How to Price Equipment Wear Into Your Flooring Quotes
Every grinder, vacuum, and hand tool wears out on the job whether you price for it or not — spread the cost across the work it does and stop letting it eat into your margin.
Annual depreciation = (purchase price − salvage value) ÷ useful life. The calculator spreads that figure for every tool you own across your working days, jobs, and floor area for the year — using one shared Business Volume block — then totals everything into a per-day, per-job, and per-ft² rate you can fold straight into your price. Straight-line only, by the tool’s own admission: “close enough for pricing.”
How to read the inputs
Business Volume
- Days/week, weeks/year, jobs/year, and typical area/job — every per-day, per-job, and per-area figure downstream divides by these four numbers
Equipment Rows
- Name, purchase price, salvage value, and useful life per tool — the three starter rows load with blank purchase and salvage values, so nothing calculates until you type at least one real price
Salvage Value
- Automatically capped at the purchase price, and the depreciation base is floored at zero — there is no input combination that produces negative depreciation
Apply to Profile
- Pushes the Per Day, Per Job, and Per Area totals straight into your Business Profile’s equipment-tools overhead line, defaulting to a per-day allocation
Worked example
Leave Business Volume at typical values — 5 days/week, 48 weeks/year (240 working days/year), 60 jobs/year, and 80 ft²/job (4,800 ft² covered per year) — then fill in three owned tools straight from the calculator’s own built-in examples: an $8,000 grinder salvaged at $1,500 after 7 years ($928.57/yr), a $3,500 vacuum salvaged at $500 after 7 years ($428.57/yr), and a $2,000 hand-tool budget with $0 salvage after 4 years ($500.00/yr). Add the three together and the company-wide total comes to $1,857.14 a year — spread across the year that is $7.74 per working day, $30.95 per job, or $0.3869 per ft² to add straight to your rate.
Try it with your own equipment list
Add each tool as its own row with its purchase price, salvage value, and useful life — every field below is pre-filled with the calculator's own grinder example to adjust from.
Full tool adds unlimited equipment rows and spreads every one across your Business Volume into a per-day, per-job, and per-ft² rate.
Open the live calculator →Common mistakes
- Quoting labor and materials but leaving equipment wear out of the price entirely — treating depreciation as a year-end accounting concept instead of a real cost on every job
- Using the full purchase price as the depreciation base instead of purchase minus salvage — overstates the annual cost and skews every per-job figure high
- Guessing an unrealistically long useful life to make the per-job number look smaller — understates true annual cost and under-recovers on every quote for years
- Folding vehicle costs into this calculator instead of using the dedicated Vehicle Operating Cost Calculator — vehicles depreciate and price per mile or km differently
- Entering a monthly lease payment as if it were a purchase price — a lease is a fixed recurring cost, not straight-line depreciation, and belongs in the Fixed Cost Spreader Calculator instead
- Leaving Jobs Per Year or Typical Area Per Job at unrealistic defaults — both are denominators, so an inflated jobs-per-year figure silently understates the true per-job equipment cost
Equipment wear is easy to skip because it never shows up as a check you write on a Tuesday — but skipped or not, the grinder and vacuum keep aging on every job you run. Depreciation is one of several fixed costs to spread across every quote.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the calculator show $0 until I type a purchase price?
The three starter rows load with a name and a useful-life figure already filled in, but purchase price and salvage value are left blank on purpose — there is no invented dollar figure to accidentally quote from. Nothing calculates until you enter at least one real purchase price.
What if I enter a salvage value higher than the purchase price by mistake?
The calculator caps salvage value at the purchase price automatically, and floors the depreciation base at zero. There is no input combination that produces a negative annual depreciation figure, even if the salvage number is fat-fingered too high.
Should I use this calculator for my work truck or a leased floor grinder?
No — this tool is built for owned, non-vehicle equipment only. Vehicles depreciate and get priced per mile or km differently, so use the Vehicle Operating Cost Calculator for those. Leased equipment is not depreciated at all — the monthly payment is a fixed recurring cost, so run it through the Fixed Cost Spreader Calculator instead.
Straight-line depreciation feels too simple — is it accurate enough for pricing?
For quoting purposes, yes. Straight-line spreads a tool’s cost evenly across its useful life and is the most widely used method precisely because it is simple. Units-of-production depreciation, which ties cost to actual hours or jobs run, is more accurate when wear tracks usage rather than age — but the calculator’s own disclaimer is honest about the trade-off: straight-line is "close enough for pricing," not a tax-grade calculation.