Epoxy floor job bid calculator

The system is the primer, base coats, flakes and topcoat, and for each step you enter how much floor your crew gets through per hour. Quantities and hours work straight away. Add your own material prices, hourly labor cost and markup to get a bid total and a price per square foot; no prices are filled in for you, because they vary too much by supplier and region.

How the bid is built

The materials come from the same floor-system maths as the epoxy floor coating calculator: gallons of primer, base coat and topcoat from the film thickness (wet or dry) and volume solids, each rounded up to whole kits because each is its own purchase. Chips are weighed at a rate per square foot and rounded up to whole boxes, the same way as the garage floor calculator. Labor is the area divided by how much floor one worker covers in an hour, step by step. Then your prices turn quantities and hours into a job cost, and the markup turns that into a bid.

labor hours = area ÷ prep speed + area ÷ primer speed
            + area × base coats ÷ base speed + area ÷ topcoat speed
materials = kits × kit size × price per gallon (each product) + boxes × price per box
job cost = materials + labor hours × hourly cost + other costs
bid = job cost × (1 + markup)        price per sq ft = bid ÷ floor area

Material is priced on what you buy — whole kits — not on the exact gallons the floor takes, because the part-used kit is still on the invoice. The note under the result spells it out product by product: kits × size = gallons charged × your price, plus how much is used and carried over. If you’ll use the carry-over on the next job, switch Price the materials by to exact use. Primer, base coat and topcoat often come in different pail sizes, so each has its own kit size; leave the primer and topcoat sizes blank when they match the base coat.

Labor speeds are yours to set

Every crew and every slab is different, so the speeds on the form are round placeholders to get a number on the screen — 75 sq ft per worker-hour for prep, 400 for primer, 250 for each base coat with the broadcast, 400 for the topcoat. They are not industry averages. Replace them with your own: take a few finished jobs, divide the floor area by the worker-hours each step took, and use the typical figure.

• Prep is usually the slowest step: grinding, edging along the walls with a hand grinder, vacuuming, filling cracks and joints. An old, coated or oil-soaked slab is far slower than clean new concrete.
• Base coat + broadcast covers mixing, cutting in the edges, rolling, and throwing chips while the coat is wet. The hours scale with the number of base coats.
• Topcoat includes scraping and blowing off loose chips before the clear coat goes down.
• The waits between coats aren’t labor hours, but they are days on site. Set Crew size to see hours on site, then add the cure waits from the cure time calculator.

Markup is not margin

Markup is added to your cost; margin is the share of the bid that’s left after cost. They are easy to mix up, and the difference is real money: a 25% markup on a $4,000 job cost gives a $5,000 bid, and the $1,000 profit is 20% of that bid, not 25%. The calculator shows both.

Chips, primer and topcoat allowances

Chip rates vary with chip size and how they’re thrown: Concrete Floor Supply plans on about 0.10 lb per sq ft for 1/4 in chips and 0.20 lb for 1/8 in chips at full coverage, and WALT Tools plans on about 8 sq ft per pound. The calculator uses 0.15 lb per sq ft for a full broadcast and 0.05 for a partial one unless you enter your own rate. Chips are commonly sold in 40 lb boxes. Primer goes by the coverage rate on its data sheet — ArmorPoxy, for example, lists about 220–320 sq ft per gallon at 5–7 mils — plus 20% for thirsty, freshly ground concrete. The topcoat over chips is multiplied by 1.2 (partial) or 1.5 (full) for the rough surface; those are planning allowances, so use your system’s published topcoat rate over chips if it has one.

What isn’t in the number

• Moisture testing and a moisture-mitigating primer, if the slab needs one.
• Crack and joint filler, and extra time for a badly damaged slab.
• Grinder, vacuum and diamond wear, travel and disposal — put them in Other job costs.
• Overhead such as insurance, vehicles and the office — either in your hourly labor cost or in the markup, but not both.

This page never fills in prices. Material and labor costs vary a lot by supplier, region and job size, and they change often — a default price would look like a fact it isn’t. Enter your own and the bid is yours.