How to Price Civil Jobs in NZ (And Stop Losing Money on the 'Easy' Ones)
Most civil jobs in New Zealand don't lose money on the dig — they lose it in the quote. Guessed plant rates, forgotten overheads and 'she'll be right' margins mean the easy-looking jobs are often the worst earners. Here's a straightforward way to price civil work that holds up.
Start with your true hourly cost — not your charge-out rate
A digger op on $35/hour costs you closer to $45 once you add ACC, KiwiSaver, leave and downtime. A 13-tonne excavator costs $60–$90/hour to own and run before it turns a blade. Price from true cost, not from what the bloke down the road charges.
Overheads: the silent margin-killer
Yard rent, insurance, phones, software, the ute fleet's WOFs — fixed overheads for a small civil crew commonly run $2,000–$5,000 a week. Divide your weekly overhead by your billable hours and add it to every quoted hour. If you don't, every job is subsidising the yard.
A simple pricing checklist
- Labour: true cost per hour × estimated hours × 1.1 for the stuff-around factor
- Plant: internal charge-out rate per machine-hour, including float time
- Materials + cartage: quoted supply rates plus 5–10% wastage
- Overhead recovery: your per-billable-hour overhead share
- Margin: 15–25% on top — margin is profit, not a buffer for mistakes
The feedback loop: back-costing
Pricing only improves if you compare quote vs actual on every job. That's brutal by hand — and automatic with job management software. Fieldlink builds each job's live cost from timesheets, plant run-hours, materials and supplier invoices, and shows the margin percentage next to the spend while the job is still running. Bad pricing shows up in week one, not at year-end.
The contractors who price best aren't guessing better — they're the ones who see quote vs actual on every single job.