Flooring Business Owner Salary: How Much do They Make?

Several factors affect a flooring business owner’s salary, such as the size and location of the business, the type of flooring work undertaken, and the general level of experience and expertise.

How much do flooring contractors make? Flooring contractors make an average of $54,360 per year for each crew they employ.

Based on my experience as an estimator & project manager, here’s the process I’ll follow to demonstrate how I came to that number.

Step 1. Find the sales price of the average residential flooring job

According to both Forbes and Bobvilla, the average residential flooring replacement costs $3,000.00

• This considers that some jobs are full home re-floors and others are partial jobs.
• These are rough figures, and each contractor will be different. 

Over time you will be able to get an average of your overall job values and take your work from there. But you can now use these figures to get a rough estimate.

Step 2. Find the average expenses of a single residential flooring job

A few key expenses go into acquiring and fulfilling a flooring job. These include:

Cost of Materials: 25%

• Material costs like the actual floors, grout,  glue, nails, etc., will make up a large big of the total job cost. 
• If you’re using high-end materials, you can charge more, and if you’re using lower-cost materials, you’ll charge less, so these figures usually stay the same in terms of the percentage cut of the overall job. 

Material costs per job will average around 25% of the value of the job.

Cost of Labor: 30%

• Labor costs per job will average between 25-35% of the value of the overall job. 
• Labor will be the most significant expense for most flooring projects.

The above is just for labor workers doing the hands-on flooring work. Next, we’ll consider other workers like project managers and estimators.

Project Managers: 4.2%

• Flooring project managers are normally paid a monthly salary of about $5,000.
• Assuming each project manager can manage around 10 jobs per week would mean they can manage about 40 jobs per month. 

40 jobs at $3,000 will give you monthly gross sales of $120,000. Therefore, the project manager’s cost ($5,000 per month) comes to about 4.2% of your revenue.

Estimators: 8.3%

• Estimators give potential customers a quote for the job. 
• They will also be paid a monthly salary of about $5000, much like the project manager. 
• An estimator can quote 5 flooring jobs per day, or 100 per month. 

Assuming 20% of estimates are awarded, the estimator will bring in 20 jobs per month, totaling $60,000 in revenue.

Of that revenue, the estimator cost ($5,000) comes out to be about 8.3%.

Office Staff: Under 1%

These days, you don’t need a physical office for your staff. 

• You can hire people remotely to answer the phones and manage your job schedule. 
• You can also pay a part-time virtual assistant for bookkeeping.

Paying for office staff activities will generally cost you less than 1% of your revenue as long as you have revenues greater than $200,000 per year.

Marketing: 8%

Marketing is the cost that varies the most from company to company. 

• Smaller companies only need a little marketing to keep their crews busy. 
• They can take advantage of low-cost marketing channels such as social media. 

Larger companies need to go down the quality trail in terms of marketing channels to keep the required amount of leads flowing.  They need to get into Pay-Per-Click, Search Engine Optimization, and other more advanced digital and offline marketing strategies.

Companies also vary in how effectively they can advertise. Those that have put in the foundational work of creating a relatable brand will get a better return on their advertising investment.

With that considered, marketing for a medium-sized flooring contractor in an averagely competitive location will be around 8% of revenue.

Transportation: 7.4%

Company vehicles have the following costs:

• Gas
• Maintenance & repairs
• Commercial vehicle insurance
• Depreciation
• State taxes
• Financing (optional)
• Extended warranties (optional)

When you add up these costs and convert the total into a per-mile cost (by dividing the total cost in a given period by the miles driven in the same period), you’ll probably end up with a per-mile cost of about 65 cents.

Let’s say the distance between your shop and a job site averages 30 miles. 

• If one crew vehicle makes a round trip for two days to complete the job, that comes out to 120 miles. 
• Let’s round up to 140 miles, to include stops to grab materials and lunch.

The estimator would have also used up about 40 miles. 

• But he has to estimate 5 potential jobs to land a single job. 
• So that comes out to 160 miles driven per awarded job for estimating.

The project manager will likely visit the job just once, at the end of the job. He’ll log about 40 miles per job.

Add the 140 miles for the project manager,  the 160 miles for estimating, and the 40 miles for project management, and we get a total of 340 miles driven per job.

340 miles at 65 cents gives us a transportation cost of $221 per job. Our average job has a $3,000 sales price, which puts the transportation cost at about 7.4%.

Other costs: 1%

Some smaller costs include the following:

• Insurance
• Software costs
• Payroll services
• Legal fees
• Financial services

These shouldn’t total more than 1% of your total revenue.

Step 3. Subtract the costs from the sales price to determine the average profit per job.

Using the above data, we can break the $3000 average job price into the following proportions on a per-job basis.

Expense	Percentage
Materials	25%
Labor	30%
Project Management	4.2%
Estimating	8.3%
Office staff	1%
Marketing	8%
Transportation	7.4%
Other expenses	1%
Total expenses	84.9%

84.9% of our revenue going into expenses means we have 15.1% left over as our flooring company’s profit margin.

An average sales price of $3,000 results in $453 in profit per job.

Step 4. Find out how many jobs a flooring contractor can do per year

Flooring jobs can take a few hours to up to two weeks. It all depends on the floor’s size and the job’s complexity. 

For our purposes, we’ll assume that each flooring job takes an average of 2 days to complete. 

That means a single flooring crew can complete 10 jobs per month or 120 jobs per year. This assumes an average of 20 days of work per month.

Step 5. Multiply the number of jobs per year by the profit per job

120 jobs per year with an average sales price of $3,000 per job results in $360,000 in yearly revenue.

In step 3, we found that the expenses add up to 84.9%, and the profit margin per job comes to 15.1%.

The abovementioned $360,000 in yearly revenue with a 15.1% profit margin results in $54,360 in net yearly profit, or your take-home flooring contractor salary.

• $54,360 per year may not seem a lot for someone running a business but remember, this is looking on a linear scale. 
• We have only taken into account running jobs from a single crew. If you deployed two crews, this figure could increase by a factor of 2. 
• And every additional crew you deployed would bring in an additional $54,360 yearly profit added to your yearly profit.

That’s the beauty of running your own business. The potential for earnings is nearly limitless. And flooring is a good trade because it will always be in mind.

There are other expenses you need to factor in when you grow past a certain level, such as higher marketing costs, office space, and storage space. However, as you can see, flooring contractors have the potential to earn a significant amount. 

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