EstimatorKitFree cost per square foot calculator
A rate is only a comparison once both quotes cover the same job
Enter an area and either a total or a rate, and this returns the other one, along with the same figure per square yard and per square meter. The second panel is the part worth staying for: tick off what each of two bids leaves out, price that work once, and both numbers are restated on the same scope. Nothing here is a market rate — the boxes start empty because the only honest figures are the ones on your own quotes.
- 100% free
- No signup
- Both directions
- Sq ft, sq yd, sq m
- Two quotes at once
Off the tape, fractions included: 24' 3 1/2", 291 in and 7.4 m all land on the same number.
Rate on that area
—
- Area
- 168 sq ft
- Square yards
- 18.7
- Square meters
- 15.6
Type a figure on the left and the conversion appears. The box starts empty because there is no rate to prefill it with that would be right for your street.
A square yard is 9 square feet and a square meter is 10.8 — so a rate quoted per yard looks nine times worse than the same rate quoted per foot, which is why flooring and carpet bids are so hard to line up against a general contractor’s number.
Put two quotes on one basis
Untick what a bidder left out, then price that gap once. Both numbers then describe the same job, which is the only state in which dividing by area proves anything.
Demolition and debris haul-away
dumpster rental and tipping fees ride here, and they are billed by weight
Structural and mechanical changes
moving a drain, a header over a removed wall, a new circuit
Fixture and finish allowances
an allowance is a placeholder, so two quotes can differ by the allowance alone
Permits and inspection fees
usually a percentage of declared value, occasionally a flat schedule
Drawings, engineering and plan review
a bearing wall or a new footing puts a stamped drawing in the scope
Painting, trim and final clean
the trades that come last are the ones a rushed bid drops first
A contingency carried inside the figure
one bidder padded, the other did not — this row alone can invert a ranking
How to compare two quotes on a cost per square foot basis
Three steps, and the third is the one that changes answers.
Agree on the area first
Type the two sides, or paste in a square footage you already trust. This is the step that quietly ruins the comparison: gross area measured to the outside of the framing and net area measured inside the finish are two different numbers for the same room, and the smaller the room the wider they sit apart. Pick one basis, make both bidders state which they used, and divide by that one figure throughout.
Divide or multiply, depending on which figure you already hold
A total on a bid becomes a rate; a rate a neighbor quoted becomes what your own job would come to. The result also appears per square yard and per square meter, because a flooring supplier quoting by the yard and a builder quoting by the foot are nine times apart on paper and identical underneath.
Untick what each bid excludes, then price the gap once
Work down the seven scope rows and clear the box wherever a bidder wrote the item out. Enter what that work costs and both quotes are restated as though they covered the same job. When the cheaper piece of paper stops being the cheaper job, the page says so in words rather than leaving you to spot it in two decimals.
Technical specifications
| Directions | Total ÷ area for the rate, rate × area for the total, both from the same area entry |
|---|---|
| Units reported | Per square foot, per square yard (nine times the foot rate) and per square meter (10.7639 times it) |
| Area entry | Two measured sides, or a square footage you already have; feet, inches, fractions, yards, meters and centimeters all parse |
| Scope rows | Seven, from demolition and haul-away down to a contingency carried inside the quoted figure |
| Quotes compared | Two at a time, each shown as quoted and again on the shared scope |
| Reversal warning | Printed in words whenever the cheaper piece of paper stops being the cheaper job |
| Unpriced exclusions | Counted as zero and flagged as such, never filled in on your behalf |
| Rates supplied | None — the site ships no price list, and the boxes stay empty until you type |
Frequently asked questions
What is actually inside a cost per square foot figure?
Whatever the person who wrote it decided to put there, which is the entire problem with the metric. The same rate can cover labor only, labor plus materials, or everything down to the permit and the dumpster. It is not a defined term in any standard, no trade body publishes a schedule of what it must include, and two bidders in the same town will draw the line in different places without either of them being dishonest. Treat it as a ratio you compute yourself from a scope you can read, never as a figure you accept.
Should I measure to the outside of the walls or the inside?
