Describe the job. Get a printable estimate.
Type the job the way you would say it out loud and get the itemized lines back. A free contractor estimate template, no sign-up.
Turn on JavaScript to build the line items from a description. The blank estimate form below prints either way.
Draft. Read it before you send it; change anything that is not right.
Business name
Phone Email
Address, city, state, ZIP License #
For Customer name
Billing address Job address
No. Date Valid until
| Description | Qty | Unit | Unit price | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Subtotal
Discount
Taxable amount
Sales tax
Total
Deposit due
Balance due
Terms and notes
Markup, discount, tax, deposit
Your typed price stays in the box. The document shows the marked-up price, and the line shows you both.
Set the rate that applies where the work is. This page ships no rates and decides nothing about your state.
Your business and the customer0 of 5 filled
Document details and notes
Balance due
$0.00
Print, or choose Save as PDF in the print dialog.
This is an estimate, not advice. The lines are a draft built from what you wrote, and the tool has not seen the site, the plans or your local code. Read every line before it goes to a customer, and take sales tax, licensing and contract questions to someone who knows your state.
How the contractor estimate builder works
You type a sentence. The page cleans the text, then asks the model to map it against a list of line items your trade actually bills for. It's the same list every time, shipped with the page, one entry per term with its class and its unit already decided. Demolition bills by the hour, tile by the square foot, concrete by the cubic yard. That list keeps each returned unit consistent with the taxonomy term the model picked, and it's why the wording reads like a contractor wrote it rather than a chatbot.
Then comes a second pass, and no model touches it. It's plain code and a fixed set of rules. Tear-out often brings debris handling and disposal, painting often brings masking or protection, and many repair and finish jobs end with cleanup. The rules add those as optional lines for you to review. Each is marked as added, right there in the table, so you can see which rows came from the model and which came from the rules. Delete any of them in one click.
One guardrail is absolute: a generated price is rejected before the line ever reaches the table. The other one is not a guarantee, and we would rather say so than let you find out later. The prompt tells the model not to add permit work you did not mention or to calculate quantities you did not state. Code cannot prove a semantic judgment like that. Review every work item, quantity and duration before it goes to a customer.
Everything from that point down is arithmetic in your browser. Quantity times unit price is the line amount. The line amounts add up to the subtotal. Markup, if you turn it on, raises the unit price you typed and shows you both numbers side by side. A discount comes off the subtotal and pulls the taxable amount down with it in proportion. Sales tax applies at the rate you type, to the lines you say are taxable, and to nothing else. The total is what's left, the deposit comes off it, and the balance due is the number at the bottom.
This page has never seen the site, the plans, the code requirements or the manufacturer's instructions. It expands what you wrote. It doesn't audit it.
Who this is for
One truck or five. General contractor, remodeler, handyman, plumber, electrician, HVAC tech, roofer, painter, flooring installer, drywall finisher, concrete or masonry contractor, landscaper, cleaner, whoever walks the job, prices it and sends the estimate without handing it to anybody else.
You finished a walk-through an hour ago, you've got four words about it in your phone, and the homeowner is reading two other estimates tonight. Or it's the same kitchen you've quoted forty times and you're tired of retyping the same twelve lines. Or you're new enough that you're still working out which lines belong on a tear-out job at all.
If you have an estimator, a takeoff department or Xactimate, this page isn't for you. It's for the truck.
Contractor questions about estimates and quotes
What should a contractor estimate include?
Your business name and contact details, your license number if your state wants one on written estimates, the customer's name and the job address, a date and a date the price holds until, and then the work itself broken into lines a homeowner can read. Each line wants a description, a quantity, a unit and a price, because "120 sq ft at $1.90" answers a question that "$228" does not. Under that, the subtotal, any discount, the sales tax if you are charging it, the total, and the deposit if you are asking for one. Then your own terms in your own words.
How do you write an estimate for a job?
Walk the job and write down what you will actually do, in the order you will do it. That list is the estimate; everything else is formatting. The part that eats the evening is turning eight words of notes into twelve professional lines, which is the part this page does. Then put your prices in. Your prices come from your costs and your overhead, not from a table on the internet, and a national average still has to be checked against your crew, suppliers, scope and market.
Is an estimate a contract?
The title alone does not decide that. Whether this document becomes binding depends on what you and the customer agree to and the law where the work is. This builder does not create every notice or term a state may require for a home-improvement contract.
How long is a contractor estimate good for?
The builder starts at thirty days as an editable product default, and you can change it to seven or ninety or switch the line off entirely. Pick a number you can actually hold. If lumber moves under you, a shorter window is honest; a validity date you set to create pressure is a trick, and homeowners comparing estimates can see it.
What is the difference between an estimate, a quote, a bid and a proposal?
Contractors use these words differently. Changing the dropdown changes only the heading; it does not change the document's legal effect. Use the label your customer or bidding process expects.
