Most quotes lose the job before anyone reads the price. They arrive as a number in a text message, or a PDF with three lines on it, and the client has no way to tell whether you thought about their job or guessed at it. The template below is the opposite of that — every field on it exists because leaving it off caused an argument on a real job.
Two versions follow: a blank one you can copy, and the same document filled in for a hardwood refinishing job in Kenmore, Washington. Read the filled-in one first. The blank template only makes sense once you have seen what goes in it.
What has to be on a contractor's quote
Nine things. Anything else is optional, and most of what people add is padding that makes the document harder to read rather than more convincing.
The two that stop disputes are the last two: exclusions and what happens if the scope changes. Nobody enjoys writing them, and every contractor who has skipped them has paid for it once.
The filled-in example
376 square feet of hardwood refinishing, 180 linear feet of baseboard pulled and reset, and 49 square feet of new oak where the old floor was past saving. Tax at 10.3%, deposit at 30%.
How the numbers come apart
Clients do not dispute a total. They dispute a line they do not understand. Break the work into the units you actually price in, and the conversation moves from “that seems like a lot” to “can we skip the baseboard”.
Write the exclusions before you send it
An exclusion is not a disclaimer. It is a sentence that stops a conversation from happening six weeks from now, when the floor is up and somebody finds rot in the subfloor. Three lines is usually enough.
What happens after they say yes
The quote is the first of five documents on a job that goes well: a deposit request, a work order for the crew with the pricing stripped out, a change order when the scope grows, and an invoice that credits the deposit already paid. Each one carries the same client, the same line items and the same rates.
If you are retyping any of that, the template is not the problem — the process is.
