Charge by the opening, and charge a slab more than a prehung. HomeGuide puts labor at $120 to $170 to set a standard prehung door and $180 to $400 for a double, at 1 to 2 hours each. Fitting a slab into the jamb that is already there is a different job. Homewyse's September 2026 labor line for it, planing the door to fit and cutting the hinge pockets and lockset bore, is 2.8 hours and $269 to $420. Nearly three times the hours for a door the customer bought because it was cheaper. Then add removal and casing as their own lines, and the lockset too, and never let one door go out at the per-door rate. A single door in an occupied house is a half day with the drive, however fast you hang it.
What is the labor rate per door for an interior door?
Between $120 and $420 depending on what the opening needs, and the spread is mostly the slab-versus-prehung question. Three published ranges, labor only:
| Work | Published labor | Hours | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prehung, standard, existing rough opening | $120-$170 | 1-2 | HomeGuide |
| Prehung, double | $180-$400 | 1-2 | HomeGuide |
| Slab fitted to existing jamb | $269-$420 | 2.8 | Homewyse |
| Any interior door, customer supplies it | $100-$300 | 1-4 | HomeGuide |
| Installer hourly rate | $44-$83 per hour | 1-3 | Fixr |
Installed totals with the door in them run higher. Homewyse's national figure is $440 to $669 per door for a hollow-core six-panel, and Fixr's is $374 to $697. Homewyse then tells the reader to add 13% to 22% if a general contractor supervises. If you sub out a houseful of doors, remember that the number your trim carpenter quotes you has none of your overhead in it.
Work the hourly rate backwards before you trust any of these. Fixr's $83 an hour at the top is a loaded rate, and the median carpenter in the country earns $29.12 an hour in wages by BLS 2025 data, $48.03 at the 90th percentile. Homewyse's 2.8-hour labor line comes to $96 to $150 an hour, which is closer to what a carpenter has to bill once the truck, the insurance and the unpaid walkthrough are paid for. The fuller version of that arithmetic is in what overhead costs per hour.
Should you price a prehung door or a slab higher?
The slab, for labor. The customer sees a $30 slab next to a $150 prehung unit and assumes the slab is the saving. It is, on the door. On your time it is the dear option.
A prehung unit arrives hung. The hinges are mortised, the door is bored, the stop is on. You plumb the hinge jamb, shim the latch side to an even reveal and nail it off. In the Journal of Light Construction, Ray Fritzsche of Accurate Construction Services in Wallkill, New York says it takes him about 30 minutes to install a prehung door and another 20 to trim it out, and he calls that "handy information when giving a quote." It is. It is also a production number from a house full of doors with a cut station set up.
A slab into an existing jamb starts with the jamb. The hinge mortises are where they are, so you lay the new door out from them, not from a spec. You cut three hinge pockets with a router or a chisel. You bore for the lockset, and if the house was built before the 1980s there is a fair chance the old lock sits at a 2-3/4 inch backset while the pre-bored slab at the yard is 2-3/8. You bevel the latch edge so it clears the stop. You trim the height, because the old door was cut to the old carpet. Then you hang it and find the jamb has moved in forty years and the reveal tapers. Homewyse's 2.8 hours is honest for that, and it still excludes the lockset.
So the estimate says which one it is. "Replace bedroom door, prehung, recase both sides" and "fit new slab to existing jamb, hinges plus bore" are different prices, and if the customer wants to supply the door, write down which kind.
What do you charge for removal, casing and the lockset?
Put each on its own line. A door price with the casing folded in cannot be checked by anyone, including you a year later.
| Line | Published price | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Remove and dispose of old door | $40-$80 | HomeGuide |
| Remove old door, 0.7 hours | $62-$97, plus $68-$77 debris | Homewyse |
| Casing | $2-$4 per linear foot | HomeGuide |
| Lockset install | $40-$330 | HomeGuide |
| Split-jamb unit instead of flat jamb | add $30-$60, 30-60 minutes | HomeGuide |
| Resize the opening | $250-$400 | HomeGuide |
| Reframe the opening | $110-$220 | HomeGuide |
Casing is about 17 feet a side on a 2'6" door, two legs and a head, so one side is $34 to $68 at HomeGuide's rate and both sides double it. Say which. A closet is cased on one side, a bedroom on two, and "per door" with nothing after it is how the hall side gets done for free. The casing line has its own pricing logic, covered in what to charge for baseboard and trim.
