🔢 The Round Number Myth: 72% of Ripoff Quotes End in $00, and It Tells You Nothing
The Advice Everyone Repeats
Search for how to spot a padded contractor quote and you will find the same tip everywhere: be suspicious of round numbers. The reasoning sounds airtight. A real estimate is built from parts, labor hours, and a markup. Multiply those together and you get $3,847, not $4,000. So when a contractor hands you a clean $4,000, the story goes, they did not calculate anything. They picked a number.
We have 58 quotes in our case archive where we know both the quoted price and the fair market value, and 3,344 analyzed quotes in the full database. So we checked.
The tip is wrong. Not partly wrong. It has no predictive power at all.
Round Numbers Really Are Everywhere
Start with the part everyone gets right.
42 of 58 red-flag quotes (72 percent) are round to the nearest $100. 28 of 58 (48 percent) are round thousands. Only 16 of 58 (28 percent) are priced to the exact dollar.
If prices were built up from real arithmetic, roughly 1 in 100 would land on a clean hundred by chance. We see 72 in 100. The pattern is real and it is enormous.
But Round Quotes Are Not Worse Deals
Then we asked the only question that matters to someone holding a quote: do the round ones cost you more?
Round to the nearest $100 (N = 42): median score 17.5 out of 100, median overcharge multiple 2.17x.
Priced to the exact dollar (N = 16): median score 20 out of 100, median overcharge multiple 2.71x.
The scores are effectively identical. The multiple actually runs slightly higher for the precisely priced quotes, the opposite of the folk wisdom, and the gap does not survive a significance test (two-sided Mann-Whitney, p = 0.30).
Cut the data by severity and it goes flat the same way. Among the worst quotes in the archive, those scoring 20 or below, 24 of 32 are round (75 percent). Among the less severe ones, 18 of 26 (69 percent). That is noise.
A round number is not a tell. It is not even a weak tell.
What Is Actually Driving the Pattern
Sort the archive by the size of the quote and the roundness pattern resolves completely.
| Quote size | Round to nearest $100 | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Under $1,000 | 1 of 9 | 11% |
| $1,000 to $5,000 | 13 of 18 | 72% |
| $5,000 to $20,000 | 15 of 18 | 83% |
| Above $20,000 | 13 of 13 | 100% |
Every quote in the archive above $20,000 is round. Nearly every quote below $1,000 is not.
This is not a fact about contractors. It is a fact about how human beings write down large numbers. Nobody quotes a basement finish at $38,412. They quote $38,000, because at that scale the last few hundred dollars are inside the estimator's own margin of error.
The control that settles it: our own fair-value estimates are round 59 percent of the time (34 of 58). Those benchmarks are computed from a pricing database, with no incentive to look impressive and no customer to charge. They round for the same reason contractors do. When the honest number and the dishonest number round at nearly the same rate, roundness cannot be what separates them.
The Precise Quotes Are Not Safe Either
If anything, the data warns against the opposite instinct, the assumption that an itemized, dollar-exact quote has been checked.
Some of the worst overcharges we have on file are priced to the dollar. $950 to install a garbage disposal, fair value $150, which is 6.3x and scored 5 out of 100. $153 for a Subaru engine air filter at a dealership, fair value $30, a part you can change yourself in about four minutes. $3,460 for a 2020 Subaru Forester service visit against a fair value of $680. $5,864 for work on a 2017 Honda CR-V, fair value $1,800.
Dealer service systems produce dollar-exact numbers automatically, straight out of flat-rate labor software. The precision is generated by the billing system, not by anyone checking whether the price is fair. A quote can be itemized to the penny and still be triple what the work is worth.
Meanwhile the single worst quote in the entire archive is round: $127,000 for straw wattle erosion control against a fair value of $2,000. That is 63.5x, and it is round because six-figure numbers always are.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
Across four data studies now, our archive keeps returning the same answer to the same question. People want a way to read a quote and know. Is the scope inflated? Is the job too big? Is the number suspiciously clean?
We have tested all three. Job size predicts nothing, with a rank correlation of negative 0.05. Invented scope is rare, since 80 percent of red-flag quotes describe exactly the right work at the wrong price. And now roundness predicts nothing either.
The pattern behind the pattern is that a quote does not contain the information you need to evaluate it. Every visual cue people are taught to look for is a property of how the document was written, not of whether the price is fair. The document looks the same either way. That is precisely why overcharging works, and why it survives a careful reading by an intelligent person.
The only thing that separates a fair $4,000 from a padded $4,000 is what the work actually costs. That number is not on the page. It has to come from somewhere else.
Methodology and Caveats
Figures come from the QuoteScore case archive, 58 quotes where both the quoted price and an independent fair-value benchmark are recorded, after removing 2 duplicate entries from the raw 60. Every case is a real quote submitted by a real customer. Scores are QuoteScore's 0 to 100 rating, where lower is worse. The overcharge multiple is quoted price divided by fair value. Round means the quoted total is divisible by 100.
The archive is curated toward bad quotes and is not a random sample of all quotes, so the 72 percent round rate should not be read as the rate across all contractor quotes. That curation does not affect the central finding, which is a within-sample comparison: among these quotes, roundness does not separate the worse deals from the less bad ones. Group comparison is a two-sided Mann-Whitney U test on overcharge multiples (z = 1.04, p = 0.30). With N = 58 we can rule out a large effect, not a very small one. What we can say is that nothing in this data supports using roundness as a decision rule.
Whole-database context comes from 3,344 analyzed quotes as of August 5, 2026, with an average score of 57 out of 100 and $6,117,077 in total identified overcharges. Those figures are live and independently checkable at /api/stats/public.