Why the labour box says 0.057 hours a square foot
Clicking LVP together on a clean, flat slab goes quickly. The example floor needs much more than that: furniture out and back, carpet, pad, tack strip and staples pulled, high spots ground, low spots primed and poured, door jambs undercut, transitions set and quarter round run. Spread over 620 sq ft, those 35.34 hours come to 0.057 hours a foot for the two installers, about 3.4 minutes of labour for every square foot.
At $55 an hour that labour is $1,943.70, about $3.14 a foot. An installer who quotes a single per-foot install figure is pricing the clicking and giving away the tear-out, the slab work and the trim. If the room is empty new construction with a flat slab, your number will be lower: time a job like it and type that in.
Measuring the room and the slab before you price it
Measure wall to wall in every room, then add the closets and the hall. Use your tape, not the square footage in the house listing, which counts walls and rooms you will never touch. Add your waste before you divide material cost by the floor, so the $3.74 a foot already covers offcuts.
That $3.74 is the plank plus everything under and around it: leveler, primer, patch, quarter round, transitions and fasteners. The plank is most of it. A slab that needs no leveling knocks the prep share off, and a stair nose or two adds it back. Put a straightedge on the slab before you quote, because the leveling hours are the part a walk-through misses.
Pricing 900 sq ft, or the same floor with no carpet to remove
Bigger floors come down per foot. Change the area to 900 sq ft and the price becomes $8,689.52, or $9.66 a foot, because the dump fee, the carpet tie-in and the $200 for the van, grinder and saws stay the same size while the floor grows.
Now set the dump fee and the carpet tie-in to zero, as on a floor with no carpet coming up and no carpet left to meet. The 900 sq ft job drops to $8,530.22, $9.48 a foot. If that floor also has no tear-out hours, lower the labour box too, or the price still carries pulling carpet that isn't there.
Small floors go the other way. A 40 sq ft bathroom at the same settings comes to $763.93, about $19.10 a foot, and the $300 minimum stops anything smaller from going out at a loss.
Where the $6,637 spreadsheet floor differs from this one
The $55 break-even rate is the example company's $54.91, rounded. Yours comes from your van, insurance, wages and the hours you really bill, so work it out with the free true hourly rate calculator. The 18% profit sits on top of every cost, which is not the same as an 18% margin: the markup vs margin guide shows the gap.
The spreadsheet goes further. It prices each product from your own price list, charges the grinder, saws and van by their own hourly cost, marks up subs and dump fees on their own line, adds a small cushion, walks you through the floor costs installers forget, prints a quote for the homeowner and logs whether the job made money. Its version of this floor is $6,637 before tax. For what installers charge per foot and why the numbers vary, read the flooring pricing guide.