# How to Price Holiday Light Installation Jobs
Holiday light installation looks simple from the curb: hang some lights, collect a check, take them down in January. The operators who actually make money treat it like the tight, seasonal contracting business it is. You have an eight-to-ten-week selling window, a hard weather deadline, and customers who decide in 30 seconds whether your quote feels fair. Price wrong on either side and you either lose the job or lose your shirt putting strands on a two-story roofline in the cold.
This guide walks through how to build a quote that covers materials, labor, takedown, and storage, and still leaves a real margin. The numbers below are ballpark ranges seen across U.S. residential markets; your local labor and material costs will shift them, but the method holds.
The Three Ways Installers Price
Most installers settle on one of three models, and the best ones blend them.
Per linear foot. This is the industry default for roofline work. You charge a rate per foot of roofline lit, with the rate covering lights, clips, labor, and takedown. Typical all-in rates run $2 to $5 per linear foot for standard C9 LED on a single-story roofline, climbing to $5 to $8+ per foot for steep, high, or hard-access rooflines. A 150-foot roofline at $3.50/ft is a $525 job before you add trees, wreaths, or wraps.
Per item / per feature. Wrapped trees, bushes, wreaths, garland, and pathway stakes price better as line items. Wrapping a single tree trunk and a few branches can run $75 to $200 depending on height and how high you climb. A pre-lit wreath hung over a garage is a $40 to $75 add-on. Pathway stake runs price by the foot or by the bundle.
Hourly / cost-plus (commercial and weird jobs). For commercial properties, HOAs, or anything with custom design, an estimate built on crew-hours plus a materials markup protects you when the scope is fuzzy. Two installers at a blended $60-$80/crew-hour, plus materials at a 2x to 2.5x markup, is a defensible structure.
The trap is quoting per-foot on a job that's really three trees and a wrapped column. Use per-foot for roofline, line items for everything else.
Build the Quote From the Ground Up
A quote that holds up has four buckets. Skip one and your margin disappears.
1. Materials. Quality commercial-grade C9 LED strands cost more than the big-box strings homeowners buy, and that's the point: you reuse them or sell them as part of the package. Account for bulb strands, clips (one per bulb spacing), extension cords, timers, stakes, and replacement bulbs. A 150-foot roofline in C9 with clips and a timer might carry $150 to $300 in materials depending on whether the customer is buying the lights or renting yours.
2. Install labor. Time the actual hang. A clean single-story roofline runs 1.5 to 3 crew-hours; a steep two-story with dormers can eat 5 to 8. Price labor at what your crew costs loaded (wage + payroll burden + insurance) and mark it up. If a two-person crew costs you $50/hour loaded and the job takes 4 hours, that's $200 in raw labor before margin.
3. Takedown. This is the line new installers forget, and it's where they bleed. Takedown is real labor in worse weather. Bake it in. A common approach is to bundle install + takedown into one season price (the per-foot rate already includes it) or to charge takedown at roughly 40-60% of the install labor. Either way, the customer pays for both, because you're showing up twice.
4. Storage and overhead. If you store the customer's lights over the off-season, or if you own the lights and store them, that's a cost. So is your truck, fuel, ladder, fall gear, and the design time on the quote. Roll a flat overhead percentage (15-25%) across every job rather than eating it.
A Worked Example
A two-story home, 180 feet of roofline, one wrapped maple in the front yard, a lit wreath over the door.
- Roofline: 180 ft x $4.00/ft (two-story, all-in) = $720
- Wrapped tree (15 ft, moderate climb): $150
- Lit wreath, hung: $60
- Quote total: $930
Inside that $930, your materials might be ~$280, your install + takedown labor ~$320, leaving roughly $330 of gross margin before overhead. That's a healthy job. The mistake is quoting the same house at $2/ft because a competitor does, landing at $360 for the roofline, and discovering takedown alone wiped your profit.
A structured estimate tool removes this guesswork. The Holiday Light Installation Kit prices a roofline by linear footage, fixtures, timers, and labor with a 25% margin built in, so every quote you send already clears your target. It also carries an install-and-takedown schedule keyed to storage bin numbers, an inventory tracker for strands and stakes, and a per-job income/expense board so you can see net profit for the whole season instead of guessing in February.
Pricing Mistakes That Kill First-Year Installers
Charging by the strand instead of by the foot. Strands aren't uniform and customers can't picture them. Linear feet of roofline is the unit they understand and the one that maps to your labor.
Forgetting the climb premium. A 12-foot single-story and a 24-foot two-story are not the same job. Steep pitch, multiple stories, and limited ladder access can double your time. Price height and access explicitly.
Eating takedown to win the bid. Takedown is half the work for a third of the glory. If your install price doesn't fund it, you're working January for free.
Renting your lights without a multi-year plan. Owning the lights and renting them seasonally is a strong model, but only if you price for replacement and storage and keep customers for 3+ seasons. Year one of a rental package can look thin until the lights pay themselves off.
Underbooking the calendar. Your season is roughly the first week of November through mid-December for installs. There are only so many crew-days. A full calendar at fair prices beats a packed one at cut-rate prices every time. Know your daily install capacity and stop discounting once you're booking out.
Set Rates, Then Hold Them
Decide your per-foot roofline rate, your tree and wreath add-ons, your minimum job size (set a floor around $300-$400 so small jobs are worth the truck roll), and your takedown policy. Write them down. The fastest way to lose money is to re-negotiate your own pricing on every doorstep.
For a deeper walkthrough of the full season workflow, from first quote to final takedown, the free starter guide that accompanies the kit covers scheduling, route batching, and the safety checklist for working at height in cold weather. Get your pricing structure locked before the phones start ringing in October, and the season runs itself.