What It Really Costs You to Win a Job
Every quote costs real hours, and most quotes are lost — here is how your hours per quote, hourly rate, and win rate combine into the one number that pays for the jobs you did not win.
Cost per won job = (Hours per quote × Hourly rate) ÷ Win rate. Every quote you write costs real hours whether you win it or not, and most quotes are lost — so the formula divides the cost of one quote by your win rate to fold the losing quotes back into the number. At 2 hours per quote, a $60/hr rate, and a 25% win rate, that works out to $480 per won job — the amount that quietly needs to be covered by every job you actually land.
How to read the inputs
Hours Per Quote
- Ships blank on purpose — count the whole quote, not just the write-up: site visit, drive time, measuring, follow-up calls, and revisions
Hourly Rate & Win Rate
- Rate is what your quoting time is worth, not your wage; win rate is silently floored at 1% and capped at 100%, so a 0% entry never errors, it just returns a very large number
Business Volume
- Days/week, weeks/year, jobs/year, and area/job only feed the alternate per-year, per-day, and per-area views — they never change the headline Cost Per Won Job figure
Apply to Profile
- Pushes the cost per won job, plus its per-day and per-area equivalents, into your Pro Tools Business Profile as an overhead line tagged “quoting-sales”
Worked example
Leave every Business Volume field at its default — 5 working days/week, 48 weeks/year (240 working days), 60 jobs/year, and 80 ft² typical area per job (4,800 ft² covered per year) — then enter 2 hours per quote at the default $60/hr rate and 25% win rate. Cost Per Quote comes to $120.00, and at a 25% win rate that takes 4.0 quotes to land one job, so the headline Cost Per Won Job is $480.00. Spread across the year that is $28,800.00, or $120.00 per working day, or $6.00 per ft² — and it costs 480 hours a year in quoting time alone. Improving the win rate from 25% to 40% would cut quotes-per-win to 2.5 and drop the cost per won job by about 38%, to roughly $300 — the same hours and rate, just fewer losing quotes funding each win.
Find your own cost per won job
Enter your real hours per quote, hourly rate, and win rate — the headline figure updates instantly, ready to fold into your pricing.
Full tool also takes your win rate and business volume, then shows per-year, per-day, and per-ft² views alongside the headline cost per won job.
Open the live calculator →Common mistakes
- Under-estimating quoting hours — treating a quote as a quick 30-minute task when the all-in time (site visit, drive time, write-up, follow-ups, revisions) usually runs 2–3+ hours
- Leaving Hours Per Quote blank and assuming the calculator is broken or defaults to $0 — it is deliberately empty until you fill it in, and shows a prompt instead of a result
- Entering a 0% win rate expecting a $0 or blocked result — the app floors it to 1%, so it still returns a real (very large) cost-per-won-job number rather than erroring out
- Switching the ft²/m² toggle and expecting the Typical Area Per Job number to convert automatically — it only relabels the unit, so the same number gets silently misread unless you re-enter it
- Itemizing the result on a customer-facing quote — the tool’s own guidance is to bake it into overall pricing or your day rate instead, the same way you would fold in insurance or software costs
Once you know your true cost per won job, it belongs in the same overhead stack as everything else that runs whether or not this particular quote closes. See how much you are spending to generate the lead in the first place — quoting cost is only half of what it takes to land a customer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why divide by win rate instead of just multiplying hours by rate?
Because the hours spent on quotes you lose still cost you. If a 2-hour quote at $60/hr costs $120 and you only win 1 in 4, you are really spending $120 on each of 4 quotes to land that 1 job — $480 total. Dividing the cost of one quote by your win rate (0.25) lands on the same $480 directly, so the formula bakes the losing quotes in automatically instead of making you count them by hand.
What counts as a healthy win rate?
Industry benchmarks generally put a "good" bid win rate around 25–35%, with many contractors averaging near 25% (about 1 win per 4 quotes) and top performers reaching 30–40%. Hard competitive or public bids often run lower, 10–22%, while warm referral or repeat-customer quotes can run much higher, sometimes 50–65%. As rough rules of thumb: a win rate under about 15% usually signals wasted bidding effort, while one much above 50% often means you are pricing too low and leaving margin on the table.
Why is the Hours Per Quote field blank until I type something?
It is deliberate — there is no realistic default for how long a quote takes you, so the calculator ships that field empty rather than guess. Until you enter a real number, the results section stays hidden with a prompt instead of showing a $0 or invented figure, so you never mistake a placeholder for your actual cost.
Should I show the cost per won job as a line item on the quote itself?
No — bake it into your overall pricing or hourly rate instead. Customers do not want to see something like "Cost of failed quotes: $480" itemized on their estimate. It belongs folded into your overhead allocation, alongside insurance, software, and the other costs that run whether or not this particular job closes.