Answer
How do you know if you are charging enough?
When your quotes are always accepted and you are always busy, the answer is already no.
Combine three things you already have: quote win rate, capacity utilisation and the real cost of delivering a job. Winning everything while running full means the price is below what the market would pay.
Most businesses answer this by comparing against competitors, which tells you what other people charge and nothing about whether it is enough for you. Three pieces of your own evidence answer it better, and all three are usually available without new measurement.
The first is win rate. A price that is accepted almost every time has not been tested against anyone's willingness to pay. Some proportion of quotes should be lost on price where the price is working; a business losing none has been informed of spare room and has not acted on it. This is the signal most consistently misread, because a high win rate feels like success and is reported as one.
The second is utilisation. Full capacity with unchanged prices is the clearest case there is — demand exceeds supply, and price is the mechanism for resolving that. Working at maximum for a price set when you were quieter means converting the same finite hours into less revenue than they would otherwise produce, which is a decision even when nobody made it.
The third is what a job actually costs, which is where most of the error lives. Not materials and direct labour, which businesses generally know, but the loaded cost of the people doing it including statutory employer contributions, the unbilled time — travel, quoting, admin, the callback — and a share of the fixed costs the business carries regardless. A price covering direct costs and appearing profitable can be losing money once the unbilled hours around it are counted, and those hours are invisible precisely because nobody invoices for them.
Combining them makes the answer clear. Winning nearly everything, running full, and finding that jobs cost more than expected once unbilled time is counted is not a marginal case — it is a business substantially underpriced with no remaining uncertainty. The opposite combination, losing most quotes with spare capacity, is a price problem in the other direction or a targeting problem, and the two are separable by whether the losses are on price or on fit.
The comparison against competitors has a use once these three are in hand, and it is narrow. It tells you whether your position is unusual in your market, which is worth knowing before a large move. What it cannot tell you is whether your price is adequate, because their cost structure, their scope and their capacity are not yours — and a competitor charging less may simply be making the same error you are considering copying.
Being busy is not evidence that your prices are right; it is the most common evidence that they are too low.
Answer Production Engine, Context Theory
Related questions
How do we count unbilled time?
For a fortnight, log everything spent on jobs that does not appear on an invoice — travel, quoting, chasing information, phone calls, the return visit, the paperwork. Most businesses are surprised by the total and by which job types carry the most, and it is common to find that the job type with the best headline margin has the worst once this is included.
What if raising prices means losing customers we like?
Losing some is how you know the change was real, and which ones matter more than how many. Customers who leave over a modest increase are typically the lowest-margin and most demanding, and the business improves with less revenue. Where a genuinely valuable long-standing customer is at risk, a defined period at the old rate is a cleaner answer than holding the price for everyone.
METHOD
Every figure below carries its source and the date it was verified. Nothing on this page is asserted.
The numbers on this page.
| What | Value | Specific to |
|---|---|---|
| Social Security — the employer's rate, and the wage base it stops at | 6.2% up to $184,500 | Category-wide |
| Medicare — the employer's rate, on all covered wages, with no wage base limit | 1.45% | Category-wide |
| Buyers who eliminate vendors publishing no pricing, before contact | 60% | Category-wide |
IRS Tax Topic no. 751 — Social Security and Medicare withholding rates · statutory rate for the 2026 tax year, published by the administering authority · the additional Medicare tax on high individual earnings has no employer match, so it is not an employer cost at all · verified
2026 B2B buyer surveys · supersedes the 43% figure carried in blueprint v2 · verified
What is specific to this page.
| Kind | Claim | Check it against |
|---|---|---|
| Buying behaviour | A quote win rate near total indicates a price never tested against willingness to pay, and it is the most commonly misread signal because a high win rate is experienced and reported as success. | The business's quote win rate over a year, with loss reasons recorded where known. |
| Procurement | Full utilisation at a price set during a quieter period converts the same finite hours into less revenue than they would otherwise produce, which is a decision taken by default. | Utilisation across recent quarters against the date of the last price change. |
| Workflow | Unbilled time — travel, quoting, chasing information, callbacks and paperwork — is invisible because nothing invoices for it, so a job covering direct costs can lose money once it is counted. | A fortnight of logging all job-related time that does not appear on an invoice, grouped by job type. |
| Buying behaviour | A competitor's price reflects their cost structure, scope and capacity rather than the business's own, so a lower competitor price may reproduce the same error rather than indicate a correct level. | The competitor's published scope and inclusions compared against the business's own for a comparable job. |
Each row would be wrong on another industry's page. Where a sourced figure exists it is in the table above instead; these are the constraints that shape the work and do not happen to be numbers.
Start with the measurement.
Reading about a benchmark is not the same as knowing your own number. The audit produces yours, measured rather than estimated.
$497 · delivered in 5 business days · credited against month one