A free construction quote template, and how to write a quote that wins the job.

What should a construction quote template include?

A good construction quote template includes your business name, ABN and licence number, the client and site address, a clear scope of work with exclusions, line items with quantity, unit and rate, a subtotal, GST at 10%, the total, the deposit, how long the price is valid, your terms and a place for the client to sign.

Our template has all of that, with the maths already done. You fill in the purple cells, and the line totals, GST, total, deposit, balance and expiry date calculate themselves. It works in Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers, and it prints to a one-page PDF.

Download the quote template (.xlsx)

How do you write a quote that wins the job?

Send it fast, make it look like it came from a real business, and make the scope impossible to misread. Price is rarely the only thing a client compares. They compare who answered first, who looked organised, and whose quote they understood without having to ring and ask.

• Send it the same day if you can. The quote that lands while the client is still thinking about the job has a head start on every other one.
• Write the scope in plain words. "Supply and install 12 lineal metres of 90mm stormwater, connect to existing pit" beats "plumbing works as discussed".
• List exclusions. Council fees, rock excavation, making good of paint. Whatever you are not doing, say so.
• Break the price into lines. One lump sum invites the client to haggle the whole thing. Lines show them what they are paying for.
• Give it an expiry date. Thirty days is common. Our template works it out from the quote date.
• Follow up once. A short message two or three days later wins more work than a sharper price. Most trades never send it.

Is a quote the same as a tax invoice?

No. A quote is an offer to do the work for a price. A tax invoice is what you issue once the work or a stage of it is done, and it has its own rules. Under the ATO's rules, a tax invoice for $1,000 or more must also show the buyer's identity or ABN.

The ATO's tax invoice page lists what an invoice needs: that it is intended to be a tax invoice, your identity and ABN, the date, a description with quantity and price, and the GST amount. That is why our template asks for the client's company and ABN up front. If the quote has the details, the invoice is quick to raise from it.

If you are not registered for GST, set the GST rate in the template to 0% and leave GST off your quote. If you use Xero, it can send quotes that the client accepts online and turn them into invoices, which is the natural next step once a spreadsheet gets tiresome.

How much deposit can you ask for on a building quote?

It depends on your state and the type of work. For home building work in Western Australia worth between $7,500 and $500,000, the deposit is capped at 6.5%. In New South Wales, residential building work is capped at a 10% deposit. Commercial work generally follows whatever the contract says.

The template defaults the deposit to 5%, which sits under both caps, and you can change it. WA's Building and Energy regularly takes tradies to court over excessive deposits, and NSW sets out its rules in its guide to home building contracts. A quote is not a contract on its own either: above those thresholds, residential work needs a proper written contract once the client says yes.

Why do slow quotes lose jobs?

Because the client does not wait. When a homeowner needs a plumber or an electrician, they ring three, and the first credible quote usually wins. Quoting is the single most common pain we hear on sales calls with trades and construction businesses, and slow quotes cost them jobs, not just evenings.

Across 32 sales calls we ran in October 2026, quoting and take-offs came up in at least 17, from plumbers and joiners to steel fabricators and concreters. The numbers owners described were blunt: a backlog of around 20 quotes, a full day to price a single job, residential quotes taking three weeks.

When should you move from a spreadsheet to quoting software?

Move on when more than one person quotes, when you send more quotes than you can track, or when the spreadsheet only works because one person understands it. A template is right for a sole trader or a small crew. It is the wrong tool once quoting has become a bottleneck.

There are three common steps up. The first is your accounting software: Xero and similar tools have quoting built in. The second is a job management app like ServiceM8, Tradify, simPRO or AroFlo, which ties quotes to jobs, scheduling and invoicing. Our comparison of ServiceM8, Tradify, simPRO and AroFlo covers which suits which kind of trade. For plan-heavy work, take-off tools sit alongside them, and we compare those in Bluebeam vs PlanSwift vs Groundplan.

The third step is an AI quoting system built around your own price list and past quotes. That is worth it when your jobs are too varied for a job app's price book, and when the knowledge of how to price lives in one or two heads.

Can AI write construction quotes?

Yes, with a catch. AI can read a client's email, plans or schedule and draft a priced quote in minutes, but only from your rates, your rules and your past jobs. Out of the box, with no history to learn from, its prices are guesses, and a person should check every quote before it goes out.

We saw the catch first-hand this month. During an onboarding with a Sydney builder, an AI tool priced a project at roughly half what the market rate would have been. Nothing was broken: it simply had none of the builder's own rates or site factors to work from. Once it is given those, the drafts get close enough to check rather than rewrite.

Done properly, it looks like what General Crane Services WA built. Their operations manager started a quoting system on the day of our workshop. It reads the request, applies the company's own quoting rules, and matches previous quotes from a history of 1,630, then a person checks and issues every quote. If you want to see how that works for your trade, our page on AI quoting software walks through the options, and automating your quoting covers how we build it.