Hi All, first time poster here. Was hoping I could get some feedback and advice on estimating. I have been doing this work for 25 yrs working for a contractor. Just got my license and now peeking at other options. Tired of doing side jobs for next to nothing, seems like anyway, Never been involved with the billing and guessing part of it. For instance rewiring a house, what is the average going rate per opening to come up with a ballpark number? Also if someone wanted to do there own house and they knew what they were doing. What is a fair price to let them do it under my license and insurance. Don't want to become overnight millionaire "well" but don't want to do it for nothing anymore either. Any help or constructive critisism will be appreciated!

No one works under my license and insurance, but me. No way to check everything someone else does and you and your ins. company assume all the liability for the job.

As far as letting someone work under your license and insurance, that's a bad idea.
Not only could you end up losing your license, you might end up with even bigger problems.

To paraphrase a quote from a guy I used to work for: "If you're going to do something illegal, unethical or questionable to make money, make sure that it's enough to make it worthwhile once when you figure in the fines and the jail time. There's no sense in finding out that the last 3 years of your life you netted out at minimum wage."

That sounds like a very wise man Thanks

Welcome to the forum Jim. If a customer is too cheap to have you do the work but wants to work under your license.......run. You most likely wouldn't be insured if there was a problem as they are not your employee.

As for rewiring a home, many factors will influence the price. For instance if there's a 2nd floor the lighting on the main floor will be difficult to get to. How much of the attic is accessable? Are there firestops in the walls? How much stuff is in the basement that you need to work around? Is the client going to live in the house while you're rewiring, or will they be staying somewhere else? If they are away, you can leave tools, extension cords, etc laying around overnight, and there won't be a panic to power up some circuits for tv's, lamps, hot water, etc. at the end of each day.

I give all my clients an option to save on the labor by having them to do any cleanup. Cleanup is something they can do themselves - why pay electrician rates to do it?

I use estimating software to estimate the job.
I have setup assemblies in the software for the take off.
For example an assembly would consist of the box, wire, device, staples, wirenuts and labor to complete the installation of this assembly.

I've set up three catagories for these assemblies.
Open Access (All Ceilings and walls are open with exposed framing)
Limited Access (Attic or crawlspace access with cutting in boxes and fishing wire down finished walls)
No Access (Ceiling and walls are all finished and all wiring has to be fished in the ceiling and walls)

Within these three catagories I have three difficult ratings for labor.
Easy
Standard
Hard

In these catagories I have assemblies set up for different lengths.
Assembly Examples:
0010-O Extend romex circuit 14-2 (0010 means 10 feet & O means open access)
0020-L Extend romex circuit 14-2 (0020 means 20 feet & L means limited access)
0030-N Extend romex circuit 14-2 (0030 means 30 feet & N means no access)

When I walk the job site I count the devices for each room and assign each device a code.
Code Examples:
0020-L-S (Means extend romex circuit 20 feet, limited access, standard labor)

0010-O-E (Means extend romex circuit 10 feet, open access, easy labor)

0030-N-H (Means extend romex circuit 30 feet, no access, hard labor)

I also have labor adders so if I think an assembly will exeed the preset labor time of the assembly I can add more labor to it.

When I do a job I track the actual installation time of each assembly and compare it to the labor time in the software so I can make adjustments to the software if necessary for more accuracy when estimating future jobs.

The software I use is called Turbobid. http://www.turbobid.net/TurboBidHome.html

As far as letting someone work under my license? No way. Let them get their own license.

I see this "wire your own house and pay for the electrician to do the final hookup" sort of talk all the time on homeowner BBs. I always wondered if that really happened or they just said they did it to avoid flame wars.
I really can't imagine a guy risking his license and reputation to a home owner's wiring. I know if I was inspecting this and saw "homeowner work" I would probably be a lot more leery of trusting what I saw (or didn't actually see) when this guy's name was on the permit.
Inspectors and trades get a certain amount of trust built up over the years but that is based on consistent quality of work. I probably ended up actually looking at more stuff than the average inspector but that was because I was never that busy and I like looking at electrical stuff. I did get to know who to trust and who I could count on to do something right, even after it was signed off.

NEVER EVER!!!! You want my license and insurance? BUY IT!.

Or pay my current lease rates! That again meens BUY IT!!!

Trust no one! Charge All.

No good deed goes unpunished!

Work under my license ? NO
This practice is illegal in Maryland. The homeowners can take a test, if they pass they are allowed to pull their own permit for this project ONLY. I would like to think the inspectors take their time and look at everything when it comes to this. Most homeowners can't pass the test.

Quote: "Never been involved with the billing and guessing part of it."

There is no guessing part, guessing is for the hacks and side job guys, estimating is the professional way.

Quote: "For instance rewiring a house, what is the average going rate per opening to come up with a ballpark number?"

Going by the so called going rate will get you in trouble fast, the other guys may all be way off and not know themself how to estimate a job, so when you follow them, your usually diving off the cliff blind.

Quote: "Also if someone wanted to do there own house and they knew what they were doing. What is a fair price to let them do it under my license."

Do they give licenses away where your at, or do you have to test and have the knowladge to pass a test, I moost states it is illegal to loan a license, and even if it was legal, would you risk the personal liability of letting someone else do work that may kill an entire family, to make a few dollars?

Hi Jim,
You say you've worked in the trade for 25 years but not what branch the majority of your experience is in.

If you've done a lot of residential both new and remodel then on any given project you should have a pretty good idea of both what challenges your likely to run into and how many man-hours it could end up taking in a worst case scenario.

