How Long Is a Quote Valid? The Expiry Date That Protects Your Price

You sent the solar quote in the middle of June. No reply, the thread went cold, you stopped thinking about it. The phone rings in September: "I'm ready to go on that quote, when can you start?" You open the file and start recalculating. Inverters are up, your crew is on new rates, and the September start you promised back then is booked out to November. The client is holding a piece of paper with your price on it and asking why today is different. The whole conversation comes down to one sentence that quote never had.

How long is a quote valid if you never put a date on it?

With no date on the document, a quote has no end, and the client assumes your price holds until they get around to answering. Rules on how long an offer binds exist, and without a written date their reading is contestable. One line settles it, and it does the same work on a $900 repair and a $90,000 install.

Without that line, three things happen at once. The client comes back months later and treats your document as a price list. You have to reprice the job and open the conversation with a correction, which always reads worse than a date announced up front. And the negotiation starts from your old number, so any move upward sounds like an increase you invented on the spot.

Trades use quote, estimate and bid to mean slightly different things, and most clients never notice the difference. Whichever word sits at the top of your document, the date underneath the total is what keeps the September phone call short.

There's a cost the client never sees. A quote with no end date stays open in your head too. You don't know whether the job is live or dead, so you keep slack in the calendar for work that may never arrive. Over a season that's a dozen phantom holds.

How many days should a quote be valid for?

Trade practice in service work settles into three brackets: 7–14 days on repairs and service calls, 14–30 days on remodels, installs and fit-outs, 30–60 days on large projects. The faster your material prices move and the faster your calendar fills, the shorter the sensible window. These brackets are habits the trades converged on.

Move inside the brackets with two levers. Shorten when the quote carries a lot of material that swings on the commodity market (copper, lumber, steel, panels, aggregate), or when the start date is itself the product because your calendar is booked months out. Stretch when the client is waiting on a lender, a permit office or an HOA board and tells you up front how long that usually takes.

One more thing worth checking: the supplier and sub pricing your quote is built on has its own expiry. If your distributor holds panel pricing for 21 days and you write a 45-day quote, you carry the difference for 24 of those days. The simplest rule is to keep your window shorter than the shortest price hold you were given.

What does an expiry date do besides protect your price?

It does three jobs: it turns "I'll get back to you" into a decision with a deadline, it gives you a natural reason to call a few days before that deadline, and it clears phantom work out of your calendar. Across 20 open quotes, that's the difference between a list of tasks and a list of unanswered questions.

• The decision gets a frame. Someone with unlimited time postpones. Someone looking at a date either asks a question or says "not this year". Both answers are worth the same to you, because both free up the slot.
• You have something to call about. "Ray, the quote runs out Friday, I'm calling to ask whether you want it extended or whether we're closing the file" sounds nothing like a fourth "any decision yet?". When to call and what to say on each contact is laid out in the piece on following up after you send a quote.
• The calendar stops lying to you. Expired quotes come off the open list. What's left is work that can actually happen, and you know how many free weeks you still have to sell.

How do you word the expiry date so it doesn't sound like a threat?

One sentence in a visible spot on the quote, written the way you'd say it standing in someone's kitchen. The three versions below run under 20 words each and none of them uses a legal phrase. Always give a calendar date. The client can see it immediately, and "14 days from today" goes wrong for somebody every time.

1. "This price holds through September 30. After that I'm happy to reprice it against current material costs."
2. "The quote is good until Friday, September 12, because that's how long I'm holding the slot for you."
3. "This number is good through October 15. If the decision needs longer, let me know and I'll refresh it."

Put that sentence directly under the total. In a footer next to your license number and payment details, nobody reads it. If you're emailing the quote, repeat the date in the body of the message, because half of clients read the email and only open the attachment on the day they decide.

What to leave out: language about automatic expiry, warnings in capitals, references to statutes. A quote from a tradesperson should read like a conversation. A date with a short reason behind it ("that's how long I'm holding the slot", "that's how long my supplier holds the panel price") goes down without friction. A dry expiry clause can earn you an annoyed phone call.

What do you do when a client comes back after the date?

Start by checking what actually moved since the day you sent it: material prices, crew rates, open dates. Three situations come out of that, and in all three the worst move is quietly waving through the old number. A client who resurfaces 2 or 3 months later usually signs anyway, as long as they hear a reason.

The price hasn't moved

The easiest version, and the one with the most upside sitting in it. Confirm the number out loud and let the client hear that you checked: "I ran it again, materials are holding, so the June price stands. I'll block the dates as soon as we sort the deposit." The client learns you kept an eye on the job, and you close the file that same day.

The price has gone up

Fold the update into the job itself. Reprice the lines against today's costs, show which ones actually moved, and give the new number together with a new expiry date. Illustrative example: an installer sends a $34,000 quote in June, the client calls back in September, the equipment lines (panels and inverter) are up 8%, which adds $2,100, so the new number is $36,100. A conversation with line items and a percentage in it ends in a signature far more often than a message announcing that prices went up.

If the gap is small and this is the client's second time round in one season, you can absorb it and say so out loud. A concession the client knows about does work for you. A silent one is money gone.

The slot is gone

Price is often the smaller problem here. Give the earliest honest start and offer a place in the queue: "September is full, I can be on site from October 20. If someone reschedules, you're the first call I make." Write that down with a date against it, because a promise like that is worth exactly as much as keeping it.

There's a fourth version of this story: the client never comes back at all, before the date or after it. The reasons behind that silence, and the call that breaks it, are unpacked separately in the piece on what to do when a client stops responding to a quote.

How do you keep track of expiry dates across 20 open quotes?

At five open quotes your memory covers it. At 20 you need a list that shows what's past its date without being asked. The minimum is a "Valid until" column in a spreadsheet and the habit of sorting by it every Monday morning. Sorting takes seconds; the spreadsheet only speaks when you open it.

The minimum set that works whatever tool you use:

• Set the expiry the moment you send the quote, alongside the total. Adding it later doesn't happen, because later doesn't exist.
• One place for every open quote. Your inbox can't do this job: it has no way to show you what runs out this week.
• A call two or three days before the date. Before the date you're discussing a decision. After it you're discussing a price.
• Quotes come off the list once the date passes, each with a status: extended, lost, or worth refreshing in six months. A job with no status keeps boomeranging back.

A tool does one thing here that a spreadsheet can't: it surfaces the expired quotes without being asked. In Zapyo the date lives in a "Valid until" field on the quote, and the "needs attention" list puts a quote that's past that date at the very top, ahead of the ones with no follow-up and the ones that have simply gone quiet.

This leak is easy to miss, because nothing hurts on the day it happens. What it adds up to over a year is the subject of a separate piece on why the job you lost never said