The crawl
Pick a common job to start, then replace every rate with a liner ticket and a crew you have timed. Changing scope, access, or insulation fills starting hours and material only when you have not already edited that field.
Hours and material rates
These start from the scope, access, and insulation you picked. They are ballpark crew figures, not a liner catalog or a guarantee.
Your costs
Payroll burden covers employer taxes, workers’ compensation, liability insurance, and paid time off. Underestimating it is how a $4 / sq ft liner that looked profitable was not.
Your bid
- Dirt-floor area
- Stem-wall area
- Liner coverage
- Travel
- Crew hours
- Loaded labor
- Liner & tape
- Access, dehu, extras
- Travel & other
- Overhead
- Total cost
- Profit
- Price per sq ft
- Effective hourly rate
- Walk-away price
A bid link carries your own rates — wage, burden, overhead, and target margin — so the page reopens exactly as you left it. Send it to yourself or your crew. The numbers ride after the #, which is never sent to a server, so copying a link uploads nothing. The customer should get the price, not the link.
Same floor, three scopes
| Scope | Hours | Price |
|---|
Where the hours go
Transparent arithmetic from your own inputs. The starting hours and material rates are common ballpark figures, not an industry standard, a benchmark, or a guarantee — time your own crews and replace them.
Hand the customer a proposal
The price above is for you. This is the page you print or save as a PDF and give to the customer — your details, their details, the scope, the deposit split, and a line for them to sign. Your business details are saved on this device so you only type them once; the customer’s details are never saved.
Everything on the printed page is text you typed or a number this calculator worked out. It contains no warranty, lien, or cancellation wording — those depend on your jurisdiction and your contract, and this tool is not the place to invent them.
Common questions
Why can a competitor advertise “$4 a square foot encapsulation”?
Usually because the special is written around one specific job, and that job is a preset here: a dry, walkable 36-inch ranch crawl with 6-mil liner-only — no wall liner, no dehumidifier. It really does price low. What the per-square-foot number cannot see is scope, access, water, and extras like a dedicated circuit, support piers, or a debris clean-out. Price your actual crawl beside the special and the gap becomes a list of line items instead of an argument about who is honest.
Why does a wet, tight crawl cost so much more than a dry, walkable one?
Because access and water both add hours before the liner even goes down. A 36-inch hatch crawl is the cheap-special assumption. An 18–24 inch belly crawl means the whole job is done lying down. Standing water needs a pump-out before anything else can start. None of that changes how many square feet of liner get cut — it changes how long every one of those feet takes to install.
What’s the real difference between liner-only, encapsulate, and encapsulate-plus-dehumidifier?
Liner-only is 6-mil laid loose on the dirt — a vapor barrier and nothing else. Sealed encapsulate adds a wall liner and seals the space, which controls humidity somewhat but does not actively remove it. Adding a commercial dehumidifier is what keeps the space dry through a humid summer rather than just slowing the vapor down. Skipping the dehumidifier on a genuinely wet crawl is how a sealed space ends up growing mold anyway.
Is this the same as basement waterproofing or foundation repair?
No. This prices sealing and drying a dirt crawl space — liner, access, insulation, and a dehumidifier. It is distinct from basement waterproofing (an interior perimeter drain and sump pit in a finished basement), a French drain (a yard trench), a sump pump swap, radon mitigation (SSD pipes and a fan), foundation repair (piers holding up a settled structure), mold remediation (containment and clearance testing), spray foam (board-foot insulation as the job), and attic blown-in insulation. A crawl with a genuine structural problem needs a foundation-repair bid, not this one.
Is my data uploaded anywhere?
No account and no network requests — the calculator runs entirely in your browser. Your bid is saved in this browser’s local storage so it is still here next visit, and the optional usage counter records only which features were used and the day, never your crawl dimensions, wages, or prices.
What’s the difference between the bid price and the walk-away price?
The bid price already includes your target margin on top of labor, materials, and overhead. The walk-away price is the total cost underneath it — liner, access, insulation, dehumidifier, support piers, and a clean-out — the point below which the job stops being profitable at all. Typing a price you are considering shows you the margin or the loss before you send it.