Priced the way Drywall & Finishing work is billed
A drywall patch / repair and a ceiling repair don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices Drywall & Finishing the way the work is really billed: per square foot — about $2.50 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 Drywall & Finishing jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common Drywall & Finishing 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.
Hang & finish, 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 $1,050 of labor is what you clear, not a marked-up parts total dressed up as profit.
What moves a Drywall & Finishing price
Two Drywall & Finishing 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:
- Finish level — a level-5 smooth wall for gloss paint is far more work than a level-3 headed for texture.
- Texture match — blending a patch into orange peel or knockdown is the part that quietly eats your time.
- Height and access — cathedral ceilings and stairwells need staging, and staging is time you should charge for.
What a Drywall & Finishing job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and Drywall & Finishing is no exception. SideWRK captures the scope — hang, tape and finish, texture, or patch and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- the scope — hang, tape and finish, texture, or patch
- a pre-1978 flag
- silica joint-compound dust, pre-1980 asbestos compound, and lead disclosures
Example note on a job: "Level 4 finish — texture and lighting may show minor variation."
How to price a Drywall & Finishing job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a Drywall & Finishing job and tap a suggestion like "Drywall patch / repair" or "Hang & finish" — 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 — about $2.50 a square foot. Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the Drywall & Finishing ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "Level 4 finish — texture and lighting may show minor variation." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the Drywall & Finishing-specific records: the scope — hang, tape and finish, texture, or patch, and a pre-1978 flag.
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the Drywall & Finishing 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 Drywall & Finishing work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: silica and nuisance-dust protection (N95/P100), the pre-1980 asbestos-compound rule, and EPA lead-safe work on pre-1978 homes. The app flags the permit and license triggers so they never surprise you mid-job.
Drywall & Finishing pricing — common questions
How do I price a Drywall & Finishing job in SideWRK?
You bill per square foot — about $2.50 a square foot. Add the work — Drywall patch / repair, Hang & finish, Texture match — 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 Drywall & Finishing job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like hang & finish runs about $1,400 in the app — roughly $1,050 of that is your labor and about $350 is parts at your cost. Common Drywall & Finishing work ranges from about $250 to $1,400. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a Drywall & Finishing job?
The records Drywall & Finishing work actually needs: the scope — hang, tape and finish, texture, or patch; a pre-1978 flag; silica joint-compound dust, pre-1980 asbestos compound, and lead disclosures. 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 Drywall & Finishing work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: silica and nuisance-dust protection (N95/P100), the pre-1980 asbestos-compound rule, and EPA lead-safe work on pre-1978 homes. SideWRK documents the work; it doesn't certify you. It flags the permit and license triggers so nothing sneaks up on you.
Does SideWRK work for trades other than Drywall & Finishing?
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 six prices up top settle what to charge. Where the work comes from is a different question, and drywall answers it differently than most trades on this site. Your first customers usually aren't homeowners searching at midnight. They're a superintendent, a remodeler, a plumber who just cut a hole in somebody's ceiling, a property manager turning a unit — people with a schedule and a next job already on it.
- The two bids on the tailgate. A super has two drywall bids for the same basement finish. One is a text message with a number in it. The other has the scope, the materials, and a line noting the house went up in 1974, so somebody should look at the trim for lead paint before the sander comes out. He doesn't have to think hard about which one gets the callback — and the second bid isn't winning because it has a logo on it. Drywall gets treated as commodity labor more than almost any trade going: hang it, tape it, next house. That reputation was earned by subs who show up, do good work, and hand over an invoice that's a phone number and a total.
- What he's actually screening for. Not price, and not formatting. Every bid-template article on the internet lists the same five things — scope, materials, labor, timeline, terms — so every competitor reading them is already doing it. What separates a business from a guy with a mud pan is what's on the paper besides the price: the parts of the job that carry real liability, written down before anyone starts. A super who has had a lead scare on a site remembers which sub asked about the age of the house. The four notices SideWRK prints on every drywall estimate, and what each one is for, are further down this page.
- Writing it is a tap, not an evening. Open a drywall job and the six work titles from the menu above sit as chips under the description box, so naming the work is a pick. Each piece of work goes on as its own group — the labor line, the material line, a plain-English note, a photo — and that note rides onto the estimate and then onto the invoice, with the photos going out alongside the estimate for the customer to look at. Your business name, your logo and your license number are already on it. The customer approves by typing their name on their phone, and that name lands on the document with the date beside it. Against a number on the back of a business card, that's most of the decision.
