Know your markup, your margin, and your net before you pay the sub—and before the customer pays you. No more guessing whether the job made money.
When you hire a sub, you're providing project management, quality control, warranty coverage, and liability backstop. A 15–25% markup isn't gouging—it's the minimum to cover your coordination time, carry the liability, and make the job worth doing. If you're passing sub invoices to customers at cost, you're working for free.
One bad sub job can wipe out the margin from three good jobs. Keep job-level records: what you paid, what you billed, what your own time cost. The pattern shows you which trade categories lose money every time—so you either fix the pricing or stop bidding them.
Subs often expect net-15 or net-30. Customers often pay net-30 to net-60. If you pay the sub before the customer pays you, you're financing the job out of pocket. Standard terms: collect 50% deposit from customer, pay sub 30% mobilization, balance on completion. Get this in writing on every subcontracted job over $2,000.
The Tradesman's Business Starter Kit includes a sub management checklist, contract templates, job costing spreadsheet, and core business forms. Guide from $19 — Complete Kit with all 19 templates, $49.
Get the Business Kit — $19When you're running multiple subs across multiple jobs, keeping track of what's been invoiced, what's been paid, and what's still outstanding gets complicated fast. This tracker calculates your total sub costs against your budget, flags invoices that are overdue, and shows your sub spend as a percentage of job revenue. Use it to protect your margin and avoid getting stuck with sub invoices after the client has already paid you.