If you were running jobs and were responsible for ordering the material for most of those 25 years then you should also have a good idea of what you would need to buy to get a given job done.

If you know these your not guessing, your applying your experience.

Simply put,the number you give should equal the sum of:
Materials
Labor
Overhead
Profit

You need to know what every man-hour of labor costs you.
If you have employees, how much does it really cost you after paying comp, benefits, bonuses, etc. to send your crew out for an hour?
If you work in the field, or it's just you, how much do want to pay yourself? You should be able to pay yourself more than an employee for bidding purposes due to not needing comp on yourself.

Next you would need to get current pricing from your wholesalers on all the materials you'll be buying for your project. These numbers can vary from wholesaler to wholesaler and can also change considerably with the rise and fall of the commodities market so check them often. It's important get a locked in quote from your suppliers and to write into your contract the ability to adjust for market price fluctuations should your client wait three or six months to accept your bid.
If your getting good pricing you should be able to markup your material a bit. 15% is not uncommon.

You also need to figure your overhead. It's the cost of all of your operating expenses over the time period of that job. License, bonds, insurance, office costs, equipment costs and maintenance, vehicle costs and maintenance, gas and travel costs and anything else that you'll pay for to get the job done that isn't the material and labor that becomes your finished product.

Lastly you need to figure the profit your company is to make on this project. This is above and beyond what you pay yourself hourly for working in the field. If your fairly accurate in estimating the other costs you should be able to get away with 8% - 10% and still get jobs.

Add it all up and then stare at your numbers and worry yourself sick for a while:)

Keep in mind who you will be bidding against and what their labor and overhead costs are likely to be. If you're a one man shop you should be able to give competitive bids and make good money due to lower overhead and the ability to adjust the profit number a bit if necessary.


Your goal is to get enough work. If one gets away because you were too high that just serves to let you know where you were at relative to your competition. You would rather have that than do everything too low.

Good Luck!

When I was writing contracts they also told us we had to add "risk" to the total.
That is to cover the bad thing(s) that can happen. Each job probably has a different risk factor.

Quick good example: 1 4" recessed light added to a kitchen.Off of an existing light. Kitchen looked newly remodeled. (1982-house)
I asked "oh and they did the ceiling too?".
customer: " Oh yes the whole place was all torn up".

6' total distance, I opened the existing light, (old work).

"Oh ****, Theres three ceilings here!!!......
.....3 hours later, I was cleaning up.
Snaked it all really a bear!!!!
I only estimated 1.5 hrs. But there is more "old work" to do.
That will balance it out.(I took a good look at that on the walk thru).

So you never know, cover your bases.
I have even given rebates when a job has gone very well.I just don't tell that I may!

In my bids the risk factor is covered by my analysis of the worst case scenario on that project and how likely I think it is that I will be seeing the worst of it. In that I'm defining risk as how much extra time and materials, extra trips back or even tool rentals I might need to get it done. Any other form of risk is why I pay for insurance.

I have lost jobs because I had labor and materials in that wouldn't be necessary if all went smoothly.
I have lost jobs because the owners personality led me to include enough time to talk with them for half an hour each time I attempted to install anything.

I know a few of those didn't end up going as bad as I had covered myself for and as the economy keeps tightening up I may have to take on a bit more of that risk myself.
It's only money -- until you've priced yourself out of making any. Then it's serious.

My preferred way of dealing with the really risky ones (and most limited access remodel work for that matter) remains giving a worst case number but offering to do it T&M. They often take the T&M option and it usually comes in lower than my worst case estimate.
I have had a few that just wanted a number. They are usually just using me to test somebody else's bid.



As far as example's of what can go wrong and what types of risk can get involved, my personal favorite:

Get a call to check out a burned dryer receptacle while sitting home with a sore finger from a 2" sliver two days before. I figure it's just a receptacle change out and I can handle that with a sore hand so I drive the 25 miles to have a look. Loose connection has burned wire back to where it emerged from a hole in the bottom plate. Surface mount box-no clamp or even a bushing. It's out into the pouring rain to find the access to under the house. There it is in the mud. Crawl under and find 12" of standing water against the foundation right where I need to be to check for any slack in the romex. No slack to be had. Out of the hole, hose off the mud, off to local hardware store that fortunately had a good electrical section. A sound splice and a cut-in box later, I'm on my way home soaking wet having been covered in mud and hosed off 3 or 4 times.
Two days later I'm in the hospital undergoing emergency surgery to scrape out the infection in an attempt to SAVE MY HAND!!! Antibiotics apparently aren't effective enough to kill major infections in one's extremities. Who knew? They make me stay overnight on IV antibiotics.
Turns out that standing water was loaded with ecol i from a recent bathroom remodel. Oh, and there was still a piece of the sliver in my finger anyway so they took that out.
After all deductibles were paid that job ended up costing me close to 3K. Of course without insurance it would have been over 25K.
How I got the sliver? Came off my ladder drilling over a doorway trying to save a customer from having to add 50' to a feeder that would have then required oversizing.
It's true---no good deed goes unpunished.

There are also things like that errant diversabit shot that came out through the walnut book case.

... risk.

True enough, but things like that are usually included in the inherent risk of just doing this kind of work. That's why we measure twice or even three times. There are extreme cases but those I wouldn't do for anything other than T&M and include disclosures that damage to the residence is possible or even likely.

My motto= I can add anything anywhere you want it. Some things just require more repair behind me than others do.