Free Electrical Flat-Rate Price Book Template

You get one workbook with five tabs. It works the same in Excel and Google Sheets.

• Instructions: what each tab is for, the five build steps in brief, and import steps for Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan and Jobber.
• Company & Rates: your electricians, their wages and burden, overhead, what you pay yourself, margin and parts markup. This is where your break-even and recommended labor rate are worked out.
• Price Book: a row for every task, with hours, material cost and markup going in, and good, better and best prices coming out. There's a taxable column too, which matters in electrical because so much of the work is labor only.
• Starter Task List: more than 60 common electrical tasks with suggested time ranges, from GFCI swaps and breaker replacements to subpanels, generator hookups and EV chargers.
• Printable Summary: your tasks, descriptions and prices by category, without the cost columns, to print or export as a PDF.

Nothing is pre-priced. The template does the math, and the numbers come from your shop.

Step 1: Know your true hourly cost

In electrical work, the labor rate does most of the pricing. A lot of common jobs, like troubleshooting a dead circuit or swapping a breaker, use few parts, so nearly the whole price is time. If your rate is off, almost every line in the book is off with it.

You need two rates. Break-even is the hourly figure that covers payroll, overhead and your own pay with nothing left over. Recommended is break-even with your profit margin on top, and it's the one the book uses.

Here's a shop with four electricians at $34 an hour. Burden (payroll tax, benefits and workers comp) is 18%, for a loaded wage of $40.12. Each electrician is paid for 2,080 hours and bills 60% of them, so the shop has 8,320 paid hours and 4,992 billable. Overhead is $70,000, the owner takes a $95,000 salary, and the target margin is 18%.

• Payroll: 8,320 x $40.12 = $333,798
• Total cost: $333,798 + $70,000 overhead + $95,000 owner salary = $498,798
• Break-even rate: $498,798 / 4,992 = $99.92
• Recommended rate at an 18% margin: $99.92 / 0.82 = $121.85

The owner salary is the line small shops most often leave out. If you don't count your own pay as a cost, the book can look profitable while you work for free. Our electrical labor rate calculator uses this same example if you want to check the numbers or run your own.

Step 2: List the 40 to 80 tasks you actually do

Your invoices from the last year are the best guide to what belongs in the book. Sort them by how often each job comes up, and price the most common ones first.

Most electrical contractors end up with somewhere between 40 and 80 tasks. They usually fall under these ten headings, which the Starter Task List tab also uses:

• Service call and troubleshooting
• Outlets and switches
• Lighting
• Panels and breakers
• Circuits and dedicated lines
• EV chargers
• Generators and transfer switches
• Smoke and CO alarms
• Ceiling fans
• Outdoor and landscape

Pick the tasks you do from the Starter Task List, copy them into the Price Book tab, and add whatever's missing for your market. Write descriptions in plain language, because they print on the summary your customers see.

Step 3: Set task times honestly

Electrical jobs hide time in the parts nobody sees. Fishing wire through a finished wall, running a circuit across an attic, doing a load calculation before an EV charger or subpanel, and the trip for a part the van didn't have all belong in the task time.

Permits and inspections need a decision too. Some shops build permit fees and inspection visits into the task price. Others list them as a separate line on the invoice. Either works, as long as every tech does it the same way and the cost doesn't quietly disappear.

Start with the Starter Task List's suggested ranges and check them against your electricians' experience. The people who do the work know where the time goes, and a book they helped set up is one they'll actually use.

Set a minimum charge as well. A ten-minute device swap still costs you a truck and a drive. The template won't price any task below half an hour of labor, which is $60.93 for the example shop.

Step 4: Materials and markup

Copper sets the pace for electrical materials. When copper moves, wire and cable prices follow, and a price book built on last year's wire costs can be short on every circuit and feeder job. Use what your supplier charges you now.

Markup is figured on your cost, and margin on the selling price, so the same dollars give two different percentages. A 50% markup on a $22 GFCI makes it $33, a 33% margin. The template applies your markup to every row by default, and you can set a different one on any task.

If you'd rather work in margin, our Parts Markup Calculator shows what a markup comes to as margin.

Check the taxable column carefully. Many electrical tasks are labor only, like troubleshooting or a safety inspection, so the template marks them N. Tasks with materials get Y. Adjust any row your state treats differently.

Step 5: Build good, better and best, and round your prices

Three tiers only work if each one adds real work the customer can see. For a GFCI outlet:

• Good: swap the outlet for a GFCI
• Better: the GFCI, plus testing every other outlet on that circuit
• Best: a tamper-resistant, weather-resistant GFCI, the circuit test and a warranty

The template prices better at 20% over good and best at 45% over good, then rounds each price once at the end. It never rounds the labor rate.

Before you lock the tiers in, make sure the best price still covers the upgraded device and the warranty.

The Price Book Builder runs this math across your whole task list in one go and exports a CSV that drops straight into the Price Book tab, which beats doing it one line at a time.

Here's the GFCI job at the example shop:

Using someone else's prices

Another contractor's book reflects their wages, their overhead and their supply house, not yours. Owners who have run on borrowed prices describe it as an easy way to lose money without noticing. Start from the structure if it helps, but price every line from your own costs.

Listing labor separately

A separate labor line invites the customer to do the math on your hourly rate and question the time. With a single price per task, the conversation stays on the work, not the clock.

No update schedule

Copper, wages and insurance all change, and a price book only changes if someone changes it. Set review dates in advance so it doesn't slide for a year.

Techs don't buy in

If your electricians don't trust the times or can't find tasks quickly, they'll go back to pricing by feel. Involve them in setting it up and keep it short enough to use on a call.

Forgetting permit and inspection costs

Permit fees, the time to pull a permit and the return trip for an inspection are real costs on panel, service and EV charger jobs. If they aren't in the task price and aren't billed separately, they come out of your margin.

Go through every line once a quarter. When copper or wire prices change, update the circuit, feeder and panel tasks first, since that's where material costs carry the most weight.

Add tasks as your work changes. EV chargers, generator interlocks and transfer switches have become regular calls for a lot of shops. If you're quoting the same job by hand more than a couple of times, it belongs in the book.

When wages or overhead change, update Company & Rates and the whole book reprices from there. Keep a dated copy of the previous version so you can compare old and new prices.

Building it once is the easy part. Keeping it current every time supplier prices move is the part nobody has time for. If you're done doing this by hand, we're building a way to change prices by just saying what changed. Apply for early access.