Worked Numbers
How Much to Charge for Epoxy Flooring: Price per Sq Ft, Worked
To work out how much to charge for epoxy flooring, price the job from what it takes, then divide by the floor: whole coating kits and flake for the area you coat, the hours of grinding and repair, the days the recoat time keeps you on site, your helper, and your own hours at the floor rate your year needs, with a margin on top. In the illustrative garage below, the job costs $3,157.78, a 25% margin prices it at $4,210.37, and that is $7.71 per square foot of floor.
None of these figures are market prices. Every coverage rate, price and timing belongs to one made-up owner and is there to be replaced with your own label, your own receipts and your own stopwatch. Nothing here says which coating, primer or flake suits a slab; mix, apply and handle every product as its label directs.
The epoxy flooring price formula
coated area = floor area + cove length x cove height
materials = whole kits for the coated area + flake boxes + sundries
prep = grinding + edging + crack repair + masking hours
crew hours = prep + coating passes + setup for each day on site
job cost = materials + prep consumables + helper pay
+ your hours x your floor rate + equipment + travel
price = job cost / (1 - margin)
price per sq ft = price / floor area
Step 1: your hourly floor
The example owner wants $55,000 a year kept after a 25% tax set-aside, carries $18,000 of business costs, and books 30 hours a week on site for 46 weeks. Weather and reschedules take 10% of those hours, leaving 1,242 paid hours. The year needs $91,333.33 of revenue, so the floor is $73.54 per paid hour on site. Forget the lost hours and you would set it at $66.18. With 12 unpaid hours a week of driving and admin, the owner keeps $28.47 per hour actually worked. The handyman rates post works the same floor for a general trade.
Step 2: measure floor and cove
A 24 by 22 foot garage plus a 6 by 4 foot bay, less a 3 by 2 foot pad the customer keeps bare, is 546 square feet of floor. The cove base runs around the main walls, less 19 feet of door openings: 73 feet at 6 inches high adds 36.5 square feet. So 582.5 square feet gets coated, and the cove is 6% of it. Material is worked on the coated area; the price per square foot is on the floor the customer sees.
Step 3: coating kits and flake
The example label says a base kit covers 250 square feet and a top kit 300, one coat of each, and the owner’s records say 10% of material is lost in buckets and rollers. That makes 2.59 base kits and 2.16 top kits, bought whole as 3 and 3. At 5 square feet per pound, flake for 582.5 square feet is 116.5 pounds, or 3 boxes of 40.
| Material | Count | Each | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base coat kits | 3 | $180.00 | $540.00 |
| Top coat kits | 3 | $220.00 | $660.00 |
| Flake boxes | 3 | $150.00 | $450.00 |
| Sundries | $140.00 | ||
| Materials for the job | $1,790.00 |
That is $3.07 per square foot coated. Because kits come whole, a few extra square feet can add a kit; measure before you price.
Step 4: grinding, edging and crack repair
At 150 square feet an hour, grinding 546 square feet takes 3.64 hours. Edging the 92 foot perimeter at 40 feet an hour adds 2.30. 30 feet of cracks at 3 minutes a foot is 1.50 hours, and masking, moving and vacuuming 2 more. Prep is 9.44 hours, 63% of it grinding and edging. Filler and the diamonds worn down add $107.76.
Step 5: crew hours and days on site
2 coating passes over 582.5 square feet at 125 square feet per person-hour is 9.32 person-hours. With prep, the work is 18.76 person-hours, which a crew of 2 working 8 hour days could fit in 2 days. But the example product’s recoat time means 3 visits, so the crew is on site 3 days, and each day carries 0.75 hours of setup and cleanup per person: 4.50 more.
The crew works 23.26 person-hours in all, shared evenly: 11.63 are the owner’s and 11.63 the helper’s, who costs $25.00 an hour with payroll costs, so $290.75.
Step 6: price the epoxy floor
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Coating kits, flake and sundries | $1,790.00 |
| Prep consumables | $107.76 |
| Helper: 11.63 hours x $25.00 | $290.75 |
| Owner: 11.63 hours x the $73.54 floor | $855.27 |
| Equipment | $60.00 |
| Travel: 3 trips x 30 miles x $0.60 | $54.00 |
| Job cost | $3,157.78 |
| Price at a 25% margin | $4,210.37 |
That is $7.71 per square foot of floor. The 25% margin is a 33.3% markup on cost, so be sure which one your price list means; the markup vs margin chart works both ways. A 50% deposit of $2,105.19 covers the kits, flake and prep consumables ($1,897.76) before you buy them.
Checking a per square foot price
If you quote from a price list instead, check the list against the job. At $6.50 per square foot of floor, plus $8.00 a foot of cove and $6.00 a foot of crack repair ($764.00 together), this garage quotes at $4,313.00, above a $1,500 minimum job. Against the $3,157.78 job cost, that earns a 26.8% margin. The rate that just reaches a 25% margin on this floor is $6.31, and break-even is $4.38, so the example rate clears both. On a smaller floor with more cracks or a longer recoat, the same rate might not; run the numbers per job.
The insight: the coating is under half the price
The kits, flake and sundries are $3.28 per square foot of floor, 43% of the $7.71 price. A price built as “material cost times two” misses where the rest goes.
Prep is one piece. Grinding, edging and repairs take 9.44 hours, more than the 9.32 hours of rolling the coats. The other is the calendar. The crew had 2 days of work, but the recoat time stretched it to 3, and the extra day brought its own setup, travel and helper hours. A floor priced per square foot from the coating alone leaves both unpaid.
Did the floor pay?
After the job, check the actuals. Say it sold at $4,313.00, the owner spent 13 hours against 11.63 planned, the helper 12, materials and consumables came to $1,850.00 and other costs $120.00, and a 3% card fee took $129.39. That leaves $1,913.61, or $147.20 per hour of the owner’s time, above the $73.54 floor. If the per hour figure falls below the floor, the hours you guessed short are where the price leaked. The concrete driveway cost calculator bids slab work the same way.
How these were calculated
The floor is (income / (1 - tax share) + business costs) / (booked hours x (1 - share lost) x weeks). Floor area is the main rectangle plus the bay less the bare pad; cove is the main perimeter less openings, times its height in feet. Kits needed are coated area / coverage / (1 - share lost), rounded up to whole kits; flake boxes are coated area / coverage per pound / pounds per box, rounded up. Prep hours are area over grinding rate, perimeter over edging rate, crack feet times minutes, plus masking. Days on site are the larger of the days the hours need and the days the recoat time needs; each day adds setup per person. Job cost and price follow the table, with figures carried from step to step as the spreadsheet shows them, to the cent. Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program that adds kits one at a time, sums prep in minutes and adds days until the hours fit, and the two agree. All inputs are illustrative, not label figures, measured rates or market prices. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.
To run this on your own label, slabs and year, the pack below has eight linked calculators, from the hourly floor to the after-job check.