📏 Does Job Size Affect Overcharging? We Checked 53 Real Quotes
The Overcharge Multiple Does Not Care How Big the Job Is
There is a comfortable assumption behind how most people decide whether to price-check a quote: small jobs are not worth the trouble. Nobody gets a second opinion on a $250 thermostat install. Everybody agonizes over a $50,000 roof.
Our data says that instinct is useless. We took every red-flag quote QuoteScore has published as a case study, 53 of them between April and July 2026, and divided the quoted price by the fair value for that exact job. The median quote came in at 2.2 times fair value. And the size of the job predicted almost nothing about that multiple.
The rank correlation between job size and overcharge multiple is negative 0.05 across all 53 quotes, which is statistically indistinguishable from zero. These quotes ranged from $153 to $127,000.
The Dollars Scale. The Rate Does Not.
Grouped by job size, the pattern is stark:
Under $1,000 (N = 9): median 2.17x fair value, median overcharge $350
$1,000 to $4,999 (N = 16): median 2.12x, median overcharge $1,150
$5,000 to $19,999 (N = 16): median 2.57x, median overcharge $4,736
$20,000 and up (N = 12): median 2.22x, median overcharge $25,077
The dollar figure climbs by a factor of 70 from the first band to the last. The multiple does not move.
Across all 53 quotes: 89 percent were at least 1.5x fair value, 68 percent were at least 2x, 30 percent were at least 3x, and 13 percent were at least 5x. Combined, they totaled $830,394 against a combined fair value of $323,382, a gap of $507,012.
What This Means When You Get a Quote
Overcharging is proportional, not absolute. Whatever drives a padded quote scales with the job rather than sitting on top of it as a fixed dollar grab.
That has a blunt consequence. If you skip the price check on small jobs because the stakes feel low, you are not avoiding a rip-off. You are accepting a smaller one at the same rate.
The worst multiple in the entire archive belonged to a $950 garbage disposal installation, labor only, on a unit the homeowner had already purchased. Fair labor for that job is $100 to $200. The quote was 6.3 times fair value and scored a 5 out of 100. It was also small enough that most people would have paid it without a second thought.
Other real examples at both ends of the scale: a $153 Subaru engine air filter against a $30 to $40 part (5.1x), a $2,000 windshield replacement on a 2018 Camry against a $200 to $800 range (5.0x), a $15,000 driveway channel drain against $3,300 to $5,500 (4.6x), and an $86,000 standing seam metal roof against a $34,000 fair value (2.5x).
The Full Database Agrees
The case archive is a curated set, so we checked the shape of the finding against all 3,146 quotes we have analyzed.
The five lowest-scoring categories are Auto (average score 49, N = 613), Siding (49, N = 52), Concrete (54, N = 85), Paving (54, N = 58), and Plumbing (54, N = 226).
That list mixes the cheapest trade in our dataset with some of the most expensive. Auto repair, where a typical quote runs in the hundreds or low thousands, scores exactly as badly as siding, where a typical quote runs five figures. If job size drove overcharging, those two would not be tied at the bottom of the same table.
Across the full database the average QuoteScore is 57 out of 100, and we have flagged $5,461,019 in total overcharges.
Methodology and Caveats
What the score means: QuoteScore rates each quote 0 to 100 for fairness. Higher is fairer. The score weighs the quoted total against a fair-value range for that specific job, plus itemization quality and red-flag line items.
What the multiple means: quoted total divided by the fair value assigned to that job. A 2x multiple means the quote was double what the work should cost.
Sample: 53 unique case-study quotes published between April 25 and July 20, 2026. Four duplicate publications of the same underlying quote were removed. Two entries with no price data were excluded.
The central caveat: these 53 are case studies, selected for publication because they were instructive. They are not a random sample of American price quotes, and the 2.2x median should not be read as a market-wide overcharge rate. The finding is narrower: within quotes that are already overpriced, the degree of overcharging is independent of job size.
Statistics: Spearman rank correlation is used because the job-size distribution spans four orders of magnitude and is heavily skewed. Medians are reported throughout for the same reason. One genuine outlier, a straw wattle installation quoted at $127,000 against a fair value near $2,000 (63.5x), sits in the dataset. Medians are used precisely so that a single document cannot drive the result.
Our full database figures are live and independently checkable at /api/stats/public. Reporters who want the underlying anonymized dataset can reach us at quotescoreai@gmail.com.