How much to charge for dock installation and removal

Most dock shops price the way the shop down the lake prices, adjusted for how last season felt. That holds up until the year fuel jumps, or you take on a run of hard-access properties and can’t work out why the season was busier and thinner at the same time.

Getting to a real number isn’t complicated. It needs one input almost nobody in this trade has: how long the work actually takes, per piece, at your properties, with your crews. Not “we do six properties a day” — a four-section roll-in on a sand beach and an eight-section run with a 5,000-pound lift on a rock shelf are different businesses that happen to share a customer type.

Start from minutes per piece, not properties per day

Properties aren’t comparable to each other, and a day isn’t comparable to another day. A piece is. Once you know what a dock section costs you in minutes, and what a 5,000-pound lift costs you in minutes, every property on your book prices itself.

How to get the number in two weeks without a timesheet

Have the crew run a clock on site and mark pieces as they set them. Nobody fills anything in on Friday. Two weeks across a normal mix of properties is enough to see the shape, and the shape is what you need — you’re not after three decimal places, you’re after which work is twice as slow as you thought.

Building the hourly cost you actually carry

Add up what an hour on the water costs before any profit:

• Crew. Wages plus payroll burden, for everyone aboard — a three-hand barge is three times the labor line.
• The boat. Fuel, insurance, maintenance, and the depreciation nobody books. A barge is a capital asset with a short season.
• Travel and launch. Time between properties is unbillable and real. On a big lake it’s a large share of the day.
• The office. The phone calls, the sending out, the chasing. It’s a real cost of doing seasonal work for seasonal customers.

The one nearly everybody gets wrong: dividing by the hours in a year

Your fixed costs are annual. Your billable hours are not. If the equipment and the overhead run all year and you bill sixteen weeks of it, dividing the year’s costs by the year’s hours gives you a number that isn’t close. Divide by the hours you actually bill. That correction alone is usually the difference between a season that felt busy and a season that paid.

Turning minutes into a price a customer understands

Customers don’t buy hours. They buy a dock going in. Price per section and per piece, but derive those prices from your own minutes:

Line	How to derive it
Dock, per section	Average minutes per section × loaded hourly cost × margin
Lift	Minutes per lift, banded by capacity — a 5,000 lb lift is not a PWC lift
Canopy	Priced on its own; fabric handling is its own job and it’s slower than people think
Repairs	Hourly, at the loaded rate — the one place hourly is honest to the customer

Hard access is a surcharge, not a loss you absorb quietly

A small number of properties eat a share of the season out of all proportion to what they pay. Long runs, a shoreline you can’t reach without the crane barge, a place that needs four hands on deck. They’re rarely priced for it, because until you have minutes per property nobody has anything to point at. Once you do, the surcharge is a conversation with a number in it.

Why the fall is usually the line that’s underpriced

Removal takes nearly as long as installation and gets discounted anyway. That’s habit, not arithmetic — and it’s the fastest correction available to most shops, because it’s half the year’s work. Put install and removal side by side on the same minutes-per-piece figure and the gap is usually the argument on its own.

Both of those come out of the crew’s own clocks, with nobody filling in a timesheet. How the reports work.