How to price a car wrap job

Why gut-feel quoting eats shops

The common method is a day rate plus the cost of the roll, and the difference is treated as profit. It is not profit. Rent, insurance, utilities, the plotter lease, the software, the phone, the hours spent quoting jobs that never booked — none of that was in the number, and all of it gets paid out of it.

A wrap quote has four layers, and every one of them has to be in the figure before margin is added: material, install labor, allocated overhead, and margin. Skip a layer and you have not given a discount, you have given away the layer.

Full colour changes on this site are quoted to consumers at roughly $2,500–$6,000 installed, and that spread is real — it is a small hatchback against a full-size SUV in a difficult film. The point of a build-up is that you know where in that band a given car lands and why, instead of picking a number and hoping.

Layer one: material, by body class

Start with square footage, because it is the only layer you can compute before the car arrives. The figures below are gross roll material — rectangular cut pieces with install waste included, off a 60-inch roll — which is what you actually order. They were collected in August 2026 from published industry sizing sources: a measured per-panel template chart, several worked single-vehicle examples, and two supplier consensus guides.

Compact hatch and small sedan, roughly 250–300 sq ft: a Golf-sized hatch and a Corolla-sized sedan both sit in that band. Mid-size sedan, roughly 275–325: a measured Accord came out at 317, a 5-Series at 300, a Model 3 at 290–300. Coupe, around 285 for a worked Mustang example. Crossover, roughly 285–350: a measured Trailblazer at 286 with a RAV4 or Model Y nearer 300–350 and a CR-V 325–375. Full-size SUV, roughly 350–400, which covers a four-door Wrangler or a Model X. Mid-size pickup, roughly 275–325. Full-size pickup, roughly 340–380: a measured Titan King Cab landed at 347 and a worked F-150 SuperCrew at 340–380. Long-wheelbase cargo van, around 489 measured.

Carry a ±10% band on every one of those. The published charts themselves disagree with each other by about that much, so a single number would be false precision. Quote from the top of the band and you will rarely be short.

Two conversions worth memorising. A 60-inch roll is five feet wide, so linear feet to order is square feet divided by five — a 300 sq ft sedan is 60 linear feet. And gross is not net: the actual painted surface under the film is roughly 30–45% smaller than the figure you order, which is why a quote built off a net surface area comes up short every single time.

A warning about the big-vehicle rows in supplier charts

There is a real inconsistency in the published sizing material, and it is worth knowing about before you order.

Two widely-copied supplier guides put a full-size pickup in the region of 450–600 sq ft. The measured per-panel chart puts a Titan King Cab at 347, and the worked F-150 SuperCrew figure lands at 340–380. That is not a rounding difference — the high rows are roughly 50% above the measured ones on the same class of vehicle.

The same pattern shows up on large SUVs, where one supplier's row sits well above what its own mid-size numbers would imply. The rows for compacts and mid-size sedans, by contrast, agree with the measured data closely.

So treat published charts as a sanity check on small and mid-size cars, and measure the actual vehicle before ordering anything large. A tape measure and ten minutes beats every chart on the internet, and on a van or a crew-cab truck the difference between the two sources is a hundred and fifty square feet of film you either wasted or do not have.

Layer two: labor, counted in bay-days

Hours are the wrong unit for a quote, because the constraint in a wrap shop is not hours, it is the bay. A car that sits in your only bay overnight has consumed a day whether anybody touched it or not.

So price in bay-days, and count every one of them. Intake and inspection. Wash, clay and degrease. Disassembly — handles, badges, lights, mirrors, whatever comes off, and the reassembly at the other end. The install itself. Post-heating. Cure time. Final QC and the photo set. Then whatever buffer you honestly need, because the buffer is real and pretending it is not is how a shop ends up working Sundays for free.

Two line items get forgotten and both are expensive. Removing an old wrap is its own job — adhesive, heat, hours, and no guarantee about what is underneath — and it belongs on the quote as a separate line, not absorbed. And disassembly beyond the obvious, on a car with a body kit or aftermarket lighting, can add a day on its own.

