How to Build a Price List for Your Trade
A price list turns quoting from an evening's work into ten minutes on site. Here's how to build one from the jobs you actually do, keep it current, and stop pricing the same work from scratch every time.
Most tradies price every job as if it's the first one they've ever seen — despite doing roughly the same twenty jobs over and over. A price list fixes that. Build it once from the work you actually repeat, and quoting becomes assembly rather than calculation. This guide covers what belongs on one, how to work out the rates, how to keep it from going stale, and when to abandon it for a custom quote.
Doing this job for a living? See job management in ServiceYak.
What a price list actually is
A price list is your library of repeatable work, each item priced with your labour, materials and margin already in it. Not a published rate card for customers — an internal set of building blocks you assemble a quote from.
The difference it makes is speed and consistency. Quote from a list and the same job costs the same in March as it did in January, whether you priced it in the ute or your offsider priced it at the office.
- Faster quoting — assemble rather than calculate, which means quoting on site instead of after dinner.
- Consistent pricing — no more discovering you quoted the same job three different ways.
- Nothing forgotten — a saved item carries its consumables and disposal with it.
- Someone else can quote — the pricing knowledge stops living only in your head.
Start with the twenty jobs you actually do
Don't try to price everything. Go through your last three months of invoices and find what repeats — for most trades, a surprisingly small list covers the majority of the work.
| Trade | Typical repeat items |
|---|---|
| Electrical | Downlight supply and install, GPO addition, switchboard upgrade, safety switch, smoke alarm, fan install |
| Plumbing | Tap or mixer replacement, hot water swap, toilet install, drain clear, burst repair, call-out |
| Carpentry | Door hang, decking per m², pergola per m², skirting per lineal metre |
| Painting | Interior per m², ceiling per m², door and frame, prep per hour |
| Landscaping | Turf per m², paving per m², garden bed per m², mulch per m³ |
Add a call-out or minimum charge as a line item, and use it. Small jobs priced purely on the hour are where trade businesses lose money — the travel, the parking and the write-up cost the same whether the job took twenty minutes or two hours.
Working out each rate
Each item needs to carry everything the job consumes, not just the obvious labour and materials. For every line, work through:
- Time on the tools. How long the task genuinely takes, including setup and pack-up — not your best-ever run at it.
- Your charge-out rate. Apply the rate you calculated from your income, hours and overheads, rather than a number you inherited from someone else.
- Materials, plus waste. Current supplier pricing with your standard waste allowance already built in.
- Consumables and disposal. Silicone, fixings, blades, tip fees. Individually trivial, collectively the difference between a good margin and a thin one.
- Your margin. Applied as margin, not markup — divide by (1 − margin) rather than multiplying up, or you'll get less than you think.
Where a task varies a lot with conditions, price the standard case and add site factors as separate lines — rock, difficult access, working at height, second storey. That keeps the base rate honest and the extras visible.
Keeping it from going stale
A price list that hasn't moved in two years is worse than not having one, because you'll trust it. Supplier prices move constantly and your own rate should move with your costs.
- Review quarterly — a scheduled hour, not something you do when you notice a problem.
- Re-check material-heavy lines more often — anything dominated by copper, steel, timber or concrete moves fastest.
- Update your charge-out rate annually, or whenever a major overhead changes.
- Check finished jobs against the list — if a line consistently takes longer than priced, the line is wrong.
- Date the list so you know how stale it is before you quote from it.
The most useful review input is your own job history. If the downlight line has been under-priced on the last six jobs, that's not bad luck — that's a rate that needs changing.
When to quote custom instead
A price list covers repeatable work. Reach for a custom quote when the job isn't:
- Anything with significant unknowns behind a wall or underground — that's an estimate, not a list item.
- Large or long jobs where staging and progress payments matter more than unit rates.
- Heritage, commercial or unusually specified work that your standard rates were never built for.
- Jobs with difficult access severe enough to change the method, not just add a factor.
ServiceYak keeps your price list as a reusable kit — labour, materials and margin already in each line — so you can assemble an itemised quote on site, add site factors as their own lines, and send the PDF before you leave.
Frequently asked questions
Should I show my price list to customers?
Usually not as a published rate card. A price list is an internal tool for building quotes quickly and consistently. Publishing fixed prices invites comparison on price alone and makes it awkward to charge properly for difficult sites.
How many items should a price list have?
Start with the twenty or so jobs that make up most of your invoices, and grow it as you notice repetition. A list of three hundred items you have to search through is slower than no list at all — the point is speed.
How often should I update my prices?
Review quarterly, and re-check material-heavy lines more often than that. Update your charge-out rate at least annually, or whenever a significant overhead changes — new vehicle finance, an apprentice, a rent increase.
What if a job takes longer than my price list says?
Once is a bad day; three times is a wrong rate. Check finished jobs against what you quoted and adjust the line. That feedback loop is what turns a price list from a guess into a genuinely reliable tool.