Carpentry resists flat rate pricing harder than the other three trades, and anybody selling you a price book without admitting that is not being straight with you.
An electrician replacing a panel is doing a job with known boundaries. A carpenter hanging an interior door might be hanging a door, or might be discovering that the rough opening is out of square by three quarters of an inch in a hundred-year-old rowhouse, which is a different afternoon entirely.
So the carpentry book is built differently. It flat-rates the work that repeats and gives you unit pricing for the work that scales, and it is explicit about which is which. Here is the inside of it, at Philadelphia metro calibration for 2026.
Two kinds of line item, and knowing which you are looking at
Roughly half the book is fixed-price services. Hang a pre-hung door, set a toilet-adjacent trim run, replace a section of railing. Known scope, known time, one number.
The other half is unit pricing. Decking by the square foot, crown by the linear foot, steps by the step. These are not flat rates in the strict sense, they are a rate multiplied by a measurement you take on site, and the book gives you the rate.
Trades that are all service calls do not need this distinction. Carpentry does, because a deck is not a service call and pretending it is produces a number that is wrong by thousands. Any carpentry price book claiming a single flat price for "deck" is either not a real book or is quietly assuming a size it has not told you about.
Real line items from the carpentry book
Doors
- Pre-hung hollow-core interior door, standard install: $450
- Pre-hung solid-core: $530
- Slab into an existing frame: $300
- Interior pair: $1,090
- Pocket door, open wall or new construction: $1,160
- Trim replacement, per door: $270
- Labor only, customer-supplied door: $200 to $280
Trim, by the linear foot
- Crown molding, installed: $40 per linear foot
- Which puts a 14 by 18 family room at 64 linear feet and four corners at $2,560
Decks, by the square foot
- Pressure treated: $70 per square foot installed
- Cedar: $90 per square foot
- Composite: $110 per square foot
- Steps: $280 each, so a four-step set is $1,120
- Cable railing: $80 to $120 per linear foot
A 200 square foot pressure-treated deck therefore prices at $14,000 before steps and railing, and the composite version of the identical deck lands at $22,000. Two numbers a homeowner will ask you to justify in the same conversation, and having them both come out of the same rate structure is what makes the justification hold up.
The $450 door, taken apart
A pre-hung hollow-core interior door install is the most-quoted line in the book and the one contractors most reliably underprice, so here is the whole thing.
The door itself runs $50 to $120 wholesale for builder grade. Add casing if it is not pre-cased, shims, fasteners, and the hardware if you are supplying it. Labor is two to two and a half hours for a competent install: pull the old unit, check the opening for plumb and square, set and shim, hang, adjust the reveal so it closes without a shove, case both sides, and clean up the mess you made. Overhead and profit on top.
That is $450, and the number that gets contractors in trouble is the one they say in the hallway before checking anything, which is almost always "three hundred, easy job." Three hundred is the price of a slab into an existing frame. It is not the price of a pre-hung, and the difference between those two jobs is not visible from the doorway.
Solid-core is $530 for the same labor and a door that costs $80 to $150 more wholesale. Being able to point at that split, rather than defending two blended numbers eighty dollars apart, is what makes the upgrade conversation easy.
The add-on list, which is where carpentry money actually leaks
Every fixed-price line in the book carries named add-ons underneath it, and in carpentry that list does more work than in any other trade because old houses generate discoveries constantly.
On doors: out-of-square opening correction, jamb extension for a thicker wall, match-trim work to blend with existing profiles at $100 to $300 per door, paint and finish at $150 to $300 per door if you are doing it. On decks: footing depth beyond standard, structural repair to existing framing at $300 to $1,500 depending on what you find, engineered drawings at $300 to $800 where the jurisdiction wants them.
None of those belong in the base price. Bury them in the base and you are expensive on every clean job in order to be covered on the messy ones, which means you lose the clean jobs and only win the messy ones. That is a slow way to go out of business and it feels like bad luck the whole time.
Material and labor separated on every line
The carpentry book splits material from labor on each line rather than showing a single blended number, and this is the design decision that matters most in this trade.
The reason is that carpentry customers supply their own material constantly. They bought the doors. They picked the decking at the showroom. They have a pallet of flooring in the garage from a job that never happened. The moment a customer says "I already have the material," a blended price is useless and you are back to doing arithmetic in your head in their driveway.
With material and labor split, the labor-only number is already sitting there. The $450 pre-hung door becomes a $200 to $280 labor-only line, and you can quote it in the driveway without pretending to think about it.
The split does something else too. When a customer questions why solid-core is $530 against hollow-core at $450, you can show that the labor is nearly identical and the gap is almost entirely the door. That is a far better conversation than defending a blended number that looks arbitrary.
Three tiers, where the material is the tier
Each of the 207 lines carries Good, Better, and Best, and carpentry is the trade where those tiers land most naturally, because the customer can usually see and touch the difference.
Pressure treated, cedar, composite. Hollow-core, solid-core, solid wood. Painted trim, stain-grade, hardwood. The tier is not a service level you are asking them to take on faith, it is a physical object with a visible difference, and that makes the three-option presentation genuinely easy in this trade in a way it is not in electrical.
The deck comparison is the strongest version of it. Pressure treated at $14,000 against composite at $22,000 looks like an $8,000 gap until you add twenty-five years of sealing and board replacement to the first number and almost nothing to the second, at which point the real lifetime difference is closer to $5,500. That is a genuine argument for the more expensive option, and it belongs in the conversation rather than in your head.
IRC alignment where applicable, and the honest caveat
Deck framing, guards, stairs, and ledger work follow IRC organization. The caveat, and it is a real one, is that a good deal of carpentry work is not code-governed at all. Hanging an interior door and running crown are not inspected activities. So "IRC-aligned where applicable" means exactly that, and the applicable part is mostly structural and exterior.
For the parts that are inspected, the IRC Carpentry Code Quick Reference is the truck document, and the 2024 IRC changes for carpenters covers what moved on decks and stairs.
What it does not do
- It does not price a remodel. Kitchens, additions, and whole-room renovations are estimated from drawings and scope. The book covers services and unit-priced work, which is most of what a handyman or finish carpenter actually sells.
- It cannot see the rough opening. Old houses produce surprises no catalog anticipates. The book gives you a base and named add-ons, and change orders handle the rest.
- No app, no integration. Excel workbook.
- One market, out of the box. Philadelphia metro until you put your own rate in.
The bottom line
207 services across handyman work, finish carpentry, doors, trim, and decks. Fixed pricing where the scope is known, unit pricing where the job scales, material and labor separated on every line, and tiers built around material grades customers can see.
The thing carpentry contractors underprice most reliably is the small stuff, because a door feels like a small job right up until the opening is out of square. A book will not stop that from happening. It will stop you from having quoted three hundred dollars before you knew.
Running multiple trades? The four-book bundle is $198.