How to Price Christmas Light Installation Per Foot in 2026

Price seasonal Christmas lights by the linear foot of lit roofline, with a separate rate for each kind of run. The published ranges are wide: HomeGuide puts a lights-included install at $5 to $12 per foot, HomeAdvisor puts labour on a customer's own lights at $2 to $5 per foot, and Jason Geiman at Christmas Lights HQ tells contractors to bid $8 to $12 per foot of roofline with a $1,000 minimum. GlowBid's default seasonal rate card starts at $8 per foot of roofline, $9 on peaks, $5 on the ground, $6 on tree wrap and $4 per foot of jump, with a 15% peak premium, 10% per extra storey and a $1,500 minimum. Those are starting numbers an installer changes on day one. Here is the method, and a two-storey quote worked line by line.

Key numbers

Why so wide? The homeowner sites average every job in the country, from a handyman hanging the customer's own minis on a bungalow to a crew installing commercial C9 on a three-storey in a snowbelt. HomeGuide's own regional pages differ by more than double from city to city. Your number depends on region, storeys, whether you supply the product, and whether takedown is in or out. The method below is how you land on yours.

Why per foot, not per hour

Per-hour pricing punishes a fast crew and rewards a slow one, and the customer cannot check it. Per foot is fair both ways: the roofline is what it is, the customer can see it, and once you know your crew's feet per hour you know your margin. Christmas Lights HQ's example is a 160 ft ranch done in 3.5 hours by a two-person crew, bid at $800. That is $5 per foot on a one-storey with no peaks, which is why their roofline recommendation starts at $8 once real houses show up.

The other reason is the drawing. If you draw the runs on a photo of the house, the footage is already there, and per-foot pricing means the drawing and the price are the same thing.

The base rate by run type

Every run gets its own rate because every run costs you a different amount of ladder time per foot.

Roofline. The long horizontal runs along the gutter line, including the returns around corners. This is the base rate and the biggest line on almost every quote. Default: $8 per foot.

Ridge line. The top edge of a gable, if the customer wants it lit. Most seasonal jobs skip it; when it is in, we price it at the roofline rate. Default: $8 per foot.

Peak. The two sloped edges of a gable. Peaks are slow, they need a second ladder move or a roof walk, and they are where crews get hurt. Price them higher per foot and add a pitch premium on top. Default: $9 per foot plus 15%, so an effective $10.35. A 10/12 pitch and a 4/12 pitch are not the same job; if you get a lot of steep ones, raise the premium.

Ground. Walkway strands, garden bed edging, stake lights. Fast, no ladder, cheaper per foot. Default: $5 per foot.

Trees. Trunk and branch wrap with minis. You can price by the foot of wrap, or set the run type to a flat price per wrap, which is how most installers quote a tree. Geiman's numbers are $75 for a small tree and $150 for a large one; Jobber's published range goes from $75 to $1,500 each because a mature maple wrapped to the tips is a full day. Default: $6 per foot. Change it to per-each if that is how you think.

Jumps: price them, but not as lit footage

A jump is the unlit cord between two lit runs: across a valley, over a door, from one gable down to the eave. It has no bulbs, so it must not be counted as lit footage, but it is not free either. It is socket cord or lamp cord, a clip every couple of feet, and the minute it takes to route it clean.

Two ways to price a jump, and GlowBid supports both at once: a low per-foot rate on the unlit footage (default $4 per foot), and a flat amount per jump (default $0, set it to whatever your cable and time are worth). On a typical two-gable front you have two or three jumps, so whatever you choose, it is a small line. The mistake is not the size of it; it is bulbs being ordered for footage that has none.

The storey premium

Second-storey work is slower and riskier, and the published totals show it: HomeGuide's ranges are $250 to $2,400 for one storey, $500 to $3,600 for two, $750 to $5,000 for three. HomeAdvisor says to expect about 20% more for hard-to-reach eaves.

Apply the premium to the run, not the job. A two-storey house still has a one-storey garage eave and a porch roof, and charging the storey premium on those is charging for a ladder you never extended. In GlowBid each run carries its storey count, and the premium (default 10% per storey above the first) is added to that run's base price. Mark the upper runs as storey 2 while you draw and the arithmetic takes care of itself.

Add-ons: timers, controllers, cord

Anything that is not a run is an add-on with a unit price and a quantity. On a seasonal job that is usually a timer (default $45; HomeAdvisor's published range is $10 to $50) and sometimes an extension cord run to a far outlet or a second outdoor plug. If you sell a Wi-Fi controller with C9 (some installers do for colour-changing bulbs), that is an add-on too (default $250). Add-ons sit outside the run subtotal so a rush premium does not multiply a $45 timer.

