Charge two to three times your floor rate for the tile setting, and bill the pan, the waterproofing and the flood test as separate lines on top of it. EstimationPro puts labor on shower walls at $7 to $19 per square foot against $4 to $8 for a basic floor. Inch Calculator puts installation labor for one shower at $1,800 to $2,400. A 3x5 shower tiled to 8 feet is about 103 square feet. Quote it at a $6 floor rate and you have priced that labor at $618. The roughly $1,200 you left out is the waterproofing and the vertical work. You will do all of it anyway.
Why does a shower cost more per square foot than a floor?
Because almost none of the time goes into laying field tile. A floor is one plane, gravity helps, and you can set most of a room before lunch. A shower is three walls and a sloped floor that all have to hold water for twenty years.
EstimationPro's production figure for standard tile is 80 to 120 square feet a day, and 40 to 60 for large format. Those are floor days. On a shower wall every course fights gravity, every tile at the valve, the head and the niche is a cut, and the bottom row waits on the pan. Then there are the days when no tile goes up at all.
What are the lines on a shower tile estimate?
Seven, and the tile itself is only one of them. Here is the 3x5 shower again: 88 square feet of wall, 15 of floor, with a curb. The ranges are the published ones. The arithmetic is theirs multiplied by the area.
| Line | Published rate | On this shower |
|---|---|---|
| Demo of old tile and haul | $400-$900 | $400-$900 |
| Backer board, walls | $5-$6 per sq ft | $440-$528 |
| Waterproofing | $1-$2 per sq ft | $103-$206 |
| Custom pan | $700-$1,250 | $700-$1,250 |
| Tile setting labor | $7-$19 per sq ft | $721-$1,957 |
| Setting materials and supplies | $300-$400 | $300-$400 |
| Tile | by selection | allowance |
Setting labor is EstimationPro's range. The rest are Inch Calculator's. Before the tile, that totals $2,664 to $5,241.
Inch Calculator also gives a single installed figure of $20 to $30 per square foot, which would put this shower at $2,060 to $3,090. The gap between that and the table is the demo and the pan. A per-foot number assumes somebody else already handed you a clean, sloped, watertight box. On a remodel, nobody did.
I think the $1 to $2 waterproofing line is light. It covers the bucket. It does not cover two coats with dry time between them, the corners, or the trip back to drain a flood test.
How much waterproofing does a shower take?
More than one pail, and this is the line that gets guessed. Custom Building Products' data sheet for RedGard lists coverage at 55 square feet per gallon as a waterproof membrane and 40 square feet per gallon as a pan liner. Those are finished figures for the full two-coat build.
| Surface | Area | Coverage | Gallons |
|---|---|---|---|
| Walls to 8 ft | 88 sq ft | 55 sq ft per gal | 1.6 |
| Floor and curb | about 22 sq ft | 40 sq ft per gal | 0.55 |
| Total | about 2.2 |
The one-gallon pail does not finish this shower. It does not finish the walls. You are buying the 3.5-gallon pail or three singles, and a sheet membrane system changes the count but not the lesson: take off the membrane by area like you take off the tile.
Cement board is not the waterproofing. The TCNA shower methods with a bonded membrane want it continuous from the drain to the full height of the tile, changes of plane included, over a bed sloped a quarter inch per foot, as TileLetter sets out. Board with taped seams and nothing over it is a wall that gets wet behind the tile.
Should you charge for the flood test?
Yes. Write it as a line with a price. The International Plumbing Code's shower liner test asks for at least 2 inches of water at the threshold held for at least 15 minutes. TEC says to plug the drain, fill from a source other than the shower's own supply, and let it sit 24 hours before judging it.
Fifteen minutes satisfies the inspector. It will not show a slow weep at a corner. Do the 24.
That means a day when the job stands still and a return trip to read the water line. Put a pencil mark or a strip of tape at the level when you fill it, and take a photo with the date on it. The photo costs nothing and it is the best thing in your file if the ceiling below ever stains. RedGard's sheet says a coat dries in 1 to 1.5 hours and can take up to 12, and that the flood test comes after both coats have cured. In a cold basement bath that is another morning gone.
How many days is a tiled shower?
Five or six for one setter, and the day count is the honest way to build the price. This schedule is illustrative. Replace it with your own.
| Day | Work |
|---|---|
| 1 | Demo to studs, haul out, check walls for plumb, hang board |
| 2 | Pre-slope or tray, curb, niche box, membrane |
| 3 | Fill for flood test, come back to read and drain it |
| 4 | Set walls |
| 5 | Set the floor and the curb, tile the niche |
| 6 | Grout, caulk the changes of plane, seal if the tile needs it |
Multiply the days by what a day of your setter has to bring in, then check the result against the table above. If your day math lands under the low end of the published range, your day rate is short. If it lands well over the top, look for the reason before you send it. There usually is one: a 1950s wall that is an inch out of plumb, or a second floor with no place to mix.
Day 3 is where bids go wrong. Nobody is setting tile, so nobody bills it. But you cannot book that setter on another job for a half day here and a half day there without it costing you.
What do a niche, a bench and a pattern add?
Hours, so price them in hours. EstimationPro says the same thing: niches and benches are separate lines priced by the task. A flat percentage on top of the wall rate does not capture them.
A niche is a small shower inside the shower. It gets framed, boarded, wrapped in membrane at every inside corner, given a sill that slopes out, and trimmed on four edges. Count it as half a day.
Decide where it goes before you frame it. Lay the wall tile out on paper first so the niche lands on grout lines. A niche framed between whatever studs were handy cuts slivers on two sides, and slivers are the first thing the customer sees every morning.
Large format tile carries its own adder. EstimationPro puts it at $2 to $6 more per square foot in labor than standard tile. On walls that are out of plumb you can believe the top of that range.
What if somebody else built the pan?
Then say in writing whose pan it is. If the plumber set the liner or the homeowner bought a tray, your estimate should read: "Tile installed over shower pan by others. Pan and drain connection not warranted by us. Flood test by installer of pan before tile." A leak under tile gets blamed on the last trade in the room, and that is you.
Better still, take the pan and the membrane yourself and charge for them. One trade owning everything from the drain to the showerhead is worth more to the customer than a lower number, and it is the only version of this job you can stand behind.
What this misses
The ranges are national. A setter in Seattle and one in Tulsa are not billing the same day, and none of these sources break the numbers out by metro.
Curbless showers are a different job. Recessing the floor between joists is carpentry and sometimes engineering, and the TileLetter piece notes there is no Handbook method for some of those systems. Price it from the manufacturer's instructions, not from this table.
Steam showers and natural stone change the membrane, the mortar or the pace. So does glass tile. The line items hold. The numbers do not.
Your local code may want more than the IPC. Some jurisdictions inspect the pan test. Ask before you schedule day 4.
The wall takeoff here is the same one that sinks a bathroom remodel price, and the flatness rules for big tile are in pricing flooring per square foot. The pan-by-others sentence belongs with the rest of what you exclude from an estimate. BidWalk writes the pan, the membrane and the flood test as their own lines while you are still standing in the bathroom, so the shower does not go out priced like a floor.
