The client has never supplied a labor rate, a dump receipt, a trailer capacity or a minimum charge — that is still open on the site punch list, which is why primeopsfl.com does not print a single price. The numbers pre-filled here come from published 2026 industry data (cited in Methodology at the bottom), not from Prime Ops' books.
Lee and Collier County tipping fees could not be verified — leegov.com returned HTTP 403 to an automated fetch, so the $62/ton default is the national average, not a local rate. Put a real dump receipt number in before quoting off this. Once your rates are entered, hit Save my rates and they persist on this device.
A number you cannot defend is worse than no number. This is the whole model, written out, so you can argue with it.
Costs are built up, then the price is set by target margin — dividing by (1 − margin), not multiplying by a markup.
Markup and margin are not the same number. A 1.5× markup is a 33% margin, not 50%. To actually keep 50% you divide by 0.5, which is a 2.0× markup. This is the single most common way a junk removal job that "looks profitable" isn't.
A crew member's wage is not what they cost. Payroll taxes, workers' comp, insurance and training push the real number roughly 25–35% above the hourly rate. FieldCamp puts the fully loaded rate at $25.88/hr, which is a $20 wage at about 1.29×.
The tool charges labor for every hour the crew is on the clock, not just loading: drive time (miles ÷ average speed), wait at the dump, demo, stairs and long carries. Costing only load time is the second most common margin leak.
Volume sets what you can charge. Weight sets what the dump charges you. Those two come apart badly: a quarter-trailer of tile weighs more than a full trailer of couches, and the quarter-load price will not cover it. The tool flags that as a density warning.
Default tipping fee is $62/ton — the national average, up about 10% year over year. A 20% estimate buffer is applied on top, per standard practice, because you are guessing at weight until it hits the scale.
Not verified for your counties. leegov.com blocked the automated lookup (HTTP 403) and Collier's per-ton figure was not published in a retrievable form. Both are weight-based. Enter the number off an actual scale ticket.
The widely quoted $0.38/mi figure is a light-vehicle number. A ¾-ton truck towing a loaded dump trailer does not get light-vehicle economics. The default here is built as roughly $0.40 fuel (about 9 mpg loaded) plus $0.38 tires, brakes, maintenance and depreciation across truck and trailer.
It is an estimate, not your number. Take twelve months of fuel, maintenance, tires, insurance and payments, divide by miles driven, and put the answer in the field.
The area estimator converts square footage to cubic yards using cubic-yards-per-100-ft² factors, for when you are quoting a cleanout off a photo or a room count instead of a pile.
These are starting points that get you inside the right trailer fraction. They are not a substitute for looking at it.
It does not add a customer surcharge for mattresses, freon appliances or tires. Those facility fees sit in your cost, and the margin formula marks them up automatically. Charging them a second time as a line item is double billing.
It does not save job records, email anything, or talk to a server. Nothing leaves this device. "Save my rates" writes your shop rates to this browser's local storage and nowhere else.
It does not know your actual numbers. Until the wage, the cost per mile, the tipping fee and the trailer capacity are yours, every output is an industry-shaped guess wearing your logo.
Prime Ops runs Mon–Sat, 7am–7pm. Sunday is genuinely outside operating hours, so a premium is fair. The default is +25%.
The catch: if you are paying the crew overtime for that Sunday, your labor cost rises 1.5× at the same time. Tick "Paying the crew overtime" and watch the actual margin — a 25% price premium against 1.5× wages on a labor-heavy job can land you roughly where you started. On a light, short job the premium mostly survives. That is the whole reason the checkbox exists.