Priced the way Flooring work is billed
A floor install and a hardwood refinish don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices Flooring the way the work is really billed: per square foot, all-in — about $6 a square foot. Tap the work, put in the numbers, and the line prices itself — no napkin math, no undercharging a job because you rushed the quote.
What Flooring jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common Flooring work — researched to be realistic, so you can send an estimate that isn't a guess. Adjust any of them to your market in a tap.
Typical starting prices in the app — your area, your materials, and your reputation move them. You set your own; these just keep you from undercharging on the first quote.
Tile install, priced out
Numbers only mean something on a real job, so here's how SideWRK builds the ticket on a common one:
SideWRK puts the parts on at what you actually paid — so the $1,200 of labor is what you clear, not a marked-up parts total dressed up as profit.
What moves a Flooring price
Two Flooring jobs that look the same on paper can be a hundred dollars apart once you're on site. Here's what actually changes the number — the things to size up before you quote:
- Material and subfloor — luxury vinyl over a flat slab is one price; hardwood over a subfloor that needs leveling is another.
- Tear-out — pulling old tile and hauling it out is separate from laying the new floor.
- Layout — stairs, diagonals, and a room full of cuts slow you down and belong in the number.
What a Flooring job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and Flooring is no exception. SideWRK captures the material — carpet, hardwood, LVP, tile and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- the material — carpet, hardwood, LVP, tile
- a tear-out-existing flag
- the year built
- asbestos (pre-1980 vinyl tile and mastic), silica, and pre-1978 lead disclosures
Example note on a job: "Installed over existing subfloor — minor squeaks may remain."
How to price a Flooring job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a Flooring job and tap a suggestion like "Floor install" or "LVP / laminate install" — the common work is already loaded, so you tap instead of type.
- 2
Price it per square foot
Enter the numbers and the line prices itself, per square foot, all-in — about $6 a square foot. Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the Flooring ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "Installed over existing subfloor — minor squeaks may remain." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the Flooring-specific records: the material — carpet, hardwood, LVP, tile, and a tear-out-existing flag.
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the Flooring estimate for approval. Your customer approves from their phone, the invoice goes out, and you get paid — card or Apple Pay, on the spot.
Staying on the right side of the rules
SideWRK documents your Flooring work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: an OSHA presumed-asbestos rule on pre-1980 flooring and mastic, silica control on wet cuts, and EPA lead-safe work on pre-1978 homes — a contractor license is optional in many states. The app flags the permit and license triggers so they never surprise you mid-job.
Flooring pricing — common questions
How do I price a Flooring job in SideWRK?
You bill per square foot, all-in — about $6 a square foot. Add the work — Floor install, LVP / laminate install, Tile install — enter the numbers, and each line prices itself. Parts go on at your cost, so you see real profit and not just the total.
What does a typical Flooring job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like tile install runs about $2,400 in the app — roughly $1,200 of that is your labor and about $1,200 is parts at your cost. Common Flooring work ranges from about $500 to $2,400. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a Flooring job?
The records Flooring work actually needs: the material — carpet, hardwood, LVP, tile; a tear-out-existing flag; the year built. They stay on the job as you work, so the paper trail is built instead of reconstructed later, and the disclosures this trade needs print on the estimate and invoice themselves.
Do I need a license to do Flooring work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: an OSHA presumed-asbestos rule on pre-1980 flooring and mastic, silica control on wet cuts, and EPA lead-safe work on pre-1978 homes — a contractor license is optional in many states. SideWRK documents the work; it doesn't certify you, and it flags the permit and license triggers so nothing sneaks up on you.
Does SideWRK work for trades other than Flooring?
Yes — it runs all 42 trades, each priced and documented its own way. If you run more than one, the Multi-Trade plan unlocks them all and switches between them in a tap.
Your first jobs
The numbers above answer what to charge. Getting the first floors under your knees is a different problem, and in this trade it starts with a tape measure rather than an ad:
- Measure the room, then price it. Never the other way around. A rate per square foot is only as good as the square feet, and "looks like about two hundred" is how a first flooring job goes wrong before anybody opens a box. Break the space into rectangles, add the closet, add the threshold into the hall, write the total down on site. The work form backs you up here: on a flooring job it asks for Square feet and a Rate ($/sq ft), not a lump sum, so the number you send has an area standing behind it.
