Home Staging Pricing Calculator: Build a Price List and Packages

October 23, 2026 · Pricing a service business

A home staging price list comes from four numbers you already own: the hourly floor your year needs, what your inventory costs each month it is out on a job, the hours and moving each room takes, and the margin you want. In the illustrative example below, those turn into packages of $2,250.00 for 3 rooms, $3,550.00 for 6 and $4,850.00 for 9, each covering the first month, plus $96.19 per room for every month after.

Every figure here belongs to one made-up stager, entered as their own numbers. None of it is a market price, and nothing here says anything about what staging does to a home’s sale price or how long it takes to sell.

The home staging pricing formula

hourly floor        = (income / (1 - tax share) + business costs)
                      / paid hours a year
inventory a month   = furniture / months of use + decor / months of use
                      + storage + insurance
room-month charge   = inventory a year / room-months out on jobs
                      + loss reserve per room-month
first-month cost    = your hours x floor + helper pay + movers
                      + driving + rooms x room-month charge
first-month fee     = first-month cost / (1 - margin)
monthly extension   = rooms x room-month charge / (1 - margin)

Step 1: your hourly floor

The example stager wants $55,000 a year kept after a 25% tax set-aside, carries $9,000 of business costs, and books 25 hours a week on staging jobs for 48 weeks. Cancels and delays take 8% of those hours, leaving 1,104 paid hours. Revenue the year needs is $82,333.33, so the floor is $74.58 for each paid hour. With 13 more unpaid hours a week of driving, shopping and admin, the stager keeps $30.15 per hour actually worked. The freelance hourly rate calculator works through the same split in more detail.

Step 2: what the inventory costs a month

The stager paid $30,000 for furniture they expect to use for 60 months, which is $500.00 a month, and $6,000 for decor they expect to use for 24 months, $250.00 a month. Storage rent is $450.00 and inventory insurance $40.00. Together the inventory costs $1,240.00 a month, or $14,880.00 a year, whether it is out on a job or sitting in the unit. Storage alone is 36% of that, so the unit is a cost to price in, not an overhead to forget.

Step 3: the room-month charge

The inventory can stage 30 rooms at once, so a year offers 360 room-months. Over the last 12 months it was out for 204 of them, a utilization of 56.7%, below the stager’s own 70% target. Every staged room-month therefore has to carry $72.94 of inventory cost, and $6,448.00 a year, 43% of the inventory cost, pays for pieces sitting in storage. At the 70% target the charge would be $59.05; if every set were out every month, $41.33.

Then a reserve for pieces that come back broken, stained or not at all. If 5% of the $36,000 inventory is lost or damaged a year, that is $1,800.00, or $8.82 for each of the 204 room-months. The room-month charge with the reserve in is $81.76.

Step 4: a vacant home quote

The example quotes a vacant home of 6 rooms with 9 pieces each. At 12 minutes per piece to install and 8 to de-stage, 54 pieces take 18 hours, with one helper beside the stager the whole time.

The labor, movers and driving, $2,510.44 of the first month, are paid once. Each month after that carries only the inventory, which is why the extension is so much smaller than the first-month fee.

Step 5: home staging pricing packages

A price list needs one figure per room and one per job. Per room, the example takes 3 hours at the floor, $66.00 of helper pay and the $81.76 room-month charge: $371.50 for the first month. Per job, the movers and driving come to $772.00 whatever the size of the house. Each package is (rooms x $371.50 + $772.00) / (1 - 15%), rounded up to the next $50:

The medium package at 6 rooms is the same home as Step 4, so its figure before rounding equals the $3,530.59 first-month fee. Extensions are $96.19 per room per month, the room-month charge with the 15% margin on it.

The insight: the price list is mostly time and trucks, the extensions are all inventory

Per room, the inventory charge is only 22% of the $371.50 first month; the rest is hours and helper pay. But once the furniture is in, the inventory is the whole of every extension. That gives two separate levers.

The first-month fee is driven by your minutes per piece and the fixed $772.00 of movers and driving. Spread over 3 rooms, that fixed cost with margin is $302.75 a room; over 9 rooms it is $100.92. That accounts for most of the gap between the large package’s $538.89 a room and the small one’s $750.00; the rest is rounding up to the $50 step. Price a small home as 3 times the $437.06 room rate with margin, leaving the trucks out, and you get $1,311.18, short of the $1,886.50 the job costs before any margin.

The extension is driven by utilization. The $81.76 charge is high because the inventory was out only 56.7% of the time. Keep more of it on jobs and the same furniture supports a lower extension, or the same extension earns more. Counting room-months is what shows which.

Did the staging pay?

Say the stager charged $5,200.00 in total for a 6-room home that stayed staged 3 months, and logged 21 hours on it. After $450.00 of helper pay, $700.00 of movers, 140 miles of driving, a 3% card fee and $1,471.68 of inventory for the room-months it held, $2,338.32 is left: $111.35 an hour against the $74.58 floor, so it clears. The price that would have paid exactly the floor on those hours was $4,403.98.

How these were calculated

The floor is income divided by (1 - the tax share), plus business costs, over booked hours x (1 - the lost share) x weeks. Furniture and decor are spread evenly over the months entered; utilization is room-months used over room sets x 12; the room-month charge is a year of inventory cost over room-months used, plus the year’s loss over the same room-months. Job hours are rooms x pieces x (install + de-stage minutes) / 60. Fees divide cost by (1 - margin), so the margin is a share of the price, and list prices are rounded up to the next step. Figures that pass from one step to the next are carried rounded to the cent, as the spreadsheet shows them. Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program, and the two agree to the cent. All inputs are illustrative, not market prices, measured times or a claim about any property sale. None of this is financial, legal, tax or insurance advice.

If you also price design work by the hour or project, the interior design fee walkthrough covers that side, and the moving company price breakdown shows how a crew and truck are costed. To run the staging numbers on your own inventory, minutes and year, the pack below has eight linked calculators, from the hourly floor to a check on whether a finished job paid.