How To Price Labour For Different Site Types

Two jobs can look almost identical on paper. Same task. Same materials. Same fit time. But one job makes money... and the other feels tight from the moment you start. That is usually not because the task changed. It is because the site changed. Access changed. Parking changed. Walking distances changed. Interruptions changed. And the amount of productive time available in the day changed. That extra labour is what I call the Site Condition Tax. It is the time the site adds around the actual fitting work. If you do not allow for it properly, 2 jobs containing the same work can produce completely different margins. The key is to separate the task from the site. You need a clean base time for the work itself, followed by an allowance for the conditions in which that work will be completed. Let's use a simple example. Say you are fitting socket outlets. You know the item. You understand the work involved. And you know roughly how long each socket should take under reasonable working conditions. Now put that same socket onto 2 different sites. The first is a clean, open new-build. You can park close to the building. The materials are nearby, the rooms are empty and access is straightforward. You can arrive, set up and get on with the work. The second site is a live school. You have to sign in. You may only be able to work in certain rooms at certain times, and you cannot leave your tools and materials wherever you need them. You are working around staff and pupils, and you may have to wait for somebody to unlock the area before you can begin. The socket did not become more difficult to fit. The physical task is still broadly the same. But the labour around that task has changed. That is where the site uplift comes in. And that gives us the main rule for this video: Fit time measures the task. Uplift measures the site. A common mistake is changing every individual fit time whenever the site becomes awkward. On 1 quote, the socket takes 30 minutes. On another, it takes 45 minutes. On another, it takes 1 hour. Then the same thing starts happening with lights, taps, doors and every other item in the pricing catalogue. Before long, you no longer know what the fit time actually represents. Does it describe the physical task? Or does it include the walk from the van, the induction, waiting for access and working around the customer? Everything gets mixed into 1 number. Then, when the job is finished, you cannot tell whether the task was priced incorrectly or whether the site consumed the additional labour. A cleaner method is to keep the fit time focused on the actual work and assess the site separately. There are 5 main things I would check before choosing an uplift. The first is access. How close can the vehicle get to the building, and how far is it from the unloading area to the work? A long route may not sound serious, but once you include tools, materials and repeated journeys, it can remove a large part of the productive day. The second is site procedures. That includes inductions, permits, daily sign-ins, tool checks and security processes. Each one may only take a few minutes, but if it affects every person, every day, it becomes a genuine labour cost. The third is occupancy. An empty building and a live building are completely different working environments. If you are working around staff, customers, pupils, patients or residents, you normally have more protection, cleaning, interruptions and movement between areas. The fourth is working restrictions. Can you work a normal continuous shift? Or do you have limited access windows, night work, shutdown periods or rooms that are only available at certain times? An 8-hour shift does not automatically give you 8 productive fitting hours. The fifth is coordination. Can you get on with the work independently? Or are you relying on site management, security, other trades or the customer before parts of the job can continue? The more of those conditions you have, and the more severe they are, the further up the uplift range you move. There is no single percentage that works for every trade business. Your normal fit times, team and type of work may all be different. But you can still create sensible starting bands. An easy, open site might start around 10-15%. A normal commercial fit-out or office might sit around 20-25%. A school, hospital or occupied building might sit around 25-35%. Industrial work might move into the 30-40% range. And a highly restricted or congested site might need 40-50% or more. That could include rail environments, tunnels, night work, controlled areas or jobs with very limited working windows. These are not industry rules. They are starting points that you can adjust using your own completed jobs. Instead of asking: "What do I feel like adding?" Ask: "What conditions are going to reduce productive time?" There is another important point here. The building type gives you a starting point, but it does not decide the final uplift by itself. Take 2 commercial units. The first is vacant. Parking is outside, materials can be stored next to the work and there are very few interruptions. The second is occupied. You have restricted working hours, a long walk from the vehicle and several other trades working in the same area. They are both commercial sites. But they should not automatically receive the same uplift. The first may stay near the bottom of the commercial range. The second may need to move higher. The label on the building does not decide the uplift. The conditions do. Now let's put some numbers against it. Say the items on the quote contain 8 productive labour hours. That is the base fit time. Add 15% for an easy site, and the allowance becomes 9.2 hours. Add 35% for an occupied building, and it becomes 10.8 hours. Add 50% for a highly restricted site, and it becomes 12 hours. The actual fitting work is still 8 hours. The site changed the number of hours you need to allow. On the occupied job, the difference is 2.8 hours. If you quoted 8 hours instead of 10.8, those missing hours do not disappear. Your margin pays for them. Most lost labour does not appear as 1 obvious 4-hour delay. It disappears in small pieces. Signing in. Walking materials to the work area. Waiting for access. Working around the customer. None of those delays looks particularly serious on its own. But together, they reduce how much fitting work gets completed in the day. You may pay somebody for 8 hours without receiving 8 productive fitting hours. That difference has to be allowed for somewhere. That is what the site uplift covers. It is not there simply to make the quotation larger. It covers the extra time needed to complete the same work on a more difficult site. But not every additional labour cost should be hidden inside the uplift. The uplift should cover the general loss of productivity caused by the site. If you already know an activity will take a fixed amount of time, price it separately. For example, you may know there is a 2-hour induction on the first day. You may need a dedicated survey. Or somebody may have to complete a separate materials collection. Those are known activities. They can be shown as separate labour allowances rather than being buried inside a general percentage. That keeps the uplift cleaner and makes the completed job easier to review. Before using this method, there are 3 mistakes to avoid. First, do not hide site difficulty inside every individual fit time. If the physical task is fundamentally the same, keep the base fit time clean. Second, do not use the same uplift everywhere. A clean, open site should not be priced like an occupied hospital. And a normal office should not automatically be priced like a heavily controlled industrial site. Third, do not choose the lowest uplift simply because you are worried about the quotation looking expensive. A lower uplift may make the price look better today. But it does not reduce the amount of labour the site will actually consume. If the job needs 10.8 hours and you have allowed 8, the missing 2.8 hours still have to be paid for. Your first uplift bands will not be perfect. They do not need to be. What matters is reviewing the completed work. After the job, compare the estimate with what actually happened. Check whether the base fit time was wrong, whether the uplift was too low, or whether a separate labour activity was missed completely. That is how your percentages improve. Not by guessing harder. By comparing the estimate with the real job. Before preparing your next quote, review your last 3 completed jobs. Identify the site condition that consumed the most labour you had not priced. Was it access? Waiting? Material movement? Restricted hours? Or working around the customer? That review will give you a better starting point for the next job. The difficult part is not understanding this once. It is applying the same logic consistently across every quote, especially when more than 1 person starts pricing work. That is where FieldHive can help. FieldHive is being built so reusable pricing items can hold your normal base fit times. You can then apply the site allowance separately and compare the estimate with what the job actually used. FieldHive does not choose the uplift or replace your trade judgement. You still make the decision. It gives that judgement somewhere consistent to live. So remember: Fit time measures the task. Uplift measures the site. A socket can stay a socket. A tap can stay a tap. A fence panel can stay a fence panel. But when access, restrictions, interruptions and productive working time change, the labour allowance needs to change with them. Once labour is right, the next risk is materials. Because the supplier price is not always the full cost of putting that material onto the job. That is what we are covering next: How To Price Materials For Trade Jobs.