Take the delivered cost of the slab - including freight, which shops routinely forget - and divide it by the square footage you can actually sell out of it, not the slab's nominal size.
Those two numbers are not close. Sink cutouts, seam allowances, unusable edges, veining you have to work around and the piece you keep for the splashback all come off. If you divide by the nominal size you have understated material on every single quote you will ever write.
Do not use a rule of thumb from a forum. Pull your last ten jobs, add up the square footage you sold, add up the square footage you bought, and divide. That ratio is your real waste factor.
It will vary by material and by how fussy your customers are about veining. Run it separately for the materials you sell most. Shops that guess almost always guess low, which is exactly why heavily-veined and bookmatched work quietly loses money while feeling like premium work.
2. Fabrication labour at a loaded rate
Your hourly labour cost is not the wage. It is the wage plus payroll taxes, insurance, benefits, and the hours that get paid but not sold - travel, setup, cleanup, remakes, the morning someone spent chasing a delivery.
Take a month of total labour cost and divide it by the hours you actually billed out that month, not the hours people were present. Most shops discover their loaded rate is far above what they had in their head, and that gap is the profit that disappears every year without an obvious cause.
3. The extras that make one job different from another
Price these individually, every time:
- Edge profile. An eased or straight edge and a full ogee or waterfall are not the same amount of work, and should never sit inside one blended rate.
- Cutouts. Undermount sinks, farmhouse sinks, cooktops, faucet holes, outlets. Each is labour and each is a chance to destroy a slab.
- Seams. More seams is more labour; a job the customer insists must be seamless may mean a larger slab and a different material cost entirely.
- Splashback, waterfall ends, integrated drainboards, radius corners.
- Removal and disposal of the old tops. Frequently done free, almost never free.
- Site conditions. Third-floor walk-up, no parking, cabinets that are not level, a template date where the plumber has not turned up.
4. Install and travel
Crew hours, vehicle, fuel, and the distance. A job an hour outside town costs you a chunk of a day that a job ten minutes away does not, and a flat install price across a whole metro means your near work subsidises your far work.
5. Overhead recovery
Rent, machines, software, insurance, the phone, the truck payment, the bookkeeper, your own time when you are not cutting. Total your annual fixed costs, divide by the square footage you expect to install this year, and you have an overhead figure per square foot that must sit inside every quote.
Overhead does not care whether you priced for it. Skipping this step is how a shop can be busy all year, competitive on every quote, and end up with nothing.
6. Margin, on top of all of it
Margin is what is left after everything above, and it is what pays for the bad year, the new saw and the fact that you took the risk. It is a decision, not a residue. Decide it deliberately rather than accepting whatever the arithmetic leaves behind.
The number this gives you
Run that build-up and you get something most shops do not have: gross profit per job - the price minus the direct cost of delivering it.
Most obviously, it sets what you can afford to spend to win work. The formula on our cost per lead page is:
Break-even cost per lead = gross profit per job × share of leads that become jobs
A shop that does not know its gross profit per job cannot evaluate a single advertising decision, because it has no idea what a lead is worth. It is reduced to judging marketing on whether the invoice feels large, which is how shops end up cancelling channels that were profitable and keeping ones that were not.
For context on the other side of that equation, our own cost per lead at BedRock Countertops in Calgary was about $30, across 48 leads in 30 days, with 54% booking a measure. That is one shop, one city, one month - a data point, not a benchmark, and your own numbers are the ones that matter.
Three habits worth changing
- Itemise the quote. Your competitors advertise a low blended rate and add the extras later. If your all-in number sits next to their headline number you look expensive for a price the customer will never actually pay. Itemising lets you show the same total honestly and compete on the comparison the customer eventually makes anyway.
- Re-price when slab costs move, not once a year. A price list built on last spring's material cost is a slow leak.
- Track quoted versus won by job type. If you win 80% of complicated bookmatched jobs and 20% of simple quartz kitchens, you are not a specialist - you are underpriced on the hard work and overpriced on the easy work.
Should you publish prices?
Partly. A starting price or a range on your website filters out people whose budget you cannot serve, and every measure you do not drive to for a job you were never going to win is a real saving.
Publishing a precise price for a job you have not seen does not work - square footage, material, edges, cutouts and seams move the number too far. A range with the assumptions stated plainly ("quartz, standard eased edge, one undermount sink, no splashback") is the usable middle, and it makes the quote conversation start from an informed place instead of a shock.
We do not sell estimating software and this page is not a pitch for any. If you want a tool that does the arithmetic, that is what Moraware CounterGo and ActionFlow are for, and the software map covers the category. StoneMagnet sells the demand side, and we wrote this because a shop that does not know its gross profit cannot judge whether we or anyone else is worth paying.
Common questions
How do you price a countertop job?
Build it up instead of guessing a per-square-foot rate. Slab cost including delivery divided by usable square footage after real waste; fabrication labour at your loaded hourly rate; the job-specific extras - edge profile, cutouts, seams, splashback; install and travel; overhead recovery; then margin. The per-square-foot figure is an output of that process, not an input.
What waste factor should I use?
Your own, measured. Take the last ten jobs, compare square footage sold against square footage bought, and that ratio is your real waste factor. Run it separately per material. It varies enormously with layout and how much your customers care about veining, and shops that guess almost always guess low.
What is gross profit per job and why does it matter?
The job's price minus the direct cost of delivering it - material, fabrication labour, install labour and consumables. It sets what you can afford to spend to win a job, because break-even cost per lead equals gross profit per job multiplied by the share of leads that become jobs. Without it you cannot judge whether any marketing is working.
Should I charge separately for cutouts and edge profiles?
Yes. They are real labour that varies hugely between jobs, and burying them in a blended rate means simple jobs subsidise complicated ones. Itemising also protects you against competitors whose advertised rate excludes the same extras.
Should I publish my prices?
A starting price or a range, yes - it filters out budgets you cannot serve and saves you measures you would not have won. A precise price for a job you have not seen, no. State the assumptions alongside the range and the quote conversation starts from an informed place.