How Much Money Can You Actually Make

Let's talk about money honestly, with structure instead of hype. The figure you can make is not one number - it's the product of three: how many jobs, at what size, at what margin. Move any of the three and the income moves. This guide shows you the real ranges.

Margin by job type#

Margin percentage varies a lot by the kind of work. As a rough field guide (gross margin on total job value, figures in USD - the model and the maths are identical in any currency):

Job type	Typical job value	Realistic gross margin
Small works / handyman bundles	$300 - $1,500	30 - 50%
Bathroom / kitchen refit	$6,000 - $15,000	18 - 28%
Full house renovation	$40,000 - $120,000	12 - 20%
Commercial fit-out	$20,000 - $250,000	10 - 18%
Recurring maintenance contract	$500 - $5,000 / month	25 - 40%

Two patterns jump out. Small jobs carry fat percentages but small cash. Big jobs carry thin percentages but large cash. A 15% margin on a $100k job ($15,000) dwarfs a 45% margin on a $1k job ($450). The art is climbing from the top of that table to the bottom as your systems mature.

The monthly maths, stage by stage#

Income is just margin-per-job multiplied by jobs-per-month. Here's what the journey realistically looks like.

Stage 1 - Finding your feet (months 1-3)#

You're landing small jobs, building trust with one or two trades, making mistakes cheaply.

• 3-5 small jobs/month × ~$500 margin = $1,500 - $2,500/month

This stage feels slow and it's meant to. You're buying education with small bets. Most quitters leave here, right before it compounds.

Stage 2 - Momentum (months 4-9)#

References are coming in, you've found reliable trades, you've done your first few renovations.

• 2 renovations/month × ~$2,300 + 4 small jobs × ~$500 = $6,600/month

Now it's a real income. The difference from Stage 1 isn't working harder - it's that your reputation and trade bench are doing work for you.

Stage 3 - A real business (months 10-24)#

You're running multiple jobs in parallel because you no longer do the physical co-ordination alone - you have a project manager or a tight system. You've added a recurring maintenance contract or two for baseline cash.

• 4 renovations/month × ~$2,500 + 2 maintenance contracts × ~$1,200 + small works = $12,000 - $18,000/month gross

This is where arbitrage stops being a hustle and becomes an asset. See Scaling Past Yourself for how the parallelism actually works.

The leap from $2k to $12k a month is almost never "work 6× harder." It's better trades, tighter systems, bigger deals, and the patience to let references compound.

Gross margin is not take-home - read this#

The tables above are gross margin: price minus the direct cost of delivering the job. Your take-home is lower, because a real business has overheads:

• Marketing and lead generation (ads, referral incentives)
• Software and tools (CRM, quoting, accounting)
• Insurance (liability insurance, professional indemnity)
• Your own tax and, eventually, a project manager's wage
• A contingency pot for the jobs that go wrong - because some will

A sensible rule early on: assume roughly half of your gross margin survives to your pocket once you're reinvesting in growth. As you scale and overheads spread across more jobs, that ratio improves. Don't spend gross margin like it's profit - that mistake ends more of these businesses than bad trades do.

The four levers that grow the number#

Everything you can do to earn more pulls one of these:

1. Volume. More leads, faster follow-up, higher close rate. Covered in How to Find Clients.
2. Deal size. Move up the table - from handyman jobs toward renovations and fit-outs. Bigger cash per job.
3. Margin discipline. Quoting confidently and not discounting out of fear. Covered in Pricing & Margins.
4. Recurring revenue. Maintenance and facilities contracts that pay every month whether or not you sold anything new. The most undervalued lever of the four.

You don't pull all four at once. Early on, chase volume and learn pricing. Later, climb deal size and layer in recurring revenue.

A grounded first-year picture#

If you start from zero, work at it consistently, and don't quit in the slow first quarter, a realistic first year looks like building from a few hundred a month to a five-figure monthly gross by the back end - landing somewhere around $40,000-$90,000 of gross margin across the year, of which a meaningful chunk is reinvested into growing the next year.

That's not Lamborghini-in-90-days money. It's real-business-in-12-months money - which is far rarer and far more durable.

Next, learn to protect every point of that margin in Pricing Jobs & Protecting Your Margin.