After studying pricing for custom woodworking projects for more than a quarter century, one thing is certain. We are never going to get away from wide variations in pricing, including ranges that run from factors of four or five times the price, from low to high.
That’s even when the bidders have all the same information to work from and even have things original bidders couldn’t have, such as photos of the finished project. 

Still, there is lots to be learned from exploring the results of the Pricing Survey to better inform your own costing, estimating, bidding, and pricing practices.

This year’s Pricing Survey was sponsored by Lockdowel and TradeSoft.

How it works
Before you can even look at the numbers, you need to understand how the Pricing Survey works. We collect real jobs done by real shops and share the original bidding specifications with any shop in North America that wants to try bidding the job. The bid package includes descriptions of the projects, drawings with major dimensions, and usually finished photos to help give a better idea of what the projects are.

Then we ask the shops to bid the projects as if they were doing so in their own shop. We tell them to use their regular pricing procedures, but we also ask them to break out numbers for design fees, materials, shop rates and hours for construction, installation, and finishing. Not all shops provide the breakouts, and the breakouts don’t necessarily add up to the final quoted price.

We analyze results and publish them in FDMC and online at WoodworkingNetwork.com, keeping all bidders anonymous except for their state or province. 

The projects
This year’s survey initially had four projects, but only three garnered enough bids by deadline for a full report. The fourth project, some massive church doors, might be reported on later if we can collect additional bidders.

Kitchens have always been the most popular projects in the survey, and that is unchanged in 2024, with an inset face-frame kitchen earning the most bids. But more bidders has frequently meant a wider variation in bids. That was not true this year as most of the kitchen bids came in relatively close to each other.

Other projects included a fireplace surround with a wider variation in bidding and a small wine cabinet that had wide-ranging bids despite being smaller than the other projects in the survey. 

On the following pages, explore the detailed breakouts, pricing, and basic analysis to draw your own conclusions, but here are some lessons we’ve learned from surveying pricing for more than 25 years.

Estimating is hard
Woodworkers mostly find estimating materials costs and time on the job very difficult. Most of the variations in quoted prices come down to huge differences in the estimates for materials or the predictions about how long it will take to construct, finish, and install the job.

In the case of materials, often the problem is not taking time to really calculate material costs. Maybe you take a tape measure to the job and figure a rough estimate by the linear feet. Maybe you get a bit lazy and don’t update costs for supplies every time they jump in price. 

On labor, there is a real tendency to estimate on a best-case basis rather than delving back into historic numbers to know how long it really takes to do things. That problem fellow Murphy is always wreaking havoc with our best guesses and laying down his law that what can go wrong will go wrong.

Just remember: Live by ballpark estimates, you’re likely going to lose the game.

Shop rates are too low
Although we have seen a general trend for shop rates to be on the increase, it’s been our longstanding view that too many shops quote too low of a shop rate. A shop rate should cover all of your overhead and non-production costs as well as the actual productive labor it takes to build something. If you are paying your people $25 per hour, you can’t have a true loaded shop rate of $25 per hour and stay in business.

Even if your shop is in a low-overhead rural area, you might still be low-balling your shop rate. Rural shops might have increased transportation and shipping costs. Utilities might not be any lower cost than the big city. Yes, you might have lower taxes, but even that is not a given.

In this year’s survey, hourly shop rates range from $60 to $125. That’s an improvement from years past when there were still shops quoting rates under $50. Still, in light of recent inflationary trends, it would seem that your 2024 rate is likely due for an upward adjustment. When was the last time you actually calculated your shop rate based on current expenses?

Common misconceptions
Over the years, we’ve encountered a lot of misconceptions about how pricing works, contributing to wide variations in prices for seemingly the same item. The most common misconception is that different price quotes for one job are apples-to-apples comparison. Almost no two bids for custom woodwork, including bids in our Pricing Survey, are really bidding with identical numbers and specifications.

We try to achieve as close as we can to comparable numbers, but every shop works differently, prefers different construction techniques, different materials, and even counts and measures things differently. If the same customer visits three different shops to bid on what the customer thinks is the same job, they actually are getting bids on three different jobs.