The lockset range is wide because the work is. A passage knob on a pre-bored door is ten minutes. A mortise lock on a solid wood door is a different afternoon. If the customer is supplying the hardware, write the line as "install customer-supplied passage set, pre-bored door" and let anything else be a change.
Multi-door jobs get shopped down, and HomeGuide says discounts are normal for more than one door. Give the discount on the door line only. Removal and casing do not get faster with volume. Hanging the eighth door is quicker than the first. Carrying the eighth old door to the trailer is not.
How do you price doors in an old house with walls out of plumb?
Check three things on the walkthrough and add an hour per opening for any one that fails.
- A level on the hinge-side trimmer. Fine Homebuilding's Gary Striegler says the level comes out once, before the door is touched, and if the wall is more than 3/16 inch out over the door height he moves the bottom plate. In a 1920s house with plaster you are not moving a plate. Fritzsche's answer for the same wall is extension jambs planed flush, and he says plainly it "slows the installation considerably."
- A tape across the wall. A stock jamb is 4-9/16 inches for a 2x4 wall with half-inch drywall each side. Plaster over lath runs thicker, often 5-1/4 and up, and the jamb then needs an extension strip on one side or a special-order width. Either way it is not the unit on the shelf.
- A level on the floor across the opening. Fritzsche cuts the jamb legs to different lengths so the head stays level and the door clears the floor by about a quarter inch. A floor that drops half an inch across the opening means the latch-side leg gets cut long and the door bottom may need trimming to swing over the high spot. Ten minutes if you knew. Forty if you did not.
The mistake that costs the most is not on that list. It is handing. A prehung door is ordered left-hand or right-hand, and a door that is wrong when the box opens is a drive back to the supplier and a slot that does not come back. Stand on the hinge side, note which way it swings, write it on the estimate with the rough opening size, and read it back before you order. Every carpenter has done this once.
When is it a new opening instead of a door swap?
When there is no jamb to swap into. A new doorway is a framing job that happens to end with a door, and it is priced as framing: layout, cutting the drywall out of both sides, king studs with jacks under a header sized to the span, then new drywall taped and painted on both faces of the wall. HomeGuide's reframe and resize lines, $110 to $220 and $250 to $400, are for an opening that already exists. A new one in a bearing wall is more than either, needs a permit in most jurisdictions, and may need an engineer to size the header if the span is wide or there is a point load above.
Write the exclusions as carefully as the lines. Electrical in the wall gets relocated by an electrician at their price. Paint is to the patch, not the room, unless the room is in the estimate. And if the house is old enough for plaster, say in writing that the wall opens up before you know what is inside it. The scope-protection side of that is in what to exclude from a contractor estimate.
What this misses
The ranges are national. None of these sources break the labor out by metro, and a trim carpenter in Seattle is not billing the hour a carpenter in Little Rock is. Use the hours and put your own rate on them, which is the method in how to price labor.
Some figures are older than their titles. HomeGuide's page carries 2026 in the title and a July 2024 byline. Fixr's was updated in January 2025. Treat both as floors.
Pocket doors and French doors are priced differently. HomeGuide's installed ranges run $500 to $2,500 for a pocket door and $400 to $1,600 for double French. A pocket door opens the wall. Nothing above prices that.
Finishing is not in any of it. Homewyse's labor line excludes door finishing and moldings. A stain-grade slab that arrives raw is a day of the painter's time before it is hung, and somebody has to say whose line that is.
BidWalk takes the door count, the handing and the casing sides as you call them out at each opening, and writes each as its own line before you leave the house.
