How to write an estimate

What goes on an estimate

• Your business name, address and contact details — the same ones that will appear on the invoice.
• The client's name and address.
• An estimate number, and the date you issued it.
• A date the price stands until.
• Line items: what you will do, how much of it, and at what rate.
• The total, with tax shown separately if you charge it.
• What the price excludes, and what would change it.
• How the client accepts.

The first six are what every trade shares, and most people get them right. The last two are what stop an estimate becoming an argument three weeks in, and they are the two most often left off.

Price the parts you can, name the parts you cannot

Almost every job has something nobody can see yet: what is behind the wall, how the ground drains, how much of the old work has to come out before the new work can start. Writing one confident number over that is how an estimate turns into a loss you carry quietly.

1. Separate the certain from the uncertain

   Put the work you have done a hundred times on its own lines at your normal rate. Those lines are firm, and saying so makes the rest of the document credible.

2. Give each unknown a stated assumption

   Write what you assumed rather than what you feared. "Assumes the existing framing is sound" is a sentence a client can read, check, and answer; "subject to site conditions" is one they cannot.

3. Say what happens if an assumption is wrong

   Name the rate that applies to the extra work. Then the conversation later is arithmetic rather than negotiation, and it happens before the work rather than on the invoice.

Say how long the price stands

Materials move, your calendar fills, and an estimate with no expiry is one a client can accept next spring at last summer's price. How long is right depends on what drives your cost: a job that is mostly your own labour holds its price far longer than one that is mostly copper, lumber or fuel.

The sample estimates on our trade pages each state the period that trade actually works to, so the one for your trade is a better starting point than a round number.

Make accepting it one action

Most estimates are lost to silence rather than to price. Every step between reading the number and saying yes — printing, signing, scanning, finding the right email address — is a step at which the job quietly stops. An estimate the client can accept in the browser they are already looking at removes all of them, and it tells you the moment they do.

Make an estimate