Repeat business — the schedule, not the house
A homeowner buys drywall about twice a decade. A superintendent buys it on every job he runs, and a property manager buys it every time a tenant moves out. So the repeat customer in this trade is a person with a calendar, and what keeps you on it is being the sub who's easy to hand a scope to:
- Build the price book once. Tick "save as one of my services" when you add a line and it comes back as a starred chip on every job after that — name, quantity, rate and note all reloaded in one tap. By the fourth basement for the same builder you're typing almost nothing, and the number you quoted him in March is the number you quote in September, because it's a saved line instead of a memory.
- Copy the last one. A finished job duplicates onto a fresh estimate with every line intact: same scope, same rates, new address. "Same as the Maple Street unit, one room bigger" is a copy and one number changed. Credits and any negative line get left behind on purpose, so a break you gave somebody once doesn't quietly ride along to the next unit.
- The property remembers so you don't have to. Each job hangs on a property record — the label, the service address, the scope you picked (hang only, tape and finish, hang plus finish, texture, patch), and the answer to whether it went up before 1978. The notes hold the sheet count, the finish level, the texture and how you got to the ceiling. When the same building calls back in the spring you read a record instead of squinting at memory, and the quote goes out the same day.
- Standing turn work goes on a plan. A manager with a dozen units has drywall on a cycle, not a whim. Set it up as a recurring plan — the work, the price, the cadence — and the app files a pre-filled job each cycle, dated, with the lines already on it. Everything else is one message to one person from your own phone: what you patched, which unit, when. Written to one building, it reads like it. A blast reads like a blast.
How drywall bills
Drywall is a measured trade, and the work form asks two numbers to read the meter: Square feet and Rate ($/sq ft), already loaded at the researched $2.50. Type the footage and the running This work = total moves while you type. The square feet is the part that costs people money, because in this trade it isn't the floor.
Board is walls plus ceiling, less the openings. A 14-by-12 bedroom with 8-foot ceilings, one door and one window is 168 square feet of floor and 551 square feet of board — three and a third times the number the homeowner is picturing. Quote that room off floor area at the same rate and you've just written a $420 estimate for a $1,377.50 job. Here's what the meter makes of ordinary rooms, every one of them 8-foot ceilings, one door, one window:
Every row is walls plus ceiling, minus 21 square feet for the door and 12 for the window, times $2.50. Run the menu at the top of this page backwards through the same arithmetic and the $1,400 hang-and-finish price is 560 square feet of board — within about twenty-five dollars of that 14 × 12 bedroom. Those menu prices aren't flat fees. They're rooms.
Which leaves the driver named up the page: the finish level. Level 3 stops early because texture is going over it. Level 4 — tape, three coats, sanded — is the paint-ready standard most houses get. Level 5 adds a full skim coat across the whole surface, and it's what gloss paint and hard side light actually need. That upgrade isn't a fatter rate. It's a second line over the same footage at a finishing-only price, because the customer should be able to see what they're buying:
Two taps off the suggestion chips, two lines, one estimate. The skim coat is the app's own $600 price read across that footage — about $1.09 a square foot, roughly 44 percent on top of the hang-and-finish line. That's finishing only — no board, no screws, no hanging — and the calculator further down this page puts finishing-only work at $0.50 to $1.10 a square foot, so a level-5 pass sitting at the top of that band isn't a number you have to defend from scratch. The rate lives on the line and not on the job, so the second pass carries its own number without touching the first. Tick "optional add-on" when you add it and the customer accepts or skips it on the approval page — the level-5 call made by the person paying for it, in writing.
Set your rate once in the shop and it prefills every drywall job after that. Set a job minimum in the same place if a $250 patch across town isn't worth loading the truck — the app adds the shortfall as a visible "Shop minimum" line instead of quietly fattening the work. The drywall app runs the same three beats every trade shares: tap the work, send it, get paid.
Multiplying jobs
You cut in to patch a doorknob hole and the board behind the paper is soft, dark at the edges, and smells like a basement that never dries out. The customer approved $250. What you're looking at has nothing to do with drywall technique: how do you tell them without sounding like a guy who found extra work once he got inside the wall?
Not by softening it. By making it impossible to argue with — and then by retiring the patch instead of padding it. A $250 quote with a $650 "additional damage" adder looks exactly like the shakedown the homeowner was braced for, and it usually underprices the real scope anyway, because you're anchored to the small number you started from. The honest move and the profitable one are the same move. Off the menu at the top of this page, water-damage repair is $900 and the texture match that makes the wall read as one surface is $350 — a fresh $1,250 estimate for the job that actually exists, with the $250 patch line gone, absorbed into the cut-out. "$250 patch plus a thousand in extras" feels like an ambush. Two lines and a photo feel like information.
