How Long Is a Contractor Quote Good For?

A contractor quote is typically good for 7 to 30 days, depending on how much of your cost stack is in volatile materials. Seven days on copper-heavy electrical work or any diesel-freight-intensive scope, 14 days on mixed labor-and-materials jobs, and 30 days when labor dominates and commodity prices are a minor cost driver. If copper wire moved 3.5% last month and your bid has been sitting for 12 days, you re-run the price before you accept—not after you've called in the material order.

This article is about one specific situation: you sent a quote, materials moved while it was open, and you need to decide whether to honor the number or revise it before you commit. It is not about writing an estimate from scratch and not about change orders on active jobs.

The Default Window Depends on What Is in Your Cost Stack

A quote's validity window is not a formality. It is the period during which you can guarantee that your cost basis—the materials, labor, and overhead that produced the number—still holds. When you write a quote with no expiry, you are implicitly promising to hold that price indefinitely. That works fine on a labor-only job where the cost doesn't change. It becomes a liability the moment a distributor surcharge, a PPI release, or a freight spike moves your materials cost out from under you.

Three windows cover most situations:

• 7 days — copper-heavy electrical, diesel-sensitive hauling, fuel-surcharge scopes, anything where a single commodity is more than 30–40% of total job cost
• 14 days — mixed labor-and-materials jobs (plumbing, HVAC, general contracting, most remodel work)
• 30 days — labor-dominant jobs where materials are a small fraction of the total (painting, drywall, finish carpentry, some landscaping)

GC and trade sub situations are slightly different. As a sub, your quote feeds into a GC's bid, and GCs sometimes sit on bids for three to four weeks before the owner awards. If you know a particular GC consistently accepts bids late, a 7- or 14-day window protects you from being locked into a number that is already stale by the time the project moves. State that window clearly in writing on the quote itself—do not leave it to a conversation.

When 7 Days Is the Right Call

Any time one commodity drives more than a third of your material cost, shorten the window to seven days. Copper is the clearest example. The August 2026 BLS Producer Price Index (USDL 26-1495) showed copper and brass mill shapes up +3.5% month-over-month and +20.9% year-over-year. Nonferrous wire and cable—the category that covers most electrical wire—was up +2.4% month-over-month and +19.6% year-over-year. If you quoted a residential panel upgrade with 600 feet of 12-gauge wire three weeks ago, you are not quoting at the price you thought you were.

Diesel and freight follow the same logic. The same August PPI report (USDL 26-1495) showed diesel fuel +24.1% month-over-month and truck freight +2.0% month-over-month. That moves fast enough to make a two-week-old delivery estimate wrong. Any job where you are coordinating a heavy material delivery—pre-cast concrete, steel, pre-fabricated panels—deserves a seven-day window precisely because freight cost is a real variable in the quote.

Seasonal demand compounds the commodity problem. Electrical wire is tighter supply in the spring remodel season and again heading into fall new-construction closings. If you are quoting in a peak-demand month and the customer hasn't responded in a week, the distributor's price sheet that produced your number may have changed before you even follow up.

When 14 Days Works

A plumber quoting a bathroom remodel—copper pipe, fixtures, and labor roughly balanced—runs a reasonable 14-day window. Materials move, but the commodity exposure is split across enough line items that no single price spike breaks the quote in a week. HVAC jobs fit similarly: equipment cost is significant, but lead times on standard equipment tend to be predictable enough that two weeks is a sensible hold period on most residential installs.

General contractors running mixed-trade scopes often default to 14 days for the same reason. The labor-to-materials ratio sits somewhere between the extremes, and 14 days gives a customer long enough to get approval without leaving you exposed for a month. If a particular scope has heavy copper or fuel exposure, tighten that to seven.

When 30 Days Is Defensible

A painter quoting interior work—labor, primer, paint—can hold 30 days with low risk because paint costs, while not immune to inflation, don't move the way copper does on a monthly basis. Drywall hanging and finishing, tile setting, and certain finish-carpentry scopes share the same profile: labor is 60–75% of job cost, and the material components don't swing 3–5% in a month under normal conditions.

