Should you charge for estimates?
Free is the default for a reason. Here is when to break it, what to charge, and the one sentence that makes a fee sound fair.
Most residential work gets a free estimate, and most customers expect one. That is fine for a water heater or a fence. It stops being fine when the estimate is half a day of your time and the customer is collecting five of them. Here is how to decide.
Keep it free when
- You can price it in one visit, or from photos and a phone call.
- The job is a standard one for your trade and your close rate is decent.
- The free visit is how you win the job. For a lot of trades, standing in the driveway is the sales call.
Charge when
- Pricing the job takes real work: measuring, design, a layout, pulling specs, or a diagnosis that is itself a service.
- The customer wants a detailed line-item breakdown they could hand to someone else.
- You are driving an hour each way, or the job is small and far.
- You keep losing time to people who were never going to hire anyone.
How much
A flat fee that covers your time and a little more. $50 to $150 for a diagnostic visit in most trades. $250 to $500 for a design or a detailed scope on a remodel. Whatever the number, credit it to the job if they hire you. That one rule turns a fee from a wall into a filter: serious customers pay it without blinking, and tire kickers go away.
How to say it
"There is a $95 visit fee for the diagnosis, and it comes off the job if you go ahead with us." Say it on the phone before you drive, say it plainly, and do not apologize for it. The customers who object were going to collect your estimate and shop it anyway.
The middle path: free from photos, paid in person
A lot of one-truck contractors now price the common jobs from photos and a few questions by text, for free, and reserve the paid visit for the ones that need it. That keeps the free estimate for the jobs it wins and your afternoons for the jobs that pay. It also gets the number to the customer the same day, which wins more work than the visit did.
Either way, what you send after should look like a proposal, not a text with a number in it. What to include, and a writer that lays it out from your notes.
Free, no account: job price calculator, markup vs margin, hourly rate, and 84 sample estimates.
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