How to Build a Flat-Rate Price Book for a One-Man Electrical Shop (With Free Calculator)

Updated August 28, 2026

A flat-rate price book is a list of the jobs you do most, each with a fixed price the customer sees before you start. You build one in three steps: work out what an hour of your shop actually costs, decide the margin you want on top, then multiply that rate by the realistic hours for each task and add marked-up material. Everything else - the software, the binders, the apps - is packaging around that math.

This guide walks a one-man (or two-man) shop through the whole process using one worked example from start to finish. You can do it in a weekend with a spreadsheet and your last year of invoices. If you would rather have the engine and a 75-task library already built, that is what our Flat-Rate Price Book Builder is, but the method below stands on its own.

Why “just pick a number” fails

Most small shops set prices one of three ways: what the last boss charged, what the guy down the road charges, or what feels fair to the customer standing in the kitchen. All three skip the only number that matters, which is what it costs you to be in business for an hour.

That cost is invisible on a job. The truck payment does not show up while you are changing a receptacle. Neither does the liability policy, the phone, the replacement drill, the license renewal, or the two hours you spent quoting a job you did not get. But every one of those has to be paid from billable hours, and a one-man shop does not have very many of them.

A price book built without that number is a guess with nice formatting. A price book built on it is a system that keeps you profitable when you are tired, when the customer pushes back, and when material goes up 12 percent in a year.

Step 1: Find your true hourly cost

Start with overhead: everything you pay in a year that is not a direct job cost. Here is a realistic list for a solo residential shop.

Now add yourself. Decide the salary you want to earn - not what you made last year, what you want. Say $85,000. Add a burden for self-employment tax, health insurance and some retirement; 20 percent is a sane starting point. That makes your labor cost $102,000.

Total annual cost: $27,200 + $102,000 = $129,200.

Next, hours. This is where nearly every shop gets it wrong. You do not bill every hour you work. Driving, quoting, picking up material, invoicing, callbacks, and the customer who was not home are all real hours with no invoice. A solo shop that is honest about it usually bills 50 to 60 percent of the hours worked.

Divide cost by billable hours:

$129,200 / 1,320 = $97.88 per billable hour

That is your true hourly cost, also called break-even. Every hour you bill under $97.88 comes out of your own pocket. If you have been charging $75 because that is what the shop you apprenticed at charged in 2015, you now know why the year never adds up.

You can run your own numbers in two minutes with the free Trade Hourly Rate Finder. It uses the same math.

Step 2: Add margin and round to a shop rate

Break-even is not a price. A business with zero margin has no money for a bad month, a warranty callback, a new van, or growth. Pick a margin on price - 15 percent is a reasonable target for a small service shop; 20 to 25 percent is common for shops that have their act together.

The formula is rate = cost / (1 - margin), not cost x (1 + margin). The difference matters: 15 percent margin on price means the profit is 15 percent of what the customer pays.

$97.88 / (1 - 0.15) = $115.15

Round up to a number you can say out loud without apologizing: $120 per hour. That is your shop rate. It sits inside the $85 to $150 range a fully burdened one-man shop typically needs, and well above the $38 per hour figure salary sites publish, which is an employee wage and has nothing to do with running a business.

Write that number down. Every price in the book comes from it.

Step 3: Build the task library

A flat-rate price book is not a list of everything you could possibly do. It is the 60 to 100 jobs that make up most of your service calls. Group them so you can find them fast in a kitchen with the customer watching. Nine categories cover residential and light commercial service work:

1. Service & Troubleshooting - diagnostic call, dead circuit, tripping breaker, GFCI hunt, outlet not working
2. Receptacles & Switches - replace receptacle, add receptacle, replace switch, install dimmer, three-way, USB receptacle
3. Lighting - replace fixture, install recessed can, under-cabinet lighting, exterior light, motion sensor
4. Ceiling Fans - replace fan on existing box, new fan with brace box, fan with remote, high ceiling
5. Circuits & Wiring - new 20A circuit, dedicated appliance circuit, dryer circuit, range circuit, extend circuit
6. Panels & Service - breaker replacement, subpanel, panel replacement, service upgrade, surge protector
7. GFCI/AFCI & Safety - GFCI replacement, AFCI breaker, smoke and CO detectors, tamper-resistant swap
8. Outdoor, EV & Generators - EV charger, exterior receptacle, landscape lighting, generator inlet and interlock, hot tub circuit
9. Low Voltage & Smart Home - doorbell transformer, smart switch, thermostat wire, data drop, smart doorbell

For each task record two things: the base hours a competent electrician takes under normal conditions, excluding drive time, and the typical material cost at your supply house price.

Where do the hours come from? Your invoices. If you have replaced a hundred receptacles you already know it is about half an hour. If you are new, use your gut and correct it after the first twenty jobs. Do not pull hours from a homeowner cost website; those are built from consumer surveys, not from a tradesperson with a clock.

Step 4: Grade every task Easy, Normal, Hard

The same receptacle takes 25 minutes in a new-construction box and 70 minutes in a 1948 plaster wall with a metal box and no ground. A price book with one price per task forces you to either overcharge the easy ones or eat the hard ones.

Three grades fix that. Set multipliers on the base hours:

You pick the grade on site in ten seconds, and the customer sees one clean price. Three grades is the sweet spot: enough to be fair, few enough to decide fast.

Step 5: The price formula

For each task and grade:

price = (base hours x grade multiplier x shop rate) + (material x (1 + markup)) + trip fee

Then round up to the nearest $5 and never go below your minimum job charge.