The caution here is complacency. Even a 30-day window can get caught by a broad materials PPI print. The August 2026 report (USDL 26-1495, BLS PPI release) showed materials and components for construction up +0.3% month-over-month and +5.1% year-over-year, and materials for construction up +0.3% month-over-month and +5.3% year-over-year. Final demand rose +0.4% month-over-month (seasonally adjusted) and +5.4% for the 12 months ended August. That is not catastrophic for a paint job, but it is a signal that checking your number before a 30-day window expires is worth two minutes—especially if you are on the back end of the window.

When to Re-Price Before the Window Closes

The window is the outer boundary. The real trigger is when costs move—and costs can move inside the window. You do not wait for day 14 or day 30 to check. You check when any of the following happens while the quote is open.

PPI Prints While Your Bid Sits

The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the Producer Price Index monthly, roughly two weeks after the reference month ends. The August 2026 release (USDL 26-1495) landed in September. If you quoted a copper-heavy job in mid-August and the PPI came out showing copper and brass mill shapes up 3.5% that month, your distributor's price sheet has very likely already moved to reflect that. The PPI is a lagging signal—by the time BLS publishes it, your supplier already knows what happened.

The math is straightforward. If materials are 40% of your job cost and copper drives half of that materials line (so copper is 20% of total job cost), a 3.5% copper increase raises your total cost by about 0.7%. On a $10,000 job, that is $70. If copper is 60% of your materials line on an electrical-heavy scope (so 24% of total job cost), the same spike costs you $168 of margin. Neither of those numbers is trivial against a 20% margin target. And that is one month's move—add the year-over-year accumulation and you see why copper-heavy electrical work cannot carry a 30-day window.

Distributor Invoice or Supplier Surcharge Changes

You do not need a BLS release to know prices moved. Your distributor updates its price sheet, or drops a fuel surcharge notice in your account portal, or the wire house calls to say the reel price changed effective this week. That is your trigger—not the PPI, not the calendar. When your supplier's invoice price on a line item that is material to the quote changes after you sent the quote, you re-run the number before you accept the job.

Get the updated invoice. Do not estimate the change from memory or from what the sales rep said on the phone. Pull the actual current price on the specific SKU you quoted and put that into the calculator. Guessing the increase often undershoots what actually happened.

Lead Times Blow Out

Lead time is a cost variable when you are carrying the material. If you quoted a job assuming a four-week delivery on a specialty panel and the lead time has stretched to ten weeks, the cost of float—cash you've committed to material before the job can bill—changes. More relevant: if the customer wants to start by a certain date and lead times won't support it, you may need a different product at a different price. Quoting a substitution on a tight-lead-time emergency scenario is a different cost stack than the original quote. Re-run it.

Late Acceptance Pattern

Some customers sit on quotes as a negotiating tactic. Others are slow simply because of their internal approval process. Either way, if a particular customer or GC reliably accepts three to four weeks after receiving your quote, that behavioral pattern should inform the window you set at the start—not just what you do when they finally call. A 14-day window on a customer with a 30-day approval cycle means they will almost always be calling you about an expired quote. You have three options: shorten the approval cycle by following up actively, set a 7-day window so the expiry triggers an explicit conversation, or quote with a "prices subject to material costs at time of order" clause in addition to a specific window.

How to Re-Run the Calculator With Fresh Materials and the Same Margin

The process is short. You are not rewriting the estimate. You are updating one input—material cost—and keeping everything else the same.