Minimum job, deposit and the materials buffer

Minimum job. Geiman's advice is a $1,000 minimum with $500 as the absolute floor. Our default is $1,500 because a truck, two people and a ladder day in November are worth that before the first clip goes on. When the drawn footage prices under the minimum, GlowBid raises the subtotal to it and shows the adjustment as its own line, so nobody wonders where the number came from.

Deposit. Take it at signing, by card, before the date goes on the calendar. Geiman recommends 50% down and 50% on completion; the GlowBid default is 30% of the total, collected through Stripe the moment the customer signs, and you can set it to anything.

Materials buffer. Photo measurements are estimates. We add a buffer (default 10%) to the footage we order so the truck never runs short on the last return. The buffer goes on the material order, never on the customer's price. The quote says plainly that the footage is photo-based and confirmed on site.

Worked example: a two-storey in Barrhaven, C9 seasonal

A real-looking house: two-storey with a single-storey garage bump-out, two front gables, a walkway and one small tree in the front bed. Front elevation only. Measured from one photo using the roofline method with the 16 ft garage door as the reference. Every rate below is the GlowBid default on the Seasonal C9 line; the total is what the engine produces from the drawing.

Lit footage is 250 ft. With the 10% buffer, the materials list says 275 ft of cord, and at 12 in spacing that is 250 bulbs on the house, 275 ordered. At Certified Lights' published price of $19.95 per 25-pack of C9 faceted SMD bulbs, 11 packs is $219.45 of bulbs. Tax is zero on the default card because every province and state is different; set your rate and label once and it applies to every quote.

The house-only part of that quote (roofline, peaks and jumps, $1,639.20) works out to $9.64 per foot of roofline and peak, which lands inside Geiman's $8 to $12 and inside HomeGuide's $5 to $12. The whole ticket, $2,134, sits just above Geiman's $1,500 to $2,000 target average because of the tree and the walkway. That is the point of the method: the rates are yours, the footage is the house's, and the total falls where it falls.

Seasonal service on customer-owned lights

A different job with its own line on the card: the customer has strands in a bin and wants them hung and taken down. No product cost, no storage, but the same ladder time, and an hour of untangling and testing that nobody pays you for unless you price it.

GlowBid's default "Seasonal service (customer-owned lights)" line is $3 per foot of roofline, $3.50 on peaks, $2 on the ground, $2.50 on tree wrap and $1.50 per foot of jump, with the same peak and storey premiums as every other line. HomeAdvisor's labour-only range is $2 to $5 per foot. Two rules we follow on these jobs: test every strand on the ground before it goes up and note the dead ones on the work order, and write into the quote that lights the customer supplies are not warranted by us. The minimum ticket is one number for the whole rate card, so set it where the smallest job you will drive to lives.

Common mistakes

• One rate for everything. A $10 flat rate across roofline, peaks and ground overcharges the walkway and undercharges the steep gable. Run types exist because the work differs.
• Counting jumps as lit footage. Bulbs get ordered for cord that has none, and the customer pays for lights that do not exist.
• Storey premium on the whole house. The garage eave is one storey even when the house is two.
• Forgetting the returns. The 3 ft pieces around each corner add 10 to 20 ft on a two-storey.
• Quoting per foot with no minimum. A 40 ft porch at $8 is $320, and the truck cost more than that to get there.
• Takedown left vague. Say on the quote whether it is included and when it happens. HomeGuide lists takedown alone at $100 to $400 when it is not bundled.
• Buffer on the price instead of the order. The customer pays for the house, not for your spare spool.
• No deposit at signing. A signed quote with no money down is a maybe, and November is full of maybes.

How a rate card in GlowBid turns the drawing into the price

Every number in this article lives on one rate card per company: product lines (Seasonal C9, seasonal service, permanent track, permanent no-track, or your own), run types with a colour and a per-foot rate on each line, the peak and storey and rush premiums, flat per-jump and per-peak amounts, add-ons with unit prices, the minimum ticket, deposit percent, tax and the materials buffer. Fill it in once from your own costs.

Then you draw. Each run on the photo is typed (roofline, ridge line, peak, ground, tree, jump) and carries its storey count. The footage comes from the drawn geometry, the price comes from the footage and the card, and the materials list comes from the same footage plus the buffer. The drawn line, the feet and the dollars are one object, so they cannot disagree, and a quote priced in 2026 can be reopened in 2028 and show exactly which rates produced it. The customer signs on their phone, the deposit is collected on the same screen, and the job is on the calendar before you have left the driveway.