- Photograph it before you touch anything else. The photo attaches to that piece of work, not to a text thread, and one plain sentence in the note rides onto the estimate and the invoice with it: "Water staining behind the doorknob patch, soft to the touch, consistent with a slow leak rather than a spill." You're not diagnosing the leak — that's a plumber's call if it's live. You're recording what you found so the customer sees it instead of taking your word for it.
- The number can't quietly grow. When a job's total passes what the customer already approved, a caution comes up on the job carrying both figures, and it offers two ways forward: log the authorization you got standing in the hallway, or re-send the estimate. Nothing gets blocked. It just refuses to let the change be invisible.
- Give them the choice, not the number. Good — cut out and re-rock, $900, and say plainly that it doesn't fix whatever caused the water; if the leak is live, it comes back. Better — the repair plus the texture match, $1,250, with anything past minor surface staining getting a third-party look before you close the wall. Best — the same $1,250, run second, after somebody fixes the source, because closing drywall over an active leak just schedules the same repair for six months out at a higher price. "This is a plumbing call before it's a drywall call" buys more trust than pretending you can fix everything. Mark the upper tiers optional and the customer picks on the approval page.
- Know when to say it can wait. Surface discoloration from a leak that got fixed years ago and is dry to the touch isn't the same as staining still damp under your thumb. Telling somebody "this looks old and dry, leave it if the budget's tight this month" costs you nothing and buys the call when something actually is urgent. Selling urgency that isn't there is the fastest way to become the contractor people warn their neighbors about.
- Then the follow-through, which the app runs. You get pinged the moment the customer opens the estimate, while they're still looking at it. An estimate nobody answered gets a plain follow-up email at 3 and 7 days, two at most. A wrapped job with money owed reminds itself at 3, 7 and 14 days with a pay link on it, which settles by card or Apple Pay. Want to be paid into an app you already use? Send a payment request and it goes customer-to-you — the app tells you each one's rules for taking money for work first. A finished job asks for the review on its own, once, with a single nudge a few days later. And the before-and-after off that same job pairs into the gallery on your public page, where the next homeowner deciding between two drywall guys can see a seam that disappeared.
All of it is running on a sample business in the live drywall demo — free, no signup.
Price it now
Put the room in and it does the board math for you — walls plus ceiling, openings out — then the rest of the takeoff: sheets at ten percent waste, buckets of compound for a three-coat level 4, tape, screws, corner bead, and your labor on top. The same free calculator the drywall page runs, right here (or open the full version):
One difference worth knowing before the numbers confuse you: the rate box in the calculator is labor only, because it builds the material side from the takeoff. The $2.50 in the app is all-in. Put your own number in either one.
The paper worth keeping
The records list up the page says what a drywall job captures. This is why each one earns its keep:
- The property, on the record. The label, the service address, the scope you picked, and the one question most quotes never ask: was it built before 1978? The notes carry the sheet count, the finish level, the texture and how you got to the ceiling. That record is what makes the callback cheap to quote.
- Four notices that print themselves. Every drywall estimate and invoice carries the same four lines whether or not you remember them. Sanding joint compound throws fine respirable dust and some compounds contain crystalline silica — check the product SDS. OSHA's silica standard doesn't list drywall finishing as a standard task, but it can apply when the compound contains silica or the sanding is heavy or prolonged, and the nuisance and total-dust limits apply either way; dust control and an N95 or P100 is documented good practice. Cutting into or demolishing painted walls in a pre-1978 property can put the work under the federal EPA lead-safe renovation rules — firm certification, a certified renovator, the "Renovate Right" pamphlet in the owner's hands — once more than about six square feet of painted surface per room gets disturbed. Joint compound and wall plaster made before about 1980 can contain asbestos, so old compound and plaster don't get sanded, ground or demolished until they've been tested. And the fourth line says the quiet part out loud: SideWRK is a documentation tool, not legal advice, and doesn't determine or guarantee compliance with any of it.
- Two cautions raised on the job, not buried in a help page. Past the point where home-improvement work generally needs a written contract, the app says so — and says plainly that it doesn't provide the contract, so use your own. When a ticket reaches the total where most states want a contractor license and no license number is on file, it says that too, along with the part that catches people: splitting one project across two estimates or two invoices doesn't get you under the limit. The worked bedroom above trips both. Neither one blocks anything — where your state actually draws the line stays yours to check, and your license number goes in Settings, after which it prints on every document you send.
- April, already done. Numbered invoices, payments and material receipts roll into a year-end wrap-up: rows, category totals, CSVs, and a printable summary your preparer can actually use. The shoebox, retired. The whole paper trail is built as you work rather than reconstructed in March.
SideWRK helps you keep the records. The rules stay your state's, and meeting them stays yours.