What’s included and what’s not? What’s done in the shop and what’s outsourced? Is the shop building the project also installing it, or is that different team? All these are factors that change pricing.

Survey questions
Over the years, we’ve added questions to the survey to help give a better picture of the bidders. When people assumed that all the low bids were from inexperienced shops, we added a question about years in business. The reality is that most bidders in the survey are pretty experienced, some with decades behind them. But they still come up with both low and high bids.

Another question raised has been what the effect of technology has on pricing. We ask questions about software and CNC usage. The reality is that there is no correlation between the level of a shop’s technology and its pricing. 

There apparently appears to be two common rationales when people adopt CNC manufacturing. Some shops will say, “We invested in these expensive machines that make our production really precise. That adds both value and costs to what we do.” Other shops say, “We invested in these expensive machines, but their precision and speed has actually lowered our costs, allowing us to compete with higher-priced shops.” Go figure.

Using the survey
People who take the time to participate in the survey are the ones who get the most out of it. They say the exercise informed their own pricing practices in their shop. Yes, we do get complaints that the survey is too much work, bidding on jobs that you will never build or be paid for. Perhaps that’s true, and participation in the survey has decreased over the last few years. But we still believe the educational value is worth it.

Another great use of the survey is as a low-cost educational tool in your own shop. If you have more than one estimator in your operation, download the Pricing Survey bid package from WoodworkingNetwork.com and make copies for all of your estimators. Then put them in separate rooms to price out the jobs as they would for real jobs in your shop.

Once they are done, compare their bids. I can almost guaranty that all your estimators aren’t always working with the same assumptions, and those assumptions can cost you money.

Looking to 2025
Next year, we are going to make some changes to the Pricing Survey. Rather than one survey once a year, we are going to be doing several Pricing Workshops in these pages several times over the year. Some of those workshops might include projects to bid like the Pricing Survey. Other installments will delve deeper into problem pricing areas and how you can improve.

Pricing is crucial to your success.  We want to make it easier and better for you and your shop. Questions? Suggestions? Email [email protected]. Here are the detailed survey results by project:

Miter-beaded inset face-frame kitchen
Requiring precision fitting, the inset face-frame kitchen has been a hallmark of high-end work and elegant design for many years. This kitchen features painted miter-beaded doors and face-frames over pre-finished maple plywood cabinets. Dovetailed maple drawers are also featured. The U-shaped layout surrounds an island and extends off to the side.

Analysis: As is usually the case, the kitchen project is always the most popular in the survey. Often that also means it’s the project with the widest variance in price. Not so this time, although the highest price of $51,875 was nearly double the lowest price of price of $26,870. The original bidder’s price came out closer to the top at $49,029. Also note the wide variation in materials estimates with the original bidder’s material cost of $19,467 significantly higher than the average of $13,947.

Fireplace surround
A fireplace surround with cabinets and shelves on either side and provisions for a television is a popular kind of custom built-in project. But every such project has subtle differences and challenges, from scribing to walls and masonry to accommodating modern electronics. How would you price this one?

Analysis: Nearly as popular as the kitchen project, this fireplace surround earned six bids and the widest variation in pricing. The high bid of $44,500 was nearly five times higher than the low bid of just $9,440. Also note significant variations in the quotes for materials costs as well as construction, installation, and finishing hours.

Wine storage cabinet
Even a small wine storage cabinet offers challenges for the custom woodworking shop. It needs to be suitably elegant to match the wine collection and construction needs to follow certain conventions for proper wine storage. That typically means angled joinery and some complex and fussy work. How would you price this one? 

Analysis: Just because a job is smaller doesn’t mean it is easier to price. The high bid of $5,995 for this relatively small wine storage cabinet was slightly more than double the low bid of $2,920. And the high bidder was the shop that actually did the project. Under the circumstances, bidding was actually fairly close for this project, and the breakouts for hours, shop rates, and materials are fairly close.