Use whichever your bidders used, and make them tell you which. Gross area to the exterior face is how builders price new construction and how an appraiser measures a house; net area inside the finish is what a flooring or tiling contractor works to. Take a room measuring 12 by 14 feet inside, with six inches of wall assembly all round: the exterior rectangle is 13 by 15, which is 195 square feet against 168, or sixteen percent more. A rate quoted on one basis and applied to the other is already wrong before anybody argues about the work.
Why do two bids for the same room land far apart per square foot?
Almost always scope, and almost never labor rate. One carries the demolition and the skip, the other assumes you empty the room. One prices fixtures at a stated allowance, the other at what you actually chose. One has a contingency folded inside its number and the other will issue change orders instead. The comparison panel exists because those four differences routinely add up to more than the gap that made one bid look cheap.
How do I compare a per-square-yard price against a per-square-foot one?
Multiply the square-foot rate by nine, or divide the square-yard rate by nine — a square yard is exactly nine square feet, and the page prints all three units so you do not have to. Carpet and some sheet goods are still quoted by the yard in the US; a rate that looks nine times worse than the general contractor's number is usually the same money wearing a different unit.
Is the lower rate always the better buy?
No, and the flip warning on this page exists because it often is not. A rate is a quotient: it falls if the price drops or if the area it is divided by grows. A bid that measures generously, excludes the tear-out and carries no contingency can post the lowest number on the page and cost the most by the end. Rank on a scope you have read line by line, then use the rate to sanity-check the ranking rather than to produce it.
Does the rate fall as the project gets bigger?
For finishes, usually; for anything with a fixed setup, no. Doubling a tiled floor roughly doubles the tile and the setting time, so that part of the rate holds. But mobilization, the dumpster, the plumber's minimum call-out and the permit do not double, so spreading them over twice the area halves their contribution. That is why a small bathroom posts an alarming rate per square foot and a large addition posts a modest one for work of the same quality.
Why doesn't the page tell me the going rate where I live?
Because any figure we printed would be wrong for most of the people reading it and stale for the rest. Rates for identical work differ by a factor of two or more between metro areas, they move with labor availability rather than with a national index, and a published average is exactly the number a bidder will point at when arguing. What you type stays in the tab and is not sent anywhere, so use real quotes rather than a placeholder.
About the cost per square foot metric
Cost per square foot is a ratio, not a price, and it behaves like one. It falls when the work gets cheaper and it falls just as readily when the area it is divided by gets larger, which is why a generous measurement and a lean scope can put the worst bid at the top of the list. Nothing defines what belongs above the line: there is no standard, no trade body schedule and no legal meaning, so one bidder folds the tear-out, the permit and a fifteen percent cushion into the figure while the next quotes bare installed work and issues change orders for the rest. Both are quoting honestly. Only one of them is quoting the job you asked about.
The metric earns its keep in exactly one place — comparing like against like once you have made them alike. That is what the scope grid does. Seven rows cover the exclusions that show up again and again in residential bids, and the last of them is the one people never think to ask about: whether a contingency is already sitting inside the number. When two bids differ by eight percent on paper and one of them carries a cushion the other does not, the ranking is decided by an assumption rather than by price. Where the unit itself is wrong, the fix is a different calculator, not a different rate — wallpaper is bought by the roll and the pattern repeat decides how many, so any per-square-foot figure for it is derived rather than quoted, which is what the wallpaper calculator works out from the repeat, and roof work is quoted by the square of 100 square feet on the sloped surface rather than the footprint, which the roofing calculator converts before anything is priced.
For a real project the rate is the last number to compute, not the first. Build the estimate out of line items you can name, then divide once at the end to get something you can carry to the next bidder. The three pages this one exists to serve do that in their own units: a bathroom is counted in fixtures and drain relocations, because its money barely notices the floor plan; a kitchen is measured in linear feet of cabinet run with the countertop, the edge and every cutout billed apart; and an addition is the one job where a square-foot rate is genuinely the right unit, and even there the foundation and the roof follow the footprint rather than the floor.
Where the quotes you type end up
Every number on this page is worked out by JavaScript running in the tab you are reading it in. Nothing you type — measurements, quantities, the prices your supplier quoted you — is uploaded, logged or kept, which is also why the calculators carry on working on a site with no signal.
Bid totals are commercially sensitive in a way measurements are not — they are what one contractor would pay to know about another. They are divided in this tab and gone the moment you reload. There is no account to attach them to and no bid-matching service behind this page.