Your labor cost per bay-day is your installer's fully-loaded annual cost divided by the days he is actually available. Fully loaded means wages plus taxes plus insurance plus everything else that follows from employing him, not the hourly rate on his contract.

Layer three: the overhead number most shops get wrong

Total your annual fixed costs — rent, insurance, utilities, equipment leases, software, phone, accounting, marketing. Call it F. Now divide it by the bay-days you sell, not the bay-days you have. That distinction is the whole section.

Work it through. Forty-eight working weeks at five days each is 240 available bay-days a year. If 70% of them are sold, you sold 168. Your overhead per sold bay-day is F divided by 168, not F divided by 240 — and F over 168 is about 43% higher than F over 240.

Shops that allocate against available days rather than sold days systematically under-price by that gap, and the gap widens exactly when business is slow, which is precisely when the temptation to discount is strongest. That is the trap: the quieter it gets, the more each remaining job has to carry, and the more it feels like you should be cutting.

Multiply the per-day figure by the bay-days that job consumes and you have its overhead allocation. On a three-day job it is three times the number. It goes in the quote before margin, not instead of it.

Layer four: margin, and the modifiers that move it

Margin sits on the total of the first three layers, not on the material alone. Marking up a roll and eating the labor is the single most common way a busy shop stays poor.

Then the modifiers. Film tier is the big one: this site quotes chrome, colour-shift flips and textured films at a 30–60% premium over a gloss colour on the same car, and it is not a markup — those films cost more per roll and are meaningfully harder to lay down cleanly, so both your material and your bay-days go up together. Price the premium against both layers or you will lose money on the jobs you were most excited about.

Complexity is the second. Deep recesses, aggressive body lines, spoilers, splitters, mirrors with awkward geometry, anything that has to be inlaid rather than wrapped. Some of it is film, most of it is hours.

Surface condition is the third, and it is the one that turns into a dispute if you leave it off. Failing clear coat, previous respray, rust — film conforms to a surface, it does not hide a bad one, and removal can lift weak paint on the way out. Inspect and write the finding on the quote.

Partials are not a linear fraction. A roof or a chrome delete is a small piece of film and a disproportionate share of the setup, so a percentage of the full-wrap price under-prices them. Quote a floor.

Putting one quote together

Mid-size sedan, gloss colour change, healthy factory paint, no old wrap. Material: call it 320 sq ft at the top of the mid-size band, which is 64 linear feet of 60-inch roll. Multiply by whatever your distributor charges per square foot — and note the sensitivity, because every dollar of movement in that per-square-foot price is $320 on this car and $489 on a long-wheelbase van.

Labor: three bay-days at your fully-loaded per-day cost. Overhead: three times your F-over-sold-days figure. Add those three, apply your margin, and you have a floor you can defend line by line.

Now run the same car in a colour-shift flip. Material goes up per square foot, the bay-days go up because the film is harder, and the overhead allocation goes up with the bay-days. The 30–60% premium is what falls out of that arithmetic — it is not a number picked to sound reasonable.

The reason to build it this way is that you can show the customer the shape of it. 'This film costs more per roll and takes an extra day to lay' is a conversation. 'It's four grand' is a negotiation.

Quoting without racing to the bottom

The quote you lose most often is the one that arrives as a bare number in a text message, because a bare number can only be compared to another bare number. Itemise, and you are being compared on scope instead.

Quote the film by brand and code, not by colour name. 'Satin black' is four different products at three price points; a code is a thing the customer can look up, which makes your figure checkable and your competitor's vague one suspicious.

And notice how much cheaper it is to quote a customer who already knows what he wants. Half the time in a wrap consultation goes on colour, and that half generates no revenue at all — it is pure overhead sitting on top of the job you eventually book. A buyer who arrives having already seen the finish on his own car has effectively done that half himself. The guides linked below cover where those buyers come from and what the whole model looks like once you add the year up.