What does it cost to start a contracting company?
Pick your trade and your state. You get an itemised estimate built from your own numbers, sitting next to your state's verified licensing, bond, and insurance requirements — each with the official source, so you can check every line yourself.
Your situation
Employees change what you must carry — workers' compensation especially.
Your number, not ours. We do not know what a van costs where you live.
Only what you still need to buy, not what is already in the truck.
Premiums are set by your carrier from your trade, payroll, and history. We will not guess at yours — put in your quote if you have one.
Insurance, vehicle payment, phone, software, storage, subscriptions. This drives your recommended reserve. Leave it blank if you have not worked it out and we will say so instead of inventing one.
Nothing is stored or emailed. This runs entirely in your browser.
Where these numbers come from, and where they deliberately stop
Your own costs are exactly what you typed. Nothing is padded, marked up, or benchmarked against an average, because a national average for a van or a set of tools tells you nothing useful about your situation.
Your reserve is your own monthly fixed-cost figure multiplied by three and by six. It is arithmetic on your number, not a recommendation dressed up as data.
State requirements are quoted verbatim from Contractor Lane's requirement verification file, in which all 600 state-by-category cells were recorded as verified against an official source on 1 August 2026. Every state on this page shows the official sources on file so you can read the rule yourself.
Government fees are the honest gap. Contractor Lane has an itemised, researched government cost list for ten states, and a researched hard minimum total for one of them. Everywhere else, the fee has not been verified to the standard this project requires, so no number is shown. A verified requirement with an unverified fee is published as exactly that. This is not a limitation we are hiding; it is the reason you can trust the figures that are here.
Bond and insurance figures are not costs. Where a state's rule names a dollar amount for a bond or an insurance policy, that is the face value or the minimum coverage the state demands, not what you hand over. You pay a premium a surety or carrier sets, usually a small fraction of the face. This page never adds those amounts to a total.