How to price masonry jobs

To price a masonry job, take off the wall area, convert it to unit counts (block, brick, or stone), add waste, and price the units plus mortar, grout, reinforcing, ties, flashing, and caps. Divide the unit count by your crew's production rate to get crew days, multiply by the crew's burdened daily cost, and add scaffold, equipment, dust control, and disposal. Then apply overhead and a profit margin. Production rate is the number that makes or breaks a masonry bid, and the only reliable source for it is your own job history.

How masonry contractors price work

• Unit and production pricing. Units times material cost, plus crew days from production rates. This is how most commercial block and brick is estimated, and it is the basis for every other method.
• Square foot of wall. A price per square foot for veneer or CMU, built from the method above. Easy for GCs to compare, but only safe when you know what height, openings, and pattern it assumes. See unit cost.
• Per 1,000 brick or per block. Common in commercial bids and when bidding labor only to a GC who supplies material.
• Linear foot. Caps, copings, sills, and steps are often priced per foot.
• Time and materials. Repair, tuckpointing on old buildings, and chimney work with unknown conditions. Write the rates down first; see time and materials.

The math: from wall area to units and crew days

Start with net wall area: length times height, minus openings over a size you decide (many estimators deduct only larger openings, since small ones take as much time as the wall they replace). For standard 8 by 16 inch concrete block, each unit covers 128 square inches of wall face including the joint, and a square foot is 144 square inches, so you need 1.125 block per square foot. For brick and stone, use the count per square foot from the manufacturer for the size and bond you are laying. Add waste for cuts and breakage.

Crew days equal units divided by units per crew day. That production rate changes with wall height, scaffold moves, number of corners and openings, pattern work, weather, and how far the material sits from the wall. Keep separate rates for each condition you see often, and update them from actual jobs.

Worked example: a 50 foot CMU screen wall

This is an illustration with made-up costs and a made-up production rate. Use your own supplier quotes and history. Say a customer wants a freestanding split-face CMU screen wall, 50 feet long and 6 feet high, on a new concrete footing, with vertical rebar grouted at intervals and a cap. Check local rules first: walls like this often need a permit, and retaining walls may need engineering.

1. Area and units. 50 x 6 = 300 square feet. 300 x 1.125 = 337.5, round to 338 block. Add 5 percent as an example waste factor: 355 block.
2. Block. 355 at an example $2.75 = $976.25.
3. Footing. 50 feet long, 2 feet wide, 1 foot deep = 100 cubic feet, or 3.7 cubic yards. Order 4 yards at an example $170 = $680.
4. Other materials. Rebar $420, mortar and sand $310, grout $350, cap units $450. Materials total: $3,186.25.
5. Labor. Example production: 120 block per day for a crew of two masons and a tender. 338 / 120 = 2.8, so 3 crew days, plus one day to grout, cap, and clean. 4 days x 3 people x 8 hours = 96 hours. Add 24 hours to dig, form, and pour the footing. 120 hours at an example burdened rate of $50 = $6,000.
6. Equipment and disposal. Mixer and wet saw rental $380 (water-fed saws are part of OSHA's silica controls), dumpster and haul-off $250. Total $630.
7. Direct cost. $3,186.25 + $6,000 + $630 = $9,816.25.
8. Overhead. At an example 15 percent of direct cost, add $1,472.44. Cost with overhead: $11,288.69.
9. Profit as margin. For a 12 percent margin, divide by 0.88: $12,828.05. Quote $12,830.
10. Check. $12,830 / 300 = about $42.77 per square foot of wall, including the footing. Compare to your past screen walls.

Labor is about 60 percent of the direct cost here. If the crew actually lays 100 block a day instead of 120, the wall takes about 3.4 days instead of 2.8. That is roughly 14 more crew hours plus a partial day of mixer rental, and close to half the profit disappears. That is why production rates deserve more attention than material prices.

Labor, overhead, and markup

For a wage reference, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a median of $28.02 per hour for masonry workers in May 2025. Tenders and laborers usually cost less per hour, so build a blended crew rate from your actual mix, then add payroll taxes, workers' comp, and benefits. The method is in how to calculate labor burden.

Overhead covers your yard, trucks, mixers and scaffold not charged to jobs, office staff, insurance, and estimating time. Find your rate with how to calculate construction overhead rate. Then set profit as a margin. A 12 percent markup on $11,288.69 gives $12,643.33, which is a margin of about 10.7 percent, not 12. See markup vs margin in construction.

Costs masonry bids often miss

Mistakes that sink masonry bids

1. Using one production rate for every wall regardless of height, openings, and pattern.
2. Deducting every opening from the unit count but not adding labor for the cuts, lintels, and jambs around them.
3. Pricing tuckpointing by the square foot without seeing how deep and how bad the joints are.
4. Leaving out the footing, or assuming another trade provides it without writing that into the scope of work.
5. Not tracking actual units per day, so bad rates repeat. Use job costing on every job.

Lay out your lines in the construction estimate template and bill from the construction invoice template. For tools that track production against the estimate, see masonry software. Smart Business Automator's estimate to project handoff automation carries estimated units and hours into the job budget so actuals can be compared.