- Take the box-store job — and put the material's condition on the line. New installers get handed the same call constantly: "I already bought the flooring, can you just lay it?" That's real paid work and it's how a lot of people meet you. Price the labor, then record the material as customer-supplied — flooring's part conditions are new, used, and customer-supplied — because that one word is the whole warranty conversation later. If the lot doesn't match, or the boxes come up two short on the last row, or a plank splits out of the carton, the paper already says whose product it was. A named part with no price still gets recorded, which is exactly what supplied material needs.
- Send it written, from the room you just measured. Walk it, put in the footage, send a branded estimate the customer can approve from their phone before you're back in the truck.
- The long answer is already written. Where good flooring work comes from, how to mark material up without apologizing for it, what waste factor to order at, how much deposit to take before you buy anything, and what to do when yours is one of three quotes on the counter — that's How to Price Flooring Jobs for Profit, this trade's pricing deep-dive, including the referral channel that quietly sends the best installs. Read it before you quote.
Repeat business — the rest of the house
Almost nobody floors their whole house at once. They do the living room, live with it, and get to the hallway when the money comes back. That gap is the repeat business, and most of it is lost because nothing wrote the next room down:
- The next room is a line, not a mention. Add the hallway to the same estimate and mark it optional. Your customer sees it on the approval page with a checkbox, ticks it or doesn't, and the total updates while they watch. A homeowner who just said yes to the living room will often say yes to forty more feet of the same plank right then. Six months later, over the phone, they won't.
- "Same as the living room" needs a record to mean anything. The property on a flooring job holds the material, the year built, and whether you tore out or went over — and the notes field asks straight out for square footage, subfloor, tear-out, transitions, and access. The pricing guide tells you to keep a job log. This is that log, kept while you're standing in it. Two springs later, when they want the bedroom to match, you're reading instead of guessing.
- An estimate they didn't take isn't a lost sale. It's a dated price. Flooring gets budgeted, deferred, and revisited — the stairs get put off, the basement waits for the tax refund. The estimate keeps its footage and its number, so when March comes you re-send it instead of re-measuring the house. The first two asks aren't even yours: a quiet estimate gets a plain follow-up email at three days and again at seven, two at most.
- One text, one person. "It's [your name] — put the LVP in your living room last spring. I'm on a job two streets over Thursday; is the hallway still on the list?" From your own phone, to one customer, under a minute. Never a blast. A message written for one house reads like it.
How flooring bills
Flooring is a measured trade, so there's one meter under every ticket: area times your rate. The work form asks two numbers — Square feet and Rate ($/sq ft), preloaded at the $6 default. That rate is all-in, which is the part worth understanding before you set your own:
Half and half is the app's starting assumption for this trade. The free calculator further down works the other end: its labor field starts at $3 a square foot and it builds the material side from the product, the waste factor, and the transitions you count, so the split there moves with the job. Either way, the menu prices on this page aren't flat fees. They're areas. Read them backwards and a $2,400 tile install is 400 square feet, a $1,200 carpet install is 200, and the $500 subfloor repair is a bad corner, not a whole room. What the meter makes of ordinary rooms:
Same arithmetic every row, at the $6 default. The rate lives on the line, not on the job, so a tear-out row or a stair run can carry its own number without touching the rest of the ticket.
Two taps off the suggestion chips, each its own line with its own area. At the flooring default's half-and-half, roughly $1,320 of that is product and $1,320 is your labor.
Set your own rate once in the shop and it prefills every flooring job after that. The flooring app is built around the same three beats every trade shares — tap the work, send it, get paid — with the units relabeled so a floor is measured in floors.
