Nobody will show you the inside of a price book before you buy it. That is the whole problem with this category. You are asked to spend real money on a document you cannot open, described in language that could mean anything, sold by companies whose demo requires a phone call.
So here is the inside of ours. Real line items, real numbers, the structure behind them, and an honest account of what the thing does not do.
Everything below is Philadelphia metro calibration for 2026. If you work somewhere else the numbers move, and the section on the settings sheet explains exactly how.
What one line item is actually made of
A flat rate line is not a price somebody made up. It is four inputs and a formula, and once you see the four inputs the whole thing stops being mysterious.
- Labor hours for the task, at the pace a competent electrician actually works, not the pace of the one good day you had in 2019.
- Your loaded hourly rate, which is not your wage. It is wage plus payroll tax plus insurance plus workers comp plus the truck plus the hours you spend quoting and driving and not billing anybody.
- Material at your real cost, with markup applied.
- Overhead recovery and profit, the part most contractors leave out and then wonder where the year went.
Multiply, add, round to something a homeowner can hear without flinching. That is a flat rate. Do it 250 times, keep the inputs consistent, and you have a book.
The value is not in any single number. It is that all 250 numbers were produced by the same math, so they are consistent with each other, and so a customer comparing two of your quotes cannot find a contradiction.
One line built all the way through
Take the retrofit recessed can at $340 and pull it apart.
The task is 1.4 hours at book pace, which covers locating the joist bay, cutting, fishing the run, making up the box, trimming out, and cleaning up after yourself. At a loaded rate of $165 an hour that is $231 of labor. The can, the trim, the connectors and the wire come to about $52 at cost with markup applied. Overhead recovery and profit ride on top of both.
Round it and you get $340. Notice that the $52 of material is fifteen percent of the price, which is exactly why the customer who priced the fixture at Home Depot and thinks you are charging $340 for a $28 can is confused. He is looking at one of the four inputs.
Now do the same thing for the new-construction version. Same fixture, no fishing, no drywall dust, no patching. The labor drops to about an hour and the price lands at $290. Two lines that look nearly identical to a homeowner and are forty minutes apart in the field, which is precisely the sort of distinction that disappears when you price from memory.
Service codes, and the part nobody mentions
Every line carries a service code column. It is dull and it matters, because it is what lets a quote become an invoice without retyping. Codes carry into QuickBooks or whatever you invoice from, and after a year they are the thing that lets you sort by service and find out which jobs actually made money. That is the same data the Job Profitability Tracker is built to read.
Real line items from the electrician book
These are actual prices out of the book at Philadelphia metro calibration. Several of them you have already seen in the pricing guides on this site, because those guides were written from this book.
Service and panel work
- 100A to 200A service upgrade, full code compliance: $7,460
- 150A to 200A service upgrade: $5,720
- Panel change only, service size unchanged: $2,500 to $4,000 depending on circuit count
- Whole-house surge protector install: $760
- Aluminum branch circuit pigtailing at the panel: $400 to $1,200 by circuit count
- Generator interlock kit and transfer wiring: $400 to $1,500
Lighting and devices
- Recessed can, retrofit into finished ceiling: $340 each
- Recessed can, new construction or open ceiling: $290 each
- LED retrofit kit into an existing can: $230 each
- Standard dimmer install: $200
- Smart dimmer with neutral and Wi-Fi setup: $250 to $350
EV charging
- Level 2 charger, normal run, adequate panel space: $1,540
- Plug-and-play on an existing 14-50 outlet: $410
- Long run or trenching required: $2,980
- Charger plus required service upgrade: around $9,000
Look at the EV block for a second, because it makes the point better than anything else. Four prices for what a homeowner calls one job. The contractor quoting "EV charger install, $750, that is what I saw online" has no way to distinguish the $410 version from the $2,980 version until he is standing in the garage with the panel cover off. A book forces the distinction before the number leaves your mouth.
The settings sheet, and why it is the actual product
Every number above is a formula, not a typed-in figure. They all trace back to one tab.
Change your loaded hourly rate on the settings sheet and all 250 services reprice in the same second. Copper jumps and you update the material inputs, every line that carries copper moves and nothing else does. Your comp premium goes up at renewal, you change one field, and your prices absorb it instead of your margin absorbing it.
This is what people miss when they compare price books on the count of services. A book with a thousand hard-typed prices is worse than a book with two hundred formula-driven ones, because the thousand go stale the first time anything changes and you will never edit a thousand rows by hand.
It is also what makes the book work outside Philadelphia. The $7,460 service upgrade is not a claim about your market. It is what the formula returns at this market's inputs. Put in a Cleveland labor rate and it lands nearer $5,500. Put in a Bay Area rate and it clears $9,000. The structure is the product, the numbers are just this market's output. Work out your own number first with the Break-Even Labor Rate Calculator, then put it in.
Why every service has three tiers
Each of the 250 lines carries a Good, Better, and Best version rather than one price.
On a panel job, Good is the code-compliant replacement that solves the problem. Better adds whole-house surge protection. Best adds surge plus a generator interlock and the AFCI upgrades the customer was going to hit at the next permit anyway.
The reason to build the book this way has nothing to do with upselling. It is that a single number invites a yes or a no, and three numbers invite a choice. A customer looking at one price is deciding whether to hire you. A customer looking at three is deciding which version of hiring you. That is a materially easier conversation and you did not have to say anything clever to get there.
NEC alignment, and what that phrase honestly means
The service categories are organized against NEC 2023 article structure. Being precise about what that buys you: it means the book is grouped the way the code is grouped, so when a scope touches AFCI, GFCI, service grounding, or working clearance, the related line items sit together instead of scattered across the catalog.
It does not mean the book is a code reference. It will not tell you what 210.12 requires. That is a different document, and if you want it in the truck it is the NEC Code Quick Reference. The price book prices the work. The code book tells you what the work has to be.
Worth knowing that the 2026 NEC is now in play in some jurisdictions and not others. We cover what moved in NEC 2026 vs 2023, and the pricing implications of the changes land in the book as the adoptions land.
What it does not do
Being straight about the limits, because the companies selling $600-a-year subscriptions will not be.
- It is a spreadsheet, not software. No mobile app, no dispatch, no integration with your field service platform. If your business is running six trucks off ServiceTitan, this is not the tool.
- It does not update itself. No quarterly OEM parts feed. When material moves, you move the inputs. That is a five-minute job a few times a year, but it is your five minutes.
- It does not know your market. Out of the box it is calibrated to Philadelphia metro. Using those numbers unedited somewhere else is the single most common way to get this wrong.
- It will not make a customer say yes. It makes your number defensible and consistent. Closing is still on you, and handling the price objection is its own skill.
The bottom line
250 electrical services, Good / Better / Best on every one, after-hours and emergency multipliers built in, service codes ready for your invoicing, and a settings sheet that reprices the whole catalog from one field.
The real argument for buying rather than building is not the money. It is that building your own takes a few weeks of evenings, most contractors quit around service number forty, and the ones who finish discover they forgot two dozen services they perform regularly. Starting from a finished catalog and editing it to your market is a different size of job entirely.
If you run more than one trade, the four-book bundle is $198 instead of $396.