The Hidden Per-Job Costs Contractors Forget to Quote
Masking tape, gloves, drop sheets, and fasteners rarely get their own line on a quote. Priced individually they add up to real money, and priced at zero they come straight out of your margin.
Last updated August 19, 2026
List every small item you burn through on a job (tape, drop sheets, gloves, cleaning supplies, fasteners) with its cost, how many you buy, and how many jobs it lasts. (Cost each × Qty) ÷ Lasts gives you a $/job for each line, and the total is the number that belongs on every quote, not left unbilled.
Why this line goes missing
Consumables are not forgotten because contractors are careless. They are forgotten because of when they are bought. Materials get ordered for a job and arrive attached to it. Tape, gloves and drop sheets get picked up on a Tuesday for no job in particular, out of the van float or on a card, and by the time they are used they have no job to attach to. They land in the accounts as a general expense, which is a real place for them to be, and never reach the quote.
That is also why trying harder does not fix it. There is no moment in the job where anyone is prompted to ask what the tape cost. The fix is structural: work the figure out once, then put it on every quote as a standing line, the same way you would treat insurance.
Consumable or equipment
The two are recovered differently, so the boundary is worth settling before you start listing items. A consumable is used up and priced per job here. Equipment is kept, wears out over years, and is recovered through depreciation instead.
Belongs here
- Tape, poly sheeting, edge and door masking
- Gloves, dust masks, ear plugs, knee pads
- Rags, wipes, cleaning chemicals
- Mixing buckets, stir sticks, fasteners that stay in the work
Belongs in depreciation
- Grinders, vacuums, drills, ladders, trolleys
- Steel caps, hard hats, hi-vis, respirator bodies
- Anything you would still own after this job
- See the equipment depreciation guide
The awkward middle
- Respirator cartridges, sanding pads, mixing paddles
- Kept, but replaced every few jobs
- Put them here with a Lasts value: a $40 paddle over 10 jobs is $4.00 a job
The rule that settles it
- If it is replaced every few jobs, it is a consumable with a Lasts value
- If it lasts a year or more, it is equipment
- Either way it gets recovered. What matters is that it is recovered once, not twice or never
How to read the inputs
Item Rows
- Five starter rows (tape, drop sheets, gloves & PPE, cleaning supplies, fasteners) ship with names filled in but cost and quantity blank; add trade-specific rows with + Add item
Cost, Qty & Lasts
- (Cost each × Qty) ÷ Lasts = $/job for that row; Lasts is floored at 1, so a blank or 0 never divides by zero
Business Volume
- Days/week × weeks/year and jobs/year × area/job only feed the Per Year, Per Day, and Per Area views, and they have zero effect on the headline Per Job number
Other Views
- Per Year, Per Working Day, and Per Area (Per Area shown to four decimal places). Use whichever denominator matches how you actually price a job
Worked example
Leave Business Volume at its own defaults (5 working days a week, 48 weeks a year, 60 jobs a year, and an 80 ft² typical job), then fill in the five starter rows with real numbers: $8 masking tape, 2 rolls, used up every job ($16.00); $25 drop sheets that last 3 jobs ($8.33); a $35 box of gloves & PPE that lasts 5 jobs ($7.00); $12 of cleaning supplies that last 2 jobs ($6.00); and $15 of small fasteners used up every job ($15.00). Those five lines add up to a Consumables & PPE Per Job figure of $52.33. Spread out, that is $3,140.00 a year, $13.08 per working day, and $0.6542 per ft².
See your own consumables add up
Start from the five starter-pack rows, or add your own trade-specific items. Cost, quantity, and lasts all update the Per Job total live.
Full tool is a row-based table. Add unlimited custom items with their own cost, quantity, and lasts value, then push the result straight into your Business Profile overhead.
Open the live calculator →What that figure is worth over a year
A $52.33 line on a quote is easy to wave away. The same number annualized is not. Across the 60 jobs in the example it is $3,140.00 a year of cost you carried and nobody reimbursed, and that is before a single item gets more expensive.
