Free overhead & profit calculator
Two steps: find your real overhead percentage from a year of numbers, then price any job with overhead and profit built in — and see the honest margin the price actually carries. Free, no signup.
O&P convention: price = cost × (1 + overhead% + profit%), both figured on cost. Runs in your browser — nothing you type is sent or saved.
Job costs are easy to name: lumber, subs, the crew's hours. Overhead is everything else that keeps the company alive whether or not anyone is swinging a hammer — liability insurance, the trucks, the storage unit, the phone, the software, the bookkeeper, and the biggest one contractors forget: your own salary. If paying yourself only happens when a job goes well, you did not price overhead — you volunteered.
The worked math: $120,000 of annual overhead against $600,000 of revenue is 20%. That means a $40,000-cost job must carry $8,000 of overhead before a single dollar of profit exists. Add a 10% profit on cost ($4,000) and the price is $52,000 — which the calculator will also tell you is a 7.7% profit margin on price, not 10%. The percent confusion is the same one the markup ↔ margin converter untangles.
In insurance restoration work, "10 and 10" is shorthand for adding 10% overhead and 10% profit on top of job costs — 20% combined. If you searched "how to get overhead and profit from insurance," here is the honest version: O&P on a claim is a convention, not an entitlement. Whether it is paid depends on the claim, the carrier, and commonly on whether the loss needs a general contractor coordinating multiple trades. This page can do the arithmetic; what a specific claim should pay is a question for your adjuster, your policy, or a claims professional — not a calculator.
For your own bidding, the deeper point stands regardless of insurance: 10% overhead is only the right number if your overhead is actually 10%. Step 1 above exists because most contractors have never run that division on their real books — and a company running 20% overhead that bids "10 and 10" is quietly donating the gap.
One boundary rule keeps the math honest: if a cost exists because of a specific job, it is a job cost, not overhead. The dumpster on Handley Street is a job cost; the storage unit that serves every job is overhead. Contractors who let job costs drift into overhead double-punish themselves — jobs look more profitable than they are, while the overhead percentage swells and makes every future bid heavier than it needs to be. Sort each cost by the question "which job made me spend this?" and the split takes care of itself.
Overhead percentage is not a tattoo. Add a truck, hire an office manager, or grow revenue 40%, and the percentage shifts under your bids. I run a remodeling company and re-run this division every winter and every summer; ten minutes, twice a year, and my markup stops being folklore. The other half of the discipline is the cost side: overhead math sits on top of job costs, and job costs are only true if every receipt lands on its job. That is the part job costing software does from the field — snap the receipt, it lands on the job, and both layers of the math stay real. The remaining tools in the set live at the free tools page.
Overhead is what it costs to run the company — insurance, trucks, office, your salary — independent of any one job. Profit is what is left after the job’s costs AND its share of overhead are paid. "O&P" is the line that covers both, commonly written as two percentages added to job cost.
A convention — especially in insurance restoration work — of adding 10% overhead and 10% profit on top of job costs, for a combined 20% addition. It is a custom, not a law or a guarantee: whether it appears on an insurance claim depends on the claim, the carrier, and often whether a general contractor is coordinating multiple trades. Talk to your adjuster or a claims professional about your specific claim.
Add up a full year of company overhead (everything you pay that is not a job cost) and divide by that year’s revenue. $120,000 of overhead on $600,000 of revenue is 20% — meaning every job must carry at least 20% on top of its costs before a dollar of profit exists.
They rhyme but answer different questions. Markup is whatever you add to cost to reach price. O&P splits that addition into its two jobs — covering the company (overhead) and paying you for risk (profit) — so you can see whether your markup actually covers both. A markup below your overhead percentage is a slow-motion loss.
No. It runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type is sent or saved.