Which Job Types Am I Underpricing Relative to Actual Time and Cost?

Where underpricing hides

• Duration drift. You priced a deep clean at 4 hours two years ago. Homes got bigger, standards got higher, and the real median is now 5. That's a 20% price cut you never agreed to.
• Add-ons priced by guess. Ovens, fridges, windows, laundry. Small tickets, wildly variable time, almost never re-audited.
• Flat rates meeting outlier homes. A flat-rate price book is fine until the distribution shifts. The biggest 10% of jobs can eat the margin of the other 90%.
• Redo risk by category. A job type with elevated refunds is underpriced even if its sticker margin looks fine, because the price never included the cost of doing some of them twice.

How to run the audit

• For each job type, pull completed jobs over 3+ months with collected revenue, payout, and actual duration.
• Compute gross profit per actual hour by type. Rank them. The bottom of the list is your underpricing shortlist.
• Cross-check with cleaner behavior: which types get declined, rescheduled, or complained about by your best people?
• Reprice the bottom category and remeasure a quarter later. One category at a time, so you can see the effect.

What the fix is worth

Repricing your worst category from a losing hourly rate to your median is usually worth more than a new marketing channel, because it applies to demand you already have. And it compounds with the job-mix decision in which jobs to chase or stop: some underpriced categories deserve a raise, and some deserve to be dropped. The per-hour ranking tells you which is which. My own margin baseline for judging what "good" looks like is published in the benchmark report.