The part worth sitting with is what it takes to earn back. This is cost, not price, so recovering it is not a matter of finding another $3,140 of work. At a 40% target margin you would need roughly $5,233 of extra revenue to end the year where you would have been if the line had simply been on the quote. Unbilled cost is the most expensive kind of revenue to chase, because you have to win the work twice.
Which is the same argument as pricing a job for a real margin and spreading fixed costs: what is left out of job cost does not disappear, it just comes out of profit instead.
Which view to quote from
The tool reports the same annual spend four ways because contractors price work four different ways. Only the headline changes, not the underlying number.
Per Job
- $52.33 in the example
- Use it when you quote a fixed price per job
- The headline, and the figure that goes into your Business Profile overhead line
Per Working Day
- $13.08 in the example
- Use it when you quote a day rate
- Note it divides by working days, so more days at the same spend gives a lower daily figure
Per Area
- $0.6542 per ft² in the example
- Use it when you quote by area, as most coating work does
- Carried to four decimals on purpose, because rounding a per-area rate is a real error at scale
Per Year
- $3,140.00 in the example
- Not for quoting. For deciding whether this is worth your attention at all
- It usually settles that question quickly
Common mistakes
- Leaving Qty or Cost each blank on a row, which silently zeroes that line’s $/job, so it shows $0.00 and is easy to mistake for “not needed” rather than “still needs a value”
- Confusing Qty with how much you use per job, when Qty is how many units you bought and Lasts is what turns that bulk purchase into a per-job rate; a $30 box of gloves covering 5 jobs is Cost 30 · Qty 1 · Lasts 5, not Qty 5 · Lasts 1
- Leaving Lasts at the default of 1 for genuinely reusable items like drop sheets or a box of PPE, which massively overstates their per-job cost: a $25 drop sheet reused over 3 jobs is $8.33 per job, not $25.00
- Toggling the Area Unit between ft² and m² without re-entering Typical Area Per Job, because the toggle only flips the label and does not convert the number, so the Per Area figure silently changes meaning
- Stopping at the five pre-loaded generic rows and assuming the list is complete, when they are placeholders at $0.00 and trade-specific items like respirator cartridges or extension cords still need to be added with + Add item
Once you have a real Per Job figure, treat it as a fixed line on every quote instead of a rounding error. The same tape, gloves, and drop sheets you already restock for every job either get priced in, or come straight out of your margin. It belongs in the same overhead stack as your insurance, software, and licensing costs, priced in on purpose, not left to erode your margin.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the calculator show $0.00 until I fill in the rows?
The five starter rows load with names already in place (masking tape, drop sheets, gloves and PPE, cleaning supplies, small fasteners), but cost and quantity are left blank on purpose so nothing is calculated from invented numbers (Lasts defaults to 1, used up every job, until you change it). The moment any row has a real cost and quantity, its $/job appears and the total updates.
What is the difference between Qty and Lasts?
Qty is how many units you buy at once, not how many you use per job. Lasts is what turns that bulk purchase into a per-job rate. A $30 box of gloves that covers 5 jobs is Cost 30, Qty 1, Lasts 5, which works out to $6.00 per job. Entering Qty 5 and leaving Lasts at 1 would wrongly compute $150.00 per job instead.
Do the Business Volume fields change my Per Job number?
No. Working days per week, weeks worked per year, jobs per year, and typical area per job only convert the Per Job total into Per Year, Per Working Day, and Per Area figures. They have zero effect on the headline Per Job number, which is driven entirely by the item rows. If you only need the figure to add to a quote, you can leave that whole section alone.
Is a few dollars of tape and gloves per job really worth tracking?
On its own no single item looks worth the trouble, which is exactly why it goes unbilled. Run the numbers instead. The worked example on this page comes to $52.33 a job, and across 60 jobs a year that is $3,140.00 you paid for and nobody reimbursed. Because it is cost rather than price, replacing it is worse than it looks: at a 40% target margin you would need about $5,233 of extra revenue just to get back to where you started. Small, recurring and unbilled is the kind of cost that is easiest to lose track of and hardest to notice once it is gone.