Material markup for a small electrical shop runs 20 to 50 percent. Standard devices and wire usually carry 25 to 35 percent; panels and generators carry less, 15 to 25 percent, because the base cost is high. Use 25 percent as a default and adjust by category.

Here is the worked example for replacing a standard receptacle at a $120 shop rate, 0.5 base hours, $8 material, 25 percent markup, no trip fee:

And a panel replacement at 6 base hours and $900 material:

Rounding to $5 does two things. It makes prices look decided rather than calculated, and it stops you from ever losing a dollar to rounding down.

Step 6: Set a minimum job charge

Look at the receptacle example again. $70 is the right price for the work, but nobody should drive across town, park, walk in, do the job, write it up and drive back for $70. That is the small-jobs trap, and it is the single most common way a one-man shop loses money without noticing.

Two tools fix it. A trip fee added to every job (say $25 to $45), or a minimum job charge (say $150 to $189). Many shops use a service call fee of $100 to $200 that covers the first half hour or hour, then price the repair on top. Pick one, put it in the book, and stop negotiating it. The guide on pricing service calls and small jobs goes deeper on which structure suits which market.

With a $150 minimum, the Normal receptacle becomes $150. The customer still gets a fixed price up front, and you stop subsidizing short jobs with long ones.

Step 7: Build a quick-quote sheet

The book is the reference; the quote sheet is what you use in the driveway. It should let you pick a task and a grade, pull the price, add up five lines, apply an optional discount, and show a total. That is all. If you can produce a written price in under two minutes while the customer watches, you will close more work than the shop that says “I’ll send you something tonight.”

Step 8: Sanity checks before you trust it

Before the book goes in the truck, run three checks:

• Margin danger zone. If your target margin is under 8 percent, one bad week wipes out the year. Raise it or cut overhead.
• Billable share. If you are below 35 percent billable, the problem is not your prices, it is your week. Look at drive radius, quoting habits and supply-house trips.
• Rate reality. If the math produced a shop rate under $55 an hour for a licensed trade, something is missing - usually overhead lines you forgot or a salary you set at what you are surviving on instead of what you should earn.

Defending the price to a customer

Flat rate gets called a rip-off on forums by people who have never seen the math. Here is how to answer it in a kitchen, in plain words:

• “That price includes everything: the parts, my time, the truck, the insurance and the warranty. There is nothing added at the end.”
• “You are not paying for how long it takes me. You are paying for the job done right, whether it takes me forty minutes or two hours because your wiring surprised us.”
• “An hourly rate rewards the slow guy. A flat rate rewards the guy who knows what he is doing.”

Sticker shock is real because most customers compare your price to their own hourly wage. The book gives you a calm, consistent answer, and the same price for the neighbor next week, which is what builds a reputation.

Keeping the book alive

A price book is a living document, not a project you finish. Three habits:

1. Update the shop rate once a year when insurance renews and you set next year’s salary target. Everything downstream recalculates.
2. Fix a task the day you notice it is wrong. If a job took twice the base hours three times in a row, the base hours are wrong.
3. Add a task the third time you price it by hand. If it is not in the book, you are guessing again.

Material prices move; the markup structure absorbs most of it, but re-check the big-ticket items (panels, EV chargers, generators) every quarter.

Build it yourself in a weekend

You do not need to buy anything to do this. Here is the honest plan.

Saturday morning - the engine. Open a blank spreadsheet. Column A: overhead items, column B: amounts. Sum them. Below that, salary, burden percent, weeks, hours per week, billable percent, margin percent. Write the four formulas from Steps 1 and 2. You now have a shop rate cell. Change any input and it updates.

Saturday afternoon - the task library. Go through the last 12 months of invoices and list every distinct job. Group into the nine categories. For each, write base hours and typical material. Aim for 60 to 75 tasks. Stop when you are covering 90 percent of your invoices.

Sunday morning - the price book. New tab. One row per task. Three price columns using the formula in Step 5, referencing the shop rate cell, the markup cell, the trip fee cell and the minimum job cell. Use CEILING to round to $5 and MAX to apply the minimum. Format it to print on two pages.

Sunday afternoon - the quote sheet and the checks. Ten rows with a dropdown for task and grade, a lookup for the price, a subtotal and a total. Then the three sanity checks as simple IF formulas. Print two copies of the book. One goes in the truck, one stays in the office.

That is the whole product. If you would rather skip the weekend, the Flat-Rate Price Book Builder is exactly this workbook with the engine, 75 electrical tasks in the nine categories, the three grades, the quote sheet and the checks already built, plus a written guide on defending the prices. It works in Excel and Google Sheets, it is a one-time purchase, and nobody will call you to sell you software. Either way, the method is the same, and the method is what makes the money.

Frequently asked questions

How many tasks should a one-man shop’s price book have? Sixty to a hundred. Fewer and you are quoting by hand too often; more and you cannot find anything. Start with the jobs that appear on 90 percent of your invoices and add the rest as they come up.

Should the book show the customer three prices? No. You pick the grade on site and the customer sees one price. The grades are for you, so the price is fair to both of you without a negotiation.

Do I still need a service call fee if I use flat rate? Usually yes, for diagnostic work where the scope is unknown until you open things up. Charge the service call to find the problem, then quote the repair from the book. Fixed-scope jobs like a fan swap can be book price only, subject to your minimum.

What if my market will not pay $120 an hour? Then the book tells you something more important than any price: your overhead or salary target does not fit the market you are in. You can cut overhead, raise billable share, move to a better market, or accept a lower salary - but you should make that choice on purpose, with the number in front of you, not by accident one invoice at a time.