1. Pull your original quote and isolate the material cost line. You need the exact dollar amount you put into the materials cost field, not the marked-up number and not the customer-facing total. If your original quote was built in the job profit calculator, you have it. If you quoted on paper, reverse the markup: original materials cost = marked-up materials ÷ (1 + markup rate). You need the cost basis, not the price.
2. Get today's material cost from your supplier—not from memory. Call the distributor, log into your account, or pull the invoice from this week. Get the current price on the specific SKU or spec you quoted. If you used copper wire on the original, price out the same gauge and quantity at today's reel price. If you quoted PVC conduit at a fixed list price and that hasn't moved, write it down anyway so the comparison is clean.
3. Enter the updated material cost into a new calculator run. Keep your material markup percentage the same—this is not the time to renegotiate how much you mark up materials, and changing the markup rate to cover a cost increase is a different thing than repricing at the same markup rate. How to set that rate is a separate question covered in how to mark up materials as a contractor.
4. Set Quote Valid (days) to the window you are willing to hold. In the job profit calculator, Quote Settings includes a Quote Valid (days) field (and an include-on-quote checkbox). Put 7, 14, or 30 there to match the tier you chose for this cost stack, then turn the checkbox on so the customer PDF or copied quote carries the expiry with the price. Material cost and material markup stay on the Materials section; validity is how long that stacked price stays good.
5. Keep labor hours, loaded labor rate, and overhead allocation unchanged. You are isolating the material cost variable. If labor hasn't changed and your overhead allocation for this job hasn't changed, those fields stay the same. Changing them at the same time as materials makes it hard to know where the price change came from, and it opens the door to accidentally inflating the quote for reasons you cannot explain to a customer who asks.
6. Keep the target margin the same. You want 20% of the selling price, you want 20% now. Do not reduce margin to absorb the material increase—that is how you eat the cost spike instead of passing it through. The distinction between markup and margin matters here: margin is profit divided by the selling price, not by cost. The full walkthrough is in markup vs margin on a real ticket. If you built the original quote on a target margin of 20%, hold that target in the re-run.
7. Read the new suggested charge and compare it to your original quote. The difference is what you would absorb if you honored the old number. That number is your decision point—not the decision itself.
8. Decide: revise the quote, send a courtesy explanation, or honor it with a hard close date. If the delta is small and the customer relationship is valuable, you may choose to honor the original number and treat the overage as a cost of the relationship. If the delta is material and you are still within your validity window, send the revised quote with a clear explanation that material costs changed since the original date. If the original window has already expired, there is no question—the revised quote is the only quote on the table.

Worked Example: Electrician Quoting a Panel Upgrade

These are made-up round numbers chosen to make the arithmetic easy to follow. They are not market prices, typical job costs, or earnings claims. Use your own invoice costs.

An electrician quotes a 200-amp panel upgrade with a branch circuit run. The scope is material-heavy: the panel, breakers, and wire represent about 55% of total job cost at the time of quoting.

Twelve days later, copper and brass mill shapes moved +3.5% (consistent with the August 2026 PPI, USDL 26-1495). The wire component of the $1,160 materials line was roughly $480 at invoice cost. A 3.5% move on that line is $16.80. Total updated material cost: $1,176.80.

On this example the delta is $29. Whether you revise for $29 depends on the customer, the job size, and your relationship. The discipline is running the number—knowing it is $29 rather than guessing. On a job where copper is 50% of materials and the same 3.5% move applies, the delta could be three to four times larger. For electricians on large commercial wire runs, the same percentage move on a $6,000 wire order is a $210 material cost increase, which at a 35% markup and 20% margin target is closer to a $350 swing in the customer-facing price. Run the calculator for the job in front of you, then decide—do not absorb first and calculate second.

For electricians pricing larger wire-heavy work, the electrician job pricing guide covers material-heavy load breakdowns in more detail than this article repeats here.

What the Quote Should Say About Validity

You do not need to rewrite your entire estimate template. One clause handles this. It belongs near the total price line or at the bottom of the quote, not buried in a wall of boilerplate that no one reads.

Three formulations that work:

• Simple window: "This quote is valid for 14 calendar days from [date]. Prices may change after that date."
• Material-cost condition: "Prices are subject to material costs at the time of order. Quote is valid for 14 calendar days."
• Combined (recommended for volatile-material scopes): "This quote is valid for 7 calendar days from [date]. Material prices, particularly copper and wire, are subject to change. A revised quote will be issued if material costs change materially before acceptance."

Written quotes enforce better than verbal ones because the date is on the document. A verbal quote has no date, no signature, and no legal weight in most jurisdictions. If you gave a verbal number, treat it as expired the moment prices move or more than a few days pass. Nothing prevents you from saying, "I can re-check those numbers and get you something in writing"—which is the correct move anyway before any job of real size.