Does an estimate include sales tax?
That depends on your state and on what you are selling, and it is genuinely one of the messier corners of the trade. This page ships no rates and takes no position: sales tax is off by default, you turn it on, you type the rate that applies where the work is, then use a preset and review every Taxable box. The presets are not legal answers; rules can depend on state, locality, work, customer and contract. Check the relevant revenue authority or adviser.
Can a contractor charge more than the estimate?
Do not assume the heading lets the price move. Scope changes and extra charges can require advance written approval under your contract or state law. Put changes in writing before doing the added work.
Where do the prices come from?
Yours. There is no suggested price, rate, coverage figure or "typical range" on this page. The only prices that ship are the clearly labeled made-up numbers in the first-paint example, and they disappear when you start. While we were building this we read the ten free estimate tools we checked, and the one page in that set that tells you what a line should cost publishes a table of "typical" percentages and a worked example with unsourced hourly rates, and attaches no source of any kind to either. We did not find a free, verifiable US price source in the sources we checked that we would be willing to stand behind, so we are not printing one. You know your costs. We do the part you would rather not retype.
(This one didn't come from search suggestions. We asked it ourselves, because it's the promise the page is making.)
Does this save anything, or send my customer's details anywhere?
There is no account, and this page does not save your estimate in browser or application storage. The customer fields, business fields and logo stay in this browser. The redacted job description, with your selected trade, is sent to our server and on to the model only to draft the line list; the text is not stored after the line list comes back. The redactor replaces only contact details it recognizes, so do not put sensitive details in the description. If a response fails validation, one retry may also send short failure labels derived from that response. Close the tab and your unsaved work on this page is gone.
(This one didn't come from search suggestions either. We asked it because what happens to your details is part of how the tool works.)
Free contractor estimate template: the blank grid is the job
Open the ten free estimate tools we checked and the pattern is clear: most start with a Description, Qty and Price grid or a downloadable template. Some are Excel files. Some are PDFs. One asks for your client's name, email and project address before it will show you a single line. One tells you in its own words that it is a demonstration and will not save anything. Each still makes you supply or adapt the job's actual line items.
Because the grid was never the problem. Remembering the lines this job needs, phrasing them so a homeowner reads them as professional, and checking whether a dump fee belongs on this job are the real work, often done after the site day. Jobber's 2026 Home Service Trends Report asked home service owners what eats the most time and put quoting third, behind jobsite management and customer communication, with smaller and solo operators spending more time on it.
So this page starts with a text box instead of a table. You describe the job the way you'd describe it to your brother-in-law and the lines come back with a class, a unit and suggested quantities for you to verify. What doesn't come back is a price. We never add price data to the request, and the validator rejects any price the model tries to return in a line. Your pricing is the part you'd never hand to software, and we agree with you.
| Block | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Header | Business name, phone, email, address, license number, logo |
| Document | Estimate, Bid, Proposal or Quote; a number; a date; a valid-until date |
| Customer | Name, billing address, job address when it differs |
| Lines | Description, labor or materials, quantity, unit, unit price, amount |
| Totals | Subtotal, discount, taxable amount, sales tax, total |
| Money terms | Deposit due, balance due |
| Terms | Scope changes, how long the price holds, anything else in your own words |
Print it, or choose Save as PDF in the print dialog. Nothing is gated and nothing is counted.
Sources
The line-item vocabulary this page runs on is taxonomy-v1: thirteen trade lists, one common block, ten imperial units and four companion rules. It is a wording-and-units list. There is no price in it, no rate and no coverage figure, so there is nothing in it to go stale when the market moves.
The survey statement comes from Jobber's 2026 Home Service Trends Report. The data-handling statement above describes our own server and the model we use; the text is not stored after the line list comes back. The competitor comparison is bounded to the ten pages we named when we checked them. Our free-listing and no-referral-fee statement comes from the Industry Oversight business center.
The totals are arithmetic on the numbers you typed; the page supplies no market price table.
More tools for contractors
Before you fill in those prices, the arithmetic nobody teaches you: the Markup vs. Margin Calculator shows what a 20 percent markup actually leaves you once overhead comes out.
And when the job is finished and the review isn't the one you were hoping for, there's the Negative Review Reply Generator.
The rest of them sit on the free tools for contractors page.
That header is already a listing
Look at what you just typed into the top of the document. Business name, phone, email, service address, license number, trade. That's a directory listing, and you've already written it.
We list contractors at no charge, without a referral fee. We put it in writing for contractors: "Hard work deserves unsolicited, not paid-for recognition," and "we don't charge you for accessing homeowners information once matched. The customer pays you directly, and we do not collect a referral fee."
Join as a Pro, or claim a listing that is already there.
Or see who you're up against in your trade:
Bookmark it. This is the kind of thing you want open on the phone in the truck, not filed somewhere on the laptop at home.