Multiplying jobs
Flooring is a materials trade, so most of what's still on the table sits between the takeoff and the supply house. These are shipped, and they're all in the app on a flooring job:
- The takeoff becomes the estimate. Open a job, tap the takeoff button, and the flooring calculator opens inside it. Put in the room, pick the product, and one tap drops the result onto the ticket as two lines: labor priced as the area times the rate you set in the tool, and a materials line carrying what the takeoff says that material costs. The material lands at cost. Whatever markup you charge is yours to add on the line, not something quietly baked in behind you.
- The takeoff is also your shopping list. Boxes at your waste factor, underlayment rolls, one transition per doorway, and for tile the backer board, thinset, grout, and spacers — it all rides along on the materials line, and one tap turns it into a check-off pick sheet you can print or copy at the counter. Fewer second trips is real money in a trade that runs on cartons.
- You get told the moment they open it. When the customer opens your estimate, the app pushes a notification and an email to you. On a $2,640 floor being weighed against two other quotes, the minute they're reading is the minute worth a phone call.
- The unpaid invoice stops being your problem. Money owed on a wrapped job sends its own friendly email reminder at three, seven, and fourteen days, pay link attached — that link is the card and Apple Pay path. Prefer to be paid into an app you already use? Send a payment request instead and it goes customer-to-you — SideWRK tells you each app's rules for taking money for work as you set the handle up. Either way you're not the one writing the awkward text, and the reminders are a toggle you own.
- Keep the transitions in the truck. Reducers, T-molding, underlayment, thinset — the things that turn into an hour-long round trip when you're one short. Truck stock tracks them with a reorder point you set per item, drops the count when a job uses one, and tells you when you're down to your last.
All of it is running on a seeded flooring business in the live flooring demo — free, nothing to sign up for.
Price it now
Room dimensions in, product picked, waste factor counted, your own labor rate — the same free calculator the flooring page runs, right here:
Want it full-screen, or a link to text a customer? The standalone flooring installation cost calculator is the same tool with room to breathe.
The paper worth keeping
The records list above says what a flooring job captures. This is why each one earns its place — and what it saves you from reconstructing a year later:
- The property, on the record. Label, service address, the material, the year built, and whether you tore out or laid over — asked at the estimate, kept on the job. The notes field prompts for the rest of what matters here: square footage, subfloor, tear-out, transitions, access.
- Before about 1980 is this trade's question. Vinyl and asphalt floor tile, sheet-vinyl backing, and black cutback adhesive from before roughly 1980 are presumed to contain asbestos under OSHA rules unless they've been tested. Dry-scraping, sanding, grinding, or breaking that out is separately regulated work that may call for an abatement contractor. The year-built answer is what keeps the question asked before the scraper comes out, and the notice prints on the estimate and the invoice, so your customer reads the same sentence you do.
- Silica, on the wet cuts. Cutting or grinding tile, stone, or a concrete subfloor releases respirable crystalline silica under OSHA 29 CFR 1926.1153. Documented good practice is wet-cutting, or a saw or grinder with water or HEPA dust control, rather than dry-cutting indoors. Note how you cut it and the record holds up on its own.
- Pre-1978, and the baseboards you pulled. Taking flooring off against painted trim, or scraping and sanding a painted subfloor or old finish, can disturb lead paint and bring federal EPA RRP rules into play — firm certification, a certified renovator, and the "Renovate Right" pamphlet in the owner's hands — once more than about six square feet of painted surface per room is disturbed. One flag on the job, answered before the work starts.
- The written-contract nudge, and the license line. Flooring tickets clear $500 fast, and when one does the app notes that home-improvement work over that generally needs a written contract — and says plainly that it doesn't provide the contract. Use your own. There's a spot for a flooring or contractor license number, optional, and when a ticket crosses the app's license threshold with no number on file, it raises a caution — including the part people get wrong, that splitting one project across two estimates doesn't put you back under the limit. Where your own state draws that line stays yours to confirm.
- April, already done. Numbered invoices, payments, material receipts — it all rolls into a year-end wrap-up: rows, category totals, CSVs, and a printable summary your preparer can actually use. The shoebox, retired.
SideWRK is a documentation tool, not legal advice, and it doesn't determine or guarantee compliance with any licensing, asbestos, silica, or lead requirement. It keeps the records. Meeting the rules stays yours.