How much should holiday light installers charge?

Holiday light installation is almost always quoted per job — by linear foot of roofline or as a flat price for the whole house — not by the hour, even though your real cost is driven by time on the ladder. The calculator converts an hourly rate and a typical job length into a per-job price so you can sanity-check a quote before you give it; you should still price the actual job by measuring or estimating the roofline footage rather than timing yourself on-site.

What moves the rate

• Linear footage of roofline, eaves, and any extra features (windows, doors, trees, bushes, pathways) — the core driver of both materials and labor time
• Who supplies the lights — installing a customer's own lights is priced as labor-only ($2-5/linear foot); supplying commercial-grade lights and clips yourself (full service) runs $5-10/linear foot since it folds in the cost of the lights
• Roof height, pitch, and access — steep or multi-story rooflines need extra ladder work, harnesses, or lift rental, and should add to the price
• Design complexity — roofline-only outlines price lower than displays that add trees, bushes, pathway lighting, or custom shapes/wreaths
• Minimum job charge — most installers set a floor (commonly $150-300) so a small job still covers drive time, setup, and insurance overhead
• Takedown — removal is typically quoted as a separate, smaller job (commonly $100-400 or about $0.50/linear foot), scheduled for January
• Local cost of living, competitor rates in your metro, and how compressed your local season is (a shorter install window means each booked job has to cover more of your fixed annual costs)

baseHourly of $75 sits inside the commonly-cited $60-100/hr equivalent installers use when converting time into a quote, and at the default 180-minute (3-hour) job length — the middle of the widely-cited 2-4 hour range for an average home — produces a ~$225 computed price near the low end of typicalRateRange (200-800/job), which lines up with a labor-only quote on a modestly sized roofline; full-service jobs (installer supplies commercial-grade lights) or larger/steep homes push toward the range's high end, and the frequently-cited ~$699 average full-service job in expensive metros like NYC sits above it entirely, treated here as a premium-market outlier rather than the default. The $5,000/yr expense default reflects a solo residential operator's real annual cost structure even though revenue is earned in a roughly six-to-eight-week window: general liability + commercial auto insurance (small residential contractors typically pay $2,500-5,500/yr for a basic package; this default assumes the low-to-mid end of that band, around $3,000), a starter light inventory and replacement bulbs/clips/timers if you supply your own lights (amortized to roughly $1,000/yr), ladder and fall-safety equipment ($300-700 to buy, amortized with replacement to roughly $500/yr), and quoting/scheduling software (roughly $500/yr — see tools below). Because nearly all of this overhead has to be earned back inside a few weeks, pricing needs to account for the full year's fixed costs, not just the hours actually spent on a roof.