How we build these numbers

Claver is software for the trades. These guides are written for the person setting the price, not the person paying it. If you own a shop, this page tells you how much weight to put on the numbers you read here.

The order of trust

Not every source deserves the same weight, so we rank them and say which one a figure came from. We work down this list and stop at the highest tier that actually covers the question.

1. Government data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook for wages, the EPA and the Department of Energy for maintenance intervals and installed-cost benchmarks. This is the floor under every labor number we publish.
2. Trade associations and standards bodies. Groups like ISSA, the Chimney Safety Institute of America, and ALOA. They rarely publish prices, but they define the scope of work, and scope is what a price is attached to.
3. Market cost observations. Large marketplaces publish what jobs actually closed for. These are real transactions, not surveys, but they skew toward the kind of customer who shops a marketplace.
4. A vendor's own price list. For the software guides only. A company's published pricing page is the authority on that company's prices, and nothing else is.

Each guide ends with a "Where these numbers come from" section listing exactly what we read and the date we read it. If a source is not in that list, we did not use it.

How a range gets built

A range is not an average. It is the band that most jobs of that type fall into, with the tails cut off. We start from the wage floor for the trade, add the cost drivers the associations say belong in scope, then check the result against what the market data shows jobs closing for.

When those three disagree, we widen the range rather than pick a winner. A wide honest range beats a narrow invented one. And when nothing we can read supports a specific figure, we say it qualitatively instead. "Most shops set a minimum in the low hundreds" is a claim we can stand behind. A made-up $187 is not.

How often we review them

The update date at the top of each guide is the truth. It is generated from the file's own history, not typed in by hand, so it moves only when the page actually changes. We do not promise a fixed review cadence, because a promise we cannot keep is worse than no promise. What we do commit to: when a source we cite publishes new data, the guides that lean on it get revisited, and the date moves.

Wage data updates roughly once a year. Market cost pages update more often than that. So treat a guide as a snapshot of the date it carries, and treat anything more than a year old as a starting point rather than a current quote.

How to use the calculators

The ranges tell you where the market sits. The calculators tell you where you sit, and those are different numbers. Each cost guide links the matching calculator at the end of the sources section.

Use them in this order. Run your labor rate first, because everything else stacks on top of it. Then price a representative job with your real materials cost and drive time. Then compare that number to the range in the guide. If you land well under the range, you are probably not charging for overhead. If you land well over it and you are still winning work, you have found something your market values, and you should not talk yourself out of it.

Corrections

If a figure on one of these pages looks wrong, it might be. Markets move, and we would rather fix a number than defend it. Tell us what you see in your market and which page it is on, and we will check it against the sources and update the page.

Who writes these

These guides are written by the Claver team. Claver is a field service management app for home-service shops: scheduling, quoting, invoicing, and payments. We have an obvious interest in field service owners running a profitable business, and we mention the product where it is genuinely relevant. We do not adjust a price range to make a feature look better. The byline is the company rather than a person because the research, drafting, and review are shared across the team.