Deposits and Buying Materials Ahead

If a customer wants to lock your quote price for longer than your standard window—maybe they need the number for a budget approval that takes four weeks—the cleanest solution is a deposit large enough to cover the material purchase. You take the deposit, you order the materials at today's price, and the cost risk moves from your books to the job account. The quote price is then defensible because the material cost that produced it is already locked.

This is not the same as a change order. Change orders modify the scope of work on an active contract. Buying materials ahead under a deposit secures pricing on a quote that hasn't converted yet. Keep the paperwork distinct: a deposit receipt and a clear statement of what it covers, separate from any contract documents that follow when the job is formally awarded.

The other benefit of buy-ahead: on a long-lead item—custom switchgear, specialty panels, pre-fabricated components with 8-to-12-week lead times—ordering on deposit is often the only way to hit the customer's target start date anyway. You are solving two problems at once.

When the Customer Accepts After the Window Closes or After Costs Move

This happens. A customer sits on a quote past the expiry date, then calls to say they want to move forward. Or they accept within the window, but you know costs moved after you sent the quote and you haven't updated the number yet.

If acceptance comes after expiry: Issue a revised quote before you say yes to anything. The expired quote is informational at that point—it tells both of you what the number was on a particular date. The active quote is the revised one. Send it, give the customer a short window to respond (7 days is appropriate when you are already in a re-quote situation), and do not start work or order materials against the old number.

If costs moved inside the window and acceptance comes within the window: This is the tighter call. If your validity clause says "subject to material costs at time of order," you can issue a revision. If it says only "valid for 14 days" with no material-cost condition, you may be committed to the original number if costs moved but you haven't notified the customer. The cleanest practice is to re-run the calculator the moment you see a meaningful cost move and send the revision proactively—before the customer accepts. "I wanted to update you that copper wire pricing moved this week; here's the revised number" is a professional message. "I know you accepted two days ago but prices changed" is a harder conversation.

The mistake to avoid: saying "yes, let's go" verbally when a customer calls about an expired quote, then checking prices and discovering you've committed to a number you can't hit. Once you say yes, the customer has a reasonable expectation that the price is confirmed. Re-run the calculator before you confirm, not after.

Short FAQ

My quote was verbal—does the validity window still apply?

Yes, but it is harder to enforce because there is no written date to point to. Verbal quotes have a shorter practical life precisely for this reason. If a customer calls back two or three weeks after a verbal number, treat it as expired and re-price from today's cost before you confirm anything. Nothing in a verbal exchange prevents you from saying you need to verify current prices before you can commit—and that is exactly what you should do. The solution going forward is putting a written quote with an expiry date in front of every customer before the conversation ends.

Should I re-quote or write a change order when materials go up mid-bid?

Re-quote. Change orders are for scope changes on active jobs—work that has already started or been formally authorized under a signed contract. If the job hasn't started and no contract has been executed, there is nothing to change. A re-quote replaces the original quote with a new number. A change order modifies an existing agreement. Sending a "change order" on a bid that never converted muddies your paperwork and implies a contract was already in place when it wasn't. Keep the documents honest: expired quote plus revised quote, not a change order on a job that isn't yet a job.

The Bottom Line

Set 7, 14, or 30 days based on how much of your cost stack sits in volatile materials—copper, wire, diesel-sensitive freight, or anything else that moves in monthly increments. Re-price anytime a PPI release, a distributor invoice change, or a supplier surcharge lands while your bid is open; don't wait for the customer to call or for the window to formally expire. The process is short: get today's material cost from your supplier, hold the same markup rate and the same target margin, set Quote Valid (days) in the job profit calculator, and run the updated numbers before you confirm anything. Put the validity window on every written quote—one sentence is enough—and treat any acceptance on an expired quote as a trigger to issue a revision first.

Educational estimates only — not legal, tax, or financial advice. Dollar figures in worked examples are made-up numbers used for illustration; they are not market prices, typical earnings, or cost benchmarks. BLS PPI data from USDL 26-1495, released September 2026 for August 2026 reference month. Verify current material pricing with your suppliers. Consult licensed professionals for advice specific to your situation.