Free tool
Estate sale setup and tagging day planner
Estimate how many days of tagging a household really needs before preview night, so you stop promising a Friday you cannot hold.
Free tool, no sign up
Estate sale settlement and take home calculator
Put in the numbers from your last full house and see what the family takes, what you keep, and what an hour of crew time on that job was actually worth.
Commission percentage is the number families ask about and the number operators quote, and by itself it says almost nothing about whether a job was good. A house that grosses twenty two thousand at a strong commission can pay you worse than one that grosses twelve if the first one took a hundred and eighty crew hours, two dumpsters and a month of Sundays.
This calculator settles that. It follows the money the way the settlement statement does, from gross through your commission to the family net, then takes crew pay, job costs and card fees out of your side to show what stayed. The last line, net per crew hour, is the one worth writing on the back of the contract for next time.
Your result
Your commission
$6,300
What the contract earns before you pay anybody.
Family net proceeds
$11,700
The settlement line before any extras your contract names.
Your net on the job
$2,332
Commission left after crew pay, job costs and card fees.
Net per crew hour
$17.94
What every hour spent in that house paid your company.
Run your last three houses through this and you will see which kind of estate is quietly funding the others.
Why net per crew hour beats commission percent
Two houses at the same commission rate can pay wildly differently. A tidy ranch owned by a careful widow prices in two days and sells clean. A forty year accumulation with a full basement and a detached garage eats a week of tagging before a single tag hits a table, and the goods inside it are worth less per box.
Net per crew hour puts both on the same scale. Once you know the number, sliding scales and minimum commissions stop feeling awkward to quote. You are not guessing that a hoarded house should cost more. You have the figure from the last one you did.
The costs operators forget to enter
Owners routinely undercount their own hours. The intake walk-through, the contract call, the two evenings of research on the marked pottery, the Sunday night reconciliation and the statement itself are all crew hours even when the crew is you. Enter them, or the job will look better than it was.
The other quiet line is disposal. A dumpster, a junk hauler and the donation runs are real money on a heavy house, and they land after the sale when everyone is tired. Put them in job costs before you sign, not after, and if the estate is paying for the haul, say so in writing in the contract.
Questions about this calculator
Should I put my own hours in the crew hours field?
Yes, at whatever you would pay someone to replace you. Owners who leave themselves out see a net that looks healthy and cannot understand why the bank account disagrees at the end of the season.
How do I handle a minimum commission or a guaranteed fee?
Work backward. Set commission percent so your commission line equals the fee your contract guarantees on that gross, then read the net figures. That tells you the gross at which your minimum actually covers the crew.
Does this replace the settlement statement I send the family?
No. This is your internal arithmetic, including crew pay and job costs that are your business and not the family's. The statement they receive shows gross, the deductions your contract named, and their net.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The estate sale week run sheet
One page that carries a household job from the intake walk-through to the settlement check, in the order the work actually happens.
Where this figure comes from during sale week
What you have on screen is an estimate built from numbers you entered by hand. The same figures fall out of a job on their own once the lots, the markdown days and the contract deductions are recorded as the household sells. Ask for a demo and we will rebuild the settlement for a house you have already cleared, so you can check our arithmetic against the statement you sent that family.