How to Price a Job You Have to Do Today

The number you say first is the number you live with. There is no second round on a doorstep: move up afterwards and it looks like a bait and switch, move down and you have taught the person that your prices were padded to begin with.

So the work in the ninety seconds before you answer is information-gathering, not arithmetic. Get enough detail that the figure you say out loud is one you can still stand behind three hours in, when the job has turned out worse than it looked from the gate.

Price the job, not the hour

You cannot charge by the hour for work you have never done, because you do not know how long it takes you. Quote by the hour and you get punished twice: slow because you are learning it, and watched by somebody doing the multiplication in their head while you work.

Price the outcome instead, and define the outcome out loud before you name a figure. "The garage cleared" is not a scope. "Everything on the driveway, sorted into keep and go, the go pile bagged and stacked by the curb" is a scope. The sentence you say is the contract, and you will be held to it.

Two rules keep outcome pricing safe. Name what is excluded as well as what is included — a tip run, a second trip, lifting the old carpet — because exclusions are where the argument happens at the end. And if you genuinely cannot see the whole job, price only the part you can see and say so: "I will do the front for this, and we can look at the back after."

Two questions before you answer

Ask what finished looks like, then ask what they had in mind.

The second one gets skipped because it feels like weakness. It is a normal trade question, and the answer does one of three useful things. They name something workable and you take it. They name something low, and you are now negotiating against a known figure instead of guessing at one. Or they say "you tell me", which is information too: they have no anchor, so yours will hold.

If they do say "you tell me", follow with a narrowing question rather than a number. "Has anyone else quoted it?" and "Is this a today thing or a this-week thing?" get you the two facts that move a price — competition and urgency — before you have committed to anything.

Buying yourself thirty seconds

Walk to the thing. Look at it properly, count something, lift a corner, photograph it on your phone. All of that is legitimate work and all of it buys thinking time without reading as hesitation.

The sentence that buys real time is the plainest one: "Let me have a proper look before I say anything." Nobody has ever been offended by that. What loses you the job is standing still, saying "um", and eventually producing a number with a rising tone on the end of it.

Two things never to say. "Whatever you think is fair" hands the price to a person with no reason to be generous to you. And a number said as a question invites the counter-offer before you have finished speaking.

Quote a range, then close it

A range works when both ends are real and the thing that moves it is stated. Give the low end, the high end, and the condition: the lower figure if the bags go in their own bin, the higher if you are taking it away.

Then close it in the same breath, because an open range gets heard as the bottom and remembered as the top. "Shall I get started at that?" is enough. If they hesitate, ask which end they were hoping for and hold the condition rather than dropping the price to fill the silence.

Quoting low to be sure of the work is the expensive mistake, and the money is the smaller part of it. You slow down, you cut the finish, you resent the last hour, and you do not go back when they ask again. If you have no jobs behind you at all, that is a different starting position, handled in pricing your work when you have no track record.

Raising the price mid-job

Stop before you do the extra work, not after. The moment the job turns out bigger, put the tool down and say what changed while the change is still visible to both of you: "There is a second layer under this that I could not see from the gate. That is another hour and a half."

Then give two options rather than one demand. Do the extra at the new figure, or stop at the original scope and leave the rest. The first option gets accepted far more readily when the second one is genuinely on the table.

What you must not do is absorb it quietly and ask for more at the end. That is the version that finishes as an argument on a doorstep with your tools still in their garden. If it is material costs that moved rather than labor, that is a deposit conversation and it belongs at the start — see taking a deposit to cover materials.

And if you simply misjudged it, and nothing about the job actually changed, take the hit once and move your number next time. That is what the next quote is for.

Jobs worth refusing rather than pricing badly

Some jobs are worth losing, and losing them quickly beats putting a number on them under pressure:

• Anything whose scope cannot be seen — a loft you have not been into, a blocked drain, under a floor. Price the look, or walk.
• Anything where the materials cost more than you can front, unless a deposit is agreed before you start.
• Anything licensed: gas, a consumer unit, anything wired in. Not a pricing question at all.
• Work above a step ladder, where the figure would have to carry a risk you are not covered for.
• A job where the person will not describe what finished means, however many ways you ask. An undefined scope has no price.
• A second job quoted on the spot while you are still working on the first one, before you have looked at it properly.
• A job where the money talk keeps sliding — "we will sort you out after" — because that is a collection problem before you have picked anything up.

That last one is worth taking seriously, because the price only matters if it arrives: getting paid on the day rather than in two weeks and collecting the money at the end of the job are the other half of pricing well.

Refusing takes one sentence — "That one is not for me, but I can do the rest" — and it keeps the job you can price. If you have never met the person, run the checks in vetting a cash job before you turn up before you are standing in their garden deciding.