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Christmas light installation price calculator
Abulous Lighting near Atlanta publishes $4 per foot for annual C9 installation and takedown, plus $4 per foot for the one-time lights purchase, checked October 2026. Settle who owns the lights before you price anything. Hanging your own lights and taking them home again is a different business from hanging the customer’s, and takedown is a second trip that belongs in the first price.
Price a light install
Starting point: $4.00 per linear ft. C9 installation and takedown; Atlanta area: $4.00 per linear foot. Published rate, rounded to cents. Annual labor: published split is $2.50 install and $1.50 takedown. Lights purchase is separate. Abulous Lighting: LED holiday Christmas lights, checked 2026-10-15.
Extras, travel and minimum
Measure only the lighted runs. Say who owns the lights, which maintenance visits are included, and when removal happens. The published labor starting rate includes takedown; leave removal at zero when using it and enter newly supplied lights in materials.
Enter lighted roofline (linear feet).
Should you sell the lights or lease them?
Abulous Lighting sells them: the customer buys C9s at $4 a foot, keeps and stores them, and pays $4 a foot each year to have them hung and taken down. HomeGuide’s US range of $5–$12 a foot covers packages where lights may or may not be included. Selling lowers the yearly price; leasing keeps the lights, the storage and the reordering with you.
Leasing pays better from the second season on, but it brings work: storing every house’s strands labeled by run, testing them each fall and replacing dead bulbs. Selling pushes storage to the customer, who may hand you a tangled box next year. Either way, price so the lights pay for themselves in the first season, and treat every season after that as the profit.
How should you price takedown?
Inside the install price, collected up front. Abulous splits its $4 a foot as $2.50 to install and $1.50 to take down, so takedown is 37.5% of the labor. HomeGuide puts removal-only jobs at $100–$400. Bill takedown separately in January and some customers stop answering; a second trip you’ve already been paid for doesn’t have that problem.
How do you price trees and bushes?
By the strand, not by guess. Abulous sells warm-white mini lights at $19 per 25-foot strand and charges $14 a strand to install and take them down. Count the strands a tree takes when you measure, write the count on the quote, and price wraps and bushes from it. Tall trees with tight wraps eat strands fast, so measure trunk height and ask how tight they want it.
The mistake is pricing the roofline and throwing the bushes in. Trees and railings are the jobs customers add on the day: wrap that maple too, light the porch rail. Have per-strand and per-item prices ready, so the add-on gets priced at the door instead of given away to keep the customer happy.
Example: 120 feet of roofline with your lights
120 ft of roofline costs you $2 a foot in labor ($240), $180 in lights and clips, and $80 for the takedown trip: $500. At a 25% margin, $500 ÷ 0.75 = $666.67, about $5.56 a foot, near the bottom of HomeGuide’s $5–$12 band.
If you keep the lights and reuse them, next season’s cost is $320 without the $180 of lights. Charge the same $666.67 and the margin rises to 52%: $346.67 left of $666.67.
Frequently asked questions
When should I start booking Christmas light installs?
Now, if it’s October. The weeks before Thanksgiving are the dates everyone asks for, so they fill first. Sell dates in order and put the takedown date on the same booking, so January isn’t a second round of phone calls. Keep a short waiting list for cancellations rather than squeezing in installs after dark.
Should I hang customer-owned lights?
You can, at a labor-only price with conditions. Test their strands before you climb, charge for that time, and say in the quote that you don’t stand behind their bulbs or connectors. Mixed brands and old clips slow every run, so a labor-only rate on customer lights should sit above the labor share of a package with your own lights.
Do I need a minimum for a light install?
Yes. 40 ft of front gutter at HomeGuide’s low end of $5 a foot is $200, and that visit still needs the ladder, the timer, an outlet check and a takedown trip. Set a minimum that covers both trips, and sell small jobs up to it with a wreath, a tree or a porch railing.