How to Quote a Custom Woodworking Job

Every quote you send a customer needs four blocks of information. Skip any of them and you either lose the job or lose money on it.

• Your shop info: company name, address, phone, email, and optionally a tax ID. This is what makes the document look like it came from a business, not a hobbyist.
• Customer info: who the quote is for. Name, company (if applicable), address.
• A breakdown of materials and labour: every line itemized — quantity, unit price, total. Customers don't trust round-number quotes for custom work.
• Totals, taxes, and validity: subtotal, sales tax, grand total, and a "valid until" date so the customer doesn't sit on it for three months and then ask for the same price.

Optional but useful: a project title (helps when you have multiple quotes out to the same customer), notes (payment terms, deposit required, lead time), and a signature line if you want acceptance to feel formal.

The material side is the part most shops get wrong by under-listing it. Quote every sheet, board, and length your customer is paying for — not just the parts that end up in the finished piece.

Here's the line of thinking:

• Build your cut list for the project. This is the list of parts you need (cabinet sides, shelves, doors, drawer fronts, etc.) with their dimensions and quantities.
• Run the cut list through a nesting optimizer to figure out how many full sheets or lengths of stock you'll need. Without nesting you'll either over-buy (eats your margin) or under-buy (forces an emergency trip to the lumberyard).
• Quote the stock quantity, not the parts quantity. The customer is paying for the materials you actually buy. If you need 3 sheets of 4×8 plywood to produce the parts, you quote 3 sheets — not the eight pieces that come from them.

For pricing: - Material cost = what you paid the lumberyard, per sheet or length. - Marked-up price = what you charge the customer. Most shops apply a 15-30% markup on materials (covers procurement time and risk). Some shops bill at cost and recover margin entirely from labour.

Pick an approach and stay consistent across jobs. Customers comparing your quotes notice if you're sometimes at cost and sometimes marked up.

Labour is where shops bleed money silently. Three common pricing structures:

1. Hourly rate: most flexible, most exposed. You estimate hours, multiply by your rate, and bill that. The risk is that the job takes longer than your estimate and you eat the difference (customers rarely accept "actually it took twice as long").
2. Fixed bid by part type: shops standardize on price-per-door, price-per-drawer-box, price-per-linear-foot-of-cabinet. Easier to quote, easier to compare, and forces you to know your unit economics.
3. Project fixed bid: one number for everything. Customers love it, you carry all the risk. Only safe when you have tight estimating chops.

For most custom shops, a hybrid works well: fixed bid by part type for the predictable work, hourly for install or unusual modifications.

When you quote labour as a separate line item, the customer sees the value of the craft. When you bundle materials and labour into one number, the quote looks like a price — and customers shop prices.

Whatever rate you use, be specific about what's included. Sanding, finishing, installation, delivery — call each out. Anything implied but not written is a fight waiting to happen.

A common woodworking-shop margin target: 30-50% gross margin on a finished custom job (materials + labour + overhead, vs. what you bill).

That doesn't mean you mark everything up 30-50%. It means after you back out:

• The actual material cost (with markup)
• The actual labour cost (hours × wage, including yours)
• Overhead allocation (shop rent, electricity, blade sharpening, tool replacement)

…you should have 30-50% left over as the business's profit. If you don't, your hourly rate is too low or your unit economics are off.

For a quick reality check on a single job: add up your direct costs (materials + labour at your wage rate) and multiply by 1.6. That's a defensible quote number for most custom work. Adjust up for fancy finishes, complicated joinery, or rush deadlines; down for repeat customers or standard products you've made dozens of times.

The mistake most shops make: they quote at cost-plus-a-little, win the job, then realize after the fact that they paid themselves $14/hour. Build the margin into the quote — it's not negotiable later.

A professional quote PDF has a predictable layout:

• Top-left: your shop info (logo if you have one, name, address, phone, email)
• Top-right: a big "QUOTE" label, quote number, date, valid-until date
• Below header: "Bill To" block with the customer's info
• Body: line items in a table — description, quantity, unit price, total
• Right-aligned at the bottom: subtotal, tax, total
• Footer: terms and conditions (deposit required, payment schedule, etc.)

Use a logo. Even a simple text logo. Quotes without branding look like they came out of Word — and they signal "this person doesn't run a real business." Adding your logo and a brand color costs nothing and signals professionalism more than the words on the page do.

Number your quotes. QUOTE-0001, QUOTE-0002, and so on. Sequential numbering makes you look organized and makes it easier when a customer references "the quote you sent in March."

Include a valid-until date. 30 days is standard for materials-heavy quotes (lumber prices move). Without it, customers will accept a quote six months later and expect the same price.

1. Quoting parts instead of stock. The customer isn't buying cabinet sides — they're buying the sheets the sides come from. If you quote 8 parts at $20 each you've committed to $160 in material. If you actually need 3 sheets of $80 plywood that's $240. Quote the stock.
2. Forgetting waste. Even a perfect nest leaves offcuts. If you bill exactly the area of the parts, you eat the leftover material. Most shops add a 10-15% waste factor when estimating, or just quote full sheets so the waste is naturally absorbed.
3. Bundling labour with materials. Looks tidier but makes the customer think they're buying a product, not your time. Itemize.
4. No valid-until date. Lumber prices rose 25%+ during 2021-2022. Shops with no expiration on their quotes ate it.
5. Hand-writing or Word-document quotes. It's 2026. A typo-laden Word quote with a $1,200 customer is enough to lose the job to a shop with a clean PDF.
6. Forgetting the deposit. Custom work usually needs 30-50% upfront before you order materials. Put it on the quote, not in a phone call later.

Building each quote from scratch — typing line items, looking up material prices, formatting a PDF — takes 30-60 minutes if you're being careful. For a shop quoting 3-5 jobs a week, that's 1.5-5 hours/week on paperwork.

EZNESTING's Pro plan automates the quote-from-cutlist part:

1. Build your cut list in the optimizer (you'd do this anyway to know how many sheets to order)
2. Click "Build Quote" on the project
3. Click "From Stock" — pick the materials from your project and they import as line items with quantities and prices pre-filled from your inventory
4. Add labour and any custom lines (installation, finishing, hardware)
5. Set your tax percentage and valid-until date
6. Click Export PDF — get a branded quote with your logo, brand color, and contact info

The bill of materials is the by-product of the cut planning you're already doing. The quote is just a different view of the same data. Total time per quote: under 5 minutes.

If you want to try it, the [free tier](/auth/signup) gives you the optimizer; Pro ($19.99/mo) adds the quote builder + inventory + branded PDFs.