Project Quote Calculator 2026 — GlobalCalc

GlobalCalc

Inputs

Estimated hours

Your cost per hour

Contingency

Direct expenses

Target margin

Results update as you type

Results

Quote

15,520

Hours including contingency—

Labour cost—

Total cost—

Profit at the quote—

Margin actually achieved—

Equivalent mark-up on cost—

Hours at which the project breaks even—

Effective rate per estimated hour—

Reviewed September 2026. Management accounting arithmetic: the same formulas in every market, in your own currency. Regulation G requires any non-GAAP measure such as EBITDA to be reconciled to its closest GAAP equivalent.

All calculations run 100% in your browser. The calculator code does not submit your figures to GlobalCalc to obtain a result.

About project quote

Method

How the project quote calculator works

Estimates are optimistic. The reference-class finding is that software and creative projects overrun by 30 to 50% on average, so a contingency is not padding — it is the correction for a known bias.

The quote is then cost plus contingency, divided by one minus the margin. Dividing is the step people get wrong: adding 30% margin to cost gives a 23% margin, not 30.

Formula: quote = (hours × (1 + contingency) × rate + expenses) / (1 − margin)

Data

Worked examples

Inputs	Quote	Note
120 hours at 65, 25% margin	15,520	about 12,400
No contingency	12,400	a quote that overruns
A 10% discount	13,968	most of the margin goes

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

How much contingency should I add?

Twenty to forty per cent on anything with unknowns. Reference-class forecasting consistently finds estimates optimistic by about that much.

What is the difference between margin and mark-up?

Margin is profit over price; mark-up is profit over cost. A 25% margin is a 33% mark-up, and confusing them is the most common quoting error.

Should I show the contingency to the client?

Usually not as a line item — it invites negotiation over the one part protecting you. Build it into the estimate.

What if I finish early?

You keep the contingency, which is the reward for estimating well. That is the intended behaviour of a fixed-price quote.

How do I handle scope creep?

A change order at the same rate. The contingency covers the estimate being wrong, not the job becoming a different job.

Sources

Where these figures come from

Corporate Finance Institute — EBITDA — why EBITDA is a non-GAAP measure with no single definition
US SEC — Non-GAAP Financial Measures, Compliance & Disclosure Interpretations — the disclosure rules that exist precisely because EBITDA is not standardized
US Securities and Exchange Commission — the US securities regulator

Last checked: September 2026. These are standard management-accounting definitions; where a term has no single agreed definition, the page says so.