How to quote a concrete job

Take off the quantities first, before any money

Measure the area, decide the thickness, and work out concrete, base stone and steel as quantities. Do not price anything yet. Mixing quantity and cost in one pass is how items get missed — you notice the missing rebar when you are already thinking about markup.

Do the whole pour as one number. Slab and footing come off the same truck, so they belong in one order, and combining them often clears the short-load threshold that would otherwise cost you $100 on a small job. The same applies to anything small on the same site: steps and deck piers are each well under a yard on their own and are the two items most often forgotten in the take-off entirely.

Price materials from your own book, not from memory

Every material gets a unit cost you can defend: concrete per yard, stone per ton, bar per length, pavers each. Write them down once. The contractor who prices from memory is always quoting last year's numbers, and always low.

Add waste at the quantity stage rather than fudging it in the price — 8% on concrete, 20% compaction on base stone, and cut waste on pavers set by the pattern rather than a flat 10%. Waste hidden in a unit price is waste you cannot explain when a client asks.

Labour by the unit you actually work in

Place and finish is per square foot. Setting steel is per square foot. Forming and excavating footings is per linear foot. Laying block is per linear foot of wall. Steps and piers are priced each, because the work in one is a fixed amount of forming rather than an area. Pricing labour as a lump sum feels faster and makes every subsequent job harder to quote, because you cannot reuse a number you never broke down.

Include mobilisation, cleanup and haul-off. They are real hours and they are the first things forgotten on a quote written at nine at night.

Markup is not margin, and this is where money is lost

Twenty per cent markup on $10,000 of cost gives a $12,000 price — and that is a 16.7% margin, not 20%. The difference on a year of work is thousands of dollars, and it is the single most common arithmetic mistake in small-contractor pricing.

To hit a target margin, divide rather than multiply: price = cost ÷ (1 − margin). For a genuine 25% margin on $10,000 of cost, that is $13,333, which is a 33% markup. Decide which of the two you are working in and be consistent, because quoting in markup while thinking in margin means underpricing every job by the same silent amount.

What goes in front of the client

Your business name and number at the top, their name and the job address, a short scope in plain words, the line items with quantities, one total, and what is not included. Nothing about your costs — what you pay for concrete is nobody's business and putting it on the page invites a negotiation you cannot win.

State what is excluded explicitly: permits, engineered drawings, unsuitable-material removal, rock excavation, landscape reinstatement. The exclusions are what protect you when the trench hits rock at two feet.

Then send it the same day. Being first with a professional-looking number wins more concrete work than being cheapest — a homeowner collecting three bids remembers the one who turned it round while they were still thinking about it.