See what you actually made on the job.
Busy is not the same as profitable. Put in what you collected and what the job really cost you — materials, labor with burden, subs, permits, equipment, overhead, and the callback you had to eat — and get your gross profit, your gross margin, and the gap to the target you set. Every number below is arithmetic on the numbers you type. Nothing is assumed for you.
Why you will not find a “good margin” number anywhere on this page
Plenty of sites will tell you what percentage a contractor in your trade “should” be making. We will not, because we have not verified such a figure and we are not going to invent one. Margins move with your trade, your market, your crew, your mix of service and replacement work, and how you allocate overhead — a number pulled from someone else's business is not a standard you can be measured against. So the target is your field to fill in, and everything this page prints is arithmetic on figures you supplied. That is the whole design.
What these terms mean
Definitions only. Every one of these is a concept, not a number — the figures are yours to supply.
Labor burden
Base wage is what lands on the employee's check. Labor burden is everything else an hour of that person's time costs you: employer payroll taxes, workers' compensation, liability insurance tied to payroll, health benefits, retirement contributions, paid time off, uniforms, training, and any per-employee overhead you carry. Expressed as a percent, it is that extra cost divided by base wages.
It varies by state, by trade classification, by whether the worker is on your payroll or on a 1099, and by what benefits you offer, which is why it has to be your own calculated figure and not a rule of thumb. If you have never worked yours out, your bookkeeper or payroll provider can give you the payroll-tax and workers' comp side in a few minutes, and that is most of it.
Leaving this blank does not make the cost go away. It just moves it out of this job and into the number at the bottom of your year.
Overhead allocation
Overhead is the cost of having a business at all, whether or not you ran a single job this week: truck payments and fuel, general liability and vehicle insurance, phone, software, rent or yard, licensing, advertising, bookkeeping, and the unbilled hours you spend quoting and chasing paperwork.
Allocating overhead means deciding how much of that ongoing cost this one job should carry. Contractors do it different ways — a share per billable hour, a percentage of revenue, a flat amount per job, or a split by crew. None of those is the single correct method, and this tool does not pick one for you. Whatever method you already use, apply it and put the result in that field.
This is why gross profit and net contribution are shown separately below. Gross profit is the job against its direct costs. Net contribution is what is left after the job has paid its share of keeping the doors open, and it is the one that tells you whether taking more work like this makes you money.
Gross profit, gross margin, and net contribution
Gross profit is collected revenue minus the direct costs of doing the job: materials, labor including burden, subs, permits and disposal, equipment, and callbacks. It is a dollar amount.
Gross margin is that same gross profit expressed as a percent of collected revenue. Two jobs can produce the same dollars and very different margins, which is why the percentage is worth watching alongside the dollars.
Net contribution before taxes is gross profit minus the overhead you allocated to this job. It is before income taxes and before anything you have not allocated here, so treat it as a job-level figure, not a tax result. Your accountant works from your books, not from this page.
Quoted versus collected
The price you quoted and the money you actually banked are different numbers more often than most contractors expect. Change orders that were done but never written up, a discount given at the door to end an argument, a final payment that came in short, a card fee, a lien-waiver holdback, a retainage balance still outstanding — every one of those lands between the quote and the deposit.
Margin has to be measured against what you collected, because that is the money that exists. If this page shows a gap between the two, that gap is the part of the job you did and were not paid for.
Why this only tells you about one job
A single job is a data point, not a pattern. One good job can hide a service type that loses money every time you sell it, and one bad job can look like a crisis when it was a one-off. The useful question is which kind of work is consistently profitable for you, where your quoted price and your collected revenue diverge most, and what your callbacks actually cost across a year.
That takes tracking every job the same way, not calculating one. This page is the one-job version.