How much should I charge for a small hardwood floor repair?
Determining a fair labor charge for a multi-day hardwood repair — such as patching a floor and framing a fireplace hearth without materials or finishing — is difficult when contractor quotes vary wildly. Without a clear pricing standard, a 15-to-20-hour job can attract wildly disparate estimates, leaving contractors unsure what to charge and clients shocked by high bids.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1Asking online forums for pricing estimatesDid this help you?
- 2Charging based on estimated days of labor or flat rate guesses from peersDid this help you?
- 3Getting a second and third quote to compare prices across contractorsDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“What should I charge for just the repair. I have about 2-2.5 days of labor into it (15-20 hours).”source ↗
“The first person I had out to look quoted me about $6,800 for the job. I know I’m new to this, but this seems like an outrageous price for this job.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 13How to know if old hardwood floors can actually be refinished
- 2How to cover ugly hardwood floors cheaply
- 5Do I need to take engineered hardwood out of the box to acclimate?
- 5What to do about a bad hardwood floor installation
- 10How to fix a flexing wood floor without replacing it
- 5How to match vinyl flooring to existing wood