Why there is no national price per square foot
Every page that answers this with a tidy range is describing a shop that is not yours.
Two of the three things that set your price are local and personal. Your crew cost depends on what installers earn where you are and what you carry in payroll burden. Your speed depends on how many floors that exact crew has done. Your overhead depends on whether you work out of a driveway or a leased building with an office manager in it.
Change any one of those and the right square foot number moves a long way. Which means the average describes nobody.
So the useful question is not what does epoxy flooring cost per square foot. It is what does this floor cost me, and what do I have to charge so it carries my overhead and leaves the profit I came for. That is arithmetic. It takes about ninety seconds.
The cost build up, in the order it happens
Four layers. Get them in the right order and the price falls out the bottom.
1. Material
Resin, topcoat, flake or quartz, patch, crack repair, and the stuff that dies on the job. Tape, plastic, blades, mixing pails. The number you want is not the price list. It is what you actually invoiced on a similar floor, divided by the square feet you actually coated. That quietly includes your waste, and the difference is usually bigger than people expect.
2. Crew days
Coating is day work. You load up, you grind, you coat, you clean up, you leave. So cost it in days, not hours. What does your whole crew cost you for one working day, including wages, payroll taxes, comp and the truck?
Then the other half. How many square feet does that crew finish in a day, on clean concrete, start to finish? Those two numbers give you labor on any floor. Your own jobs can tell you both, if anybody writes them down.
3. Job costs that are not material or labor
Fuel, dump fees, rental, permits, a dumpster, a second trip because the homeowner never moved the freezer. Small on their own. On a one day residential floor they are not small as a share of the job.
4. Overhead, as a percentage of revenue
Rent, insurance, phones, software, ads, office pay, and your own truck when it is not on a job. None of it belongs to any one floor. That is exactly why it gets forgotten, and exactly why every floor has to carry it.
Work it out once. Last year’s overhead divided by last year’s revenue. That percentage is one of the two most important numbers in your business, and most coating owners have never worked it out.
The formula: divide, don’t add
This part is worth reading twice.
You do not add your margin to your cost. You divide your cost by what is left after overhead and margin come out.
A 600 sq ft garage, costed and priced
- Material at $1.80 a ft²
- $1,080
- Crew: 1.5 days at $800 a day
- $1,200
- Fuel and dump fees
- $150
- Direct job cost
- $2,430
- Divide by 1 minus 18% overhead minus 20% margin
- / 0.62
- Price
- $3,919
That works out to $6.53 a ft², for this shop, on this floor. Inside it: $2,430 of cost, $705 of overhead, $784 of net profit. They add back to the price exactly. Every number here is made up to show the method, not to quote a market. Put your own into the price calculator and you get a better answer.
Now the version most shops actually run. Same $2,430 cost, add 20 percent, quote $2,916. The $486 you added looks like profit. Take 18 percent overhead off the $2,916, which is $525, and you are $39 underwater.
You were busy. The crew got paid. The customer was delighted. And the floor cost you money.
The gap between $2,916 and $3,919 is not a rounding difference. It is the whole business. Run thirty floors a year on the first number and you worked a full season to stay still.
Four ways to price, and when each one fits
Cost plus margin, your default
What is described above. It is the only method that makes sure a floor carries its share of overhead and leaves a profit. Use it to cost every job, even the ones you quote some other way.
Per square foot, for costing only
Useful for checking yourself and for talking to other contractors. Bad as a customer facing price. It invites a line by line comparison on the one axis where the cheapest bid always wins. It also breaks on small floors. A 300 ft² garage carries the same setup, the same masking and nearly the same cleanup as a 600 ft² one. So an honest square foot rate on the small floor looks outrageous next to the big one.
Good, better, best. Your best selling tool
One price is a yes or no question. Three options is a which one question, and the difference in close rate is not subtle. The customer who would have talked you down now talks themselves up. The ones who were always going to buy the cheapest option still buy, from you.
Build the tiers on real differences. System, topcoat, flake coverage, warranty length, how much repair is included. Do not build them on the same floor at three prices. Customers can smell that, and it costs you the trust you needed to close.
Day rate, for work that will not sit still
Commercial repair. Unknown slab conditions. Phased work around a tenant. If you honestly cannot scope it, price the day and say so. Putting a fixed number on an unknown is how a shop takes a loss it never sees coming.
When you are the high bid
You will be, often. It is not automatically a problem. What matters is whether you are high on price or high on scope. Those two get confused constantly.
Before you touch your number, find out what the other quote includes.
- What prep? Diamond grinding and acid etching are not the same work and they do not last the same.
- What system? A one day polyaspartic and a big box roll on kit are different products with different lifespans.
- How much flake, and what topcoat? Coverage and topcoat thickness are where a cheap bid gets cheap, invisibly.
- What repair is included? Cracks priced as extras after the crew shows up is a different number than the one on the page.
- What warranty, and from who? A warranty from a shop with no address is a sentence, not a warranty.
Put the two scopes side by side and let the customer see what they are choosing between. Some will still take the cheap one. That is fine. You lost to a different product, not to your price.
What you must not do is quietly match a number by taking out work you never told the customer you took out. That is how a shop ends up doing a $2,000 job for $2,000 and owning the callback too.
What a discount actually costs. At a 20 percent margin, knocking 10 percent off the price does not cost you 10 percent. Your costs do not move, so the whole discount comes out of profit. And 10 percent of the price is half of a 20 percent margin. One ten percent discount is half a floor’s profit. Two of them is the floor.
If you need a lever, move the scope, the schedule or the system. Never the margin.
Raising your prices without losing the year
Your close rate is the clearest signal. If you win nearly everything you quote, you are not a great salesman. You are cheap, and you are doing the market’s cheap work at your own expense. A healthy shop loses a fair share of its bids and sleeps fine.
Three things make a price increase survivable.
- Raise on new quotes only, starting today. Not backwards. Not on work already sold.
- Change something the customer can see at the same time. A better topcoat. A longer warranty. A written scope. A real proposal instead of a text message. They are comparing value, and you just moved it.
- Hold it for sixty days before you judge it. Your close rate will dip and then settle. Judging a price change on two weeks of data is how shops talk themselves back down.
One more thing, and it is the one that compounds. You cannot price well without knowing what your last thirty floors actually cost you. Material used per job. Real crew days. The jobs that ran long. That loop is the difference between a price and a guess, and it is what job costing and materials tracking is for. The estimating side builds the number. The costing side tells you if you were right.
The pricing system Resinwerks partners get
Resinwerks partners get the Profit-Stack pricing system along with the software. The pricing structure, the sales pitch deck, and the training to run it. One partner reported it took his close rate from 38% to 53% and added $423 in profit per job. Results vary by shop and market.
Get the software free with ResinwerksCoatHQ is free to active Resinwerks partners. You buy the resin. No subscription and no platform fee. Resinwerks makes its money on resin, not on software.
Common questions
How much should I charge for epoxy flooring?
Take your direct cost for the floor. That is material, crew days and job costs. Divide it by one minus your overhead percentage minus your target margin. Do not add a percentage on top of your cost. Those two methods give very different numbers. Published square foot ranges describe somebody else’s crew in somebody else’s market.
Is it better to price per square foot or per job?
Cost per square foot. Quote per job. Square foot costing tells you whether the floor makes money. A finished job price is how you sell it. Leading with a square foot rate invites a line by line comparison against the cheapest bid in town, and it makes you look expensive on small floors where your setup time is a bigger slice of the work.
What should I do when I am the highest bid?
Find out what the other quote includes before you touch your price. Most of the time the gap is scope, not greed. A different system. Less grinding. No patching. A thinner topcoat. No warranty. Put the two scopes side by side for the customer. If you still lose, you lost to a different product, and that beats winning at a loss.
How often should I raise my prices?
Whenever your costs move, and at least once a year. Material, wages, insurance and fuel do not hold still. A price you set two years ago is really a price cut. The simplest signal is your close rate. If you are winning nearly everything you quote, you are too cheap for the work you are getting.
Should I discount to win a job?
Know what a discount costs you first. At a 20 percent margin, taking 10 percent off does not cost you 10 percent. It takes half your profit on that floor, because your costs do not move and the whole discount comes out of margin. If you need a lever, change the scope instead. A different system, a simpler color, or a date that suits your schedule.
About the numbers in this guide. Every dollar figure in the worked example is made up. They are round numbers chosen to show the method. Not survey data. Not market rates. Not a quote.
One figure here is not ours. Resinwerks says its Profit-Stack pricing system can add $40,000 to $60,000 per crew, per year. That is profit, not revenue, and results vary by shop. We quote it the way they state it and we do not restate it as sales or income. Those are different things, and the difference is the whole point of this page.