Priced the way Welding & Fabrication work is billed
A mobile weld repair and a gate / railing don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices Welding & Fabrication the way the work is really billed: by the hour + materials (default rate ~$95/hr). 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 Welding & Fabrication jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common Welding & Fabrication 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.
Gate / railing, 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 $450 of labor is what you clear, not a marked-up parts total dressed up as profit.
What moves a Welding & Fabrication price
Two Welding & Fabrication 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 thickness — stainless and aluminum aren't mild steel, and thick sections need more passes and more filler.
- On-site vs shop — a field weld with a portable rig and travel prices above clean bench work.
- Certification — a job that needs a certified weld or has to pass inspection is a different tier than a gate repair.
What a Welding & Fabrication job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and Welding & Fabrication is no exception. SideWRK captures the base metal — mild, stainless, aluminum, galvanized and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- the base metal — mild, stainless, aluminum, galvanized
- a load-bearing / structural flag
- an installed-versus-affixed flag
- hot-work fire-watch and welding-fume (hex chrome, zinc) notes
Example note on a job: "Repair weld — not certified for structural or DOT use."
How to price a Welding & Fabrication job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a Welding & Fabrication job and tap a suggestion like "Mobile weld repair" or "Fabrication" — the common work is already loaded, so you tap instead of type.
- 2
Price it by the hour + materials
Enter the numbers and the line prices itself, by the hour + materials (default rate ~$95/hr). Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the Welding & Fabrication ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "Repair weld — not certified for structural or DOT use." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the Welding & Fabrication-specific records: the base metal — mild, stainless, aluminum, galvanized, and a load-bearing / structural flag.
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the Welding & Fabrication 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 Welding & Fabrication work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: usually none for repair and fab, but a C-60 or C-51 license once the work is affixed to a building — plus OSHA hot-work fire watch and fume protection. The app flags the permit and license triggers so they never surprise you mid-job.
Welding & Fabrication pricing — common questions
How do I price a Welding & Fabrication job in SideWRK?
You bill by the hour + materials (default rate ~$95/hr). Add the work — Mobile weld repair, Fabrication, Trailer repair — 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 Welding & Fabrication job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like gate / railing runs about $800 in the app — roughly $450 of that is your labor and about $350 is parts at your cost. Common Welding & Fabrication work ranges from about $220 to $800. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a Welding & Fabrication job?
The records Welding & Fabrication work actually needs: the base metal — mild, stainless, aluminum, galvanized; a load-bearing / structural flag; an installed-versus-affixed flag. 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 Welding & Fabrication work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: usually none for repair and fab, but a C-60 or C-51 license once the work is affixed to a building — plus OSHA hot-work fire watch and fume protection. 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 Welding & Fabrication?
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
Arriving at the number is the craft, and this trade already has two long pieces on it. How to Set Your Mobile Welding Rates covers what the field pays, the trip charge that keeps a half-day call from invoicing at a loss, and a blunt stance on quoting a crack per inch down the phone. How to Price Welding Jobs for Profit covers the floor underneath all of it: consumables, gas, drive time, and the multiplier from what you want to take home to what you have to bill. Read those for the number. This chapter is what the app does with it once it's out of your mouth.
- The estimate records the yes. It goes out as a link the customer opens on their phone. When they approve, the job holds on to the amount they approved and the name they typed, and the invoice prints it back: Approved by, their name, the date. A number read out over the phone keeps none of that.
- You hear when they open it. The moment an estimate gets opened, the app pings your phone — a push if you have notifications on, an email if you don't — so you can call while it's still on their screen instead of two days later.
- When the paint comes off, the job speaks up first. This is the welding trap: the crack was 18 inches on the phone and 30 with a grinder on it. Once the running total climbs past what the customer authorized, the job screen names both numbers side by side and puts a Log authorization button under them — who said go, how (in person, phone, or text), for how much. Made before the second pass, that's a record. Made after, it's an argument.
Repeat business
A welder's regular usually isn't a household. It's a farm with six trailers, a shop with a yard full of equipment, a property manager with gates that keep getting hit. Same customer, different steel, twice a year — and the second call should cost you a fraction of the first:
- "Do this again." Open the old job, tap it, and the app writes a fresh estimate for that customer and that job site with every line already on it at the same price. Change what changed, send it. The hitch repair you quoted in April is a two-tap quote in October.
- One customer, every piece of their steel. Each trailer, gate, and machine is its own job site under the one customer — its own base metal, its own structural answer, its own notes on thickness and access. When the call is "the one with the cracked tongue," you open the record instead of narrowing it down out loud. What six months of those records are worth once you start reading them together is the profit guide's story, and it's a good one.
- Write down the ones you lose. Mark an estimate lost and give it a reason, and it counts toward the close rate on your Money tab — won so many of so many, last 90 days. Losing on schedule is a different problem than losing on price, and you can't fix the one you never wrote down.
- When you're due back on site, one text, one person. The appointment reminder and the on-my-way both open your own texting app with the words already in it: their first name, your name and your business, and the day and time off the job. Your number, their phone, sent by your thumb — and you can change any of it before you hit send. A shop owner can tell a blast from a text.
How welding bills
The prices at the top of this page are prefills, and the mobile rates guide takes each one apart — how a ticket splits between labor and steel, and which of the two went soft when a job comes in light. What no price list can show you is the call that doesn't fit one. Here's that call:
Three controls, one small ticket. The job timer runs while you work and rounds to the nearest quarter hour, so 1:55 on the clock offers you two hours at your saved rate and the labor line comes off a clock instead of a guess on the drive home — it only appears on the five hourly trades, because there's nothing to time on a flat menu. Their plate rides the invoice at zero with Cust-supplied printed beside it. And $225 of work lands under a $250 welding minimum, so the job says "Under your $250.00 minimum — add $25.00 to reach it." with a button that adds it as a real line, taxed and totalled like any other.
That minimum is the number most likely to be missing. Both guides argue hard for having one — a call-out eats two hours of your day before the first tack. The app is where the number lives: set it once in Shop, per trade, so your welding floor isn't your handyman floor, and every job that comes in under it says so while you can still do something about it.
Multiplying jobs
After the first few jobs the money is in follow-through, and follow-through is the first thing off the truck on a Thursday. The app runs it:
- The quote that went quiet. A shop foreman who opened your estimate Tuesday and then got pulled onto a breakdown isn't a no. The app emails him a plain follow-up at 3 days and one more at 7, then leaves it alone. Turn it off in Shop if you'd rather do your own chasing.
- The invoice that chases itself. A finished job with money still on it nudges at 3, 7, and 14 days. The button drops the customer onto the job's own page, where they can pay the balance by card once you've connected Stripe. Want it in Venmo, Zelle, or Cash App instead? That's Request Payment — a link plus a text already written, sent by you.
- The review nobody remembers to ask for. When a job wraps, the app emails the request on its own and follows up once a few days later. You were already on the next call by then.
- The bead sells the next one. Pair a before and after out of a job's own photos into the gallery on your public page. A foreman choosing between two mobile welders picks the one whose welds he can see.
All of it is running on a sample business in the live welding demo — free, no signup.
Price it now
Two ways in, and it's worth knowing which one you're in. Simple is hours × rate plus material at your markup — the everyday quote. Detailed is the weld-metal check: give it the fillet leg, the run in feet and the number of passes and it works out the deposited pounds, the filler, the shielding gas, and the arc hours at your process's deposition rate, plus 0.4 of an hour for fit-up and cleanup. Quote in simple, sanity-check a fab job in detailed. One number to watch on the way in: ticking mobile swings the rate default from $95 to $125 and adds a $200 trip fee, which is this tool's own read on field pricing, not your rate — type yours over both. The same free calculator the welding app page runs, right here:
Want it full-screen, or a link to text a customer? The standalone welding cost calculator is the same tool with room to breathe, and it hands you a snippet that drops it onto your own site.
The paper worth keeping
The records list above says what a welding job captures. Under the totals, every welding estimate and invoice also prints a short block of notices you didn't have to write. They're not there to lecture your customer. They're there because welding is a trade where the risk shows up months later, and a document that already said the thing is worth more then than a memory of having mentioned it. Here's what each one is doing:
- The hot-work notice. It rides every welding document: combustibles within about 35 feet cleared or shielded, a charged extinguisher on hand, and a fire watch during the work and for at least 30 minutes after (OSHA 29 CFR 1910.252). SideWRK prints the rule. It does not issue hot-work permits, and on a site that needs one, getting it is still yours.
- The fume line — and the field that raises it. Stainless and chrome-alloy steel can put hexavalent chromium in the air; galvanized gives off zinc. The notice names both and says ventilation and respiratory protection are on you (OSHA 29 CFR 1910.1026). The base-metal field on the job site is what puts that question in front of you while you're still writing the quote, not while you're under the hood.
- The structural line. A load-bearing weld can call for a certified welder, and sometimes an engineer's design or sign-off and an inspection on top of that. The document says it plainly: SideWRK records the work performed, it does not certify a weld or decide that it meets code. The load-bearing flag on the job site is a yes or no you answer in a second, and it's the field that tells you, months later, which side of that notice the job was on.
- The license line, and what happens at $1,000. Repair and fabrication generally aren't contractor work. Permanently affixing what you built to a building can be, once a job passes your state's minor-work limit — and where your state draws that line, under which license class, is yours to confirm. With no license number on file, the document frames the work as small repair and fabrication only and says so out loud instead of leaving it hanging. At a $1,000 ticket the job screen raises the question directly, including the part people get wrong: splitting one project across two estimates doesn't put you under a limit. Past $500 it raises the written-contract question too — plenty of states want home-improvement work in writing, and SideWRK doesn't supply that contract. Use your own.
- Fabricated, supplied, or bought. A part line on a welding job carries one of three conditions, and two of them print on the customer's copy: Fabricated for the piece you made, Cust-supplied for the steel they handed you. Nothing printed means new and bought. A year on, that's the difference between a job you can reconstruct and a column of dollar amounts.
- April, already done. Numbered invoices, payments, and material receipts roll into a year-end wrap-up — rows, category totals, CSVs, and a printable summary a preparer can actually use.
SideWRK is a documentation tool, not legal advice. It helps you keep the paperwork; the rules stay your state's, and meeting them stays yours.