Built for contractors who have to know more than the trade.
Knowing how to do the work and knowing how to run a profitable contracting business are two different things.
You can be great at your trade and still have to figure out questions like:
What does a $25-an-hour employee really cost the company?
How much does my crew need to produce each day?
How much overhead should each job carry?
What markup actually produces the margin I’m trying to make?
Why did a job that looked profitable on the estimate make less money than expected?
How much material should I actually order?
The Common Contractor was created to help answer questions like these.
Built From Real Contracting Experience
The Common Contractor isn’t built from the perspective of someone looking at the contracting industry from the outside.
The tools and resources on this site are shaped by real-world experience running a home-service contracting business—estimating projects, managing employees and crews, buying materials and equipment, dealing with overhead, pricing work, tracking job costs and trying to make sure there’s actually profit left when the job is finished.
Some business questions can be answered with a formula.
Others make a lot more sense after you’ve lived through them.
The Common Contractor exists to bring the two together.
Why We Built the Calculators
Contractors deal with numbers constantly, but many of the tools available to calculate them are either overly complicated, buried inside expensive software or written for accountants instead of contractors.
We wanted something simpler.
Enter your numbers. Understand the result. Get back to running your business.
That’s why the calculators on The Common Contractor are free to use and designed around practical questions contractors actually face.
You’ll find tools for:
- Labor costs and employee burden
- Crew production and labor rates
- Markup, margin and profitability
- Overhead recovery
- Break-even and revenue planning
- Equipment costs
- Job costing and estimate-vs-actual analysis
- Construction and landscaping material quantities
No accounting degree required.
More Than Calculators
A calculator can give you a number.
It can’t always tell you what that number means for your business.
That’s why The Common Contractor also publishes practical contractor business resources covering estimating, labor, pricing, operations, job costing and profitability.
The goal isn’t to tell contractors there’s one perfect way to run a business.
It’s to provide useful information, explain the numbers clearly and help contractors make better-informed decisions in their own companies.
Who The Common Contractor Is For
The Common Contractor is primarily built for small home-service contractors and construction businesses where the owner is still close to the work.
Maybe you’re estimating jobs yourself.
Maybe you’re managing a couple of crews.
Maybe you’re trying to figure out whether you’re charging enough.
Maybe you’ve grown enough that revenue looks good, but you’re wondering where the profit went.
Or maybe you’re just starting out and trying to understand the business side before learning some of these lessons the expensive way.
That’s who we’re building this for.
Our Mission
Free tools. Real numbers. Better decisions.
Our goal is simple:
Build the most useful free toolbox possible for small home-service contractors, supported by practical resources grounded in real contracting experience.
Use the calculators.
Read the resources.
Run your own numbers.
Then take what you learn back to your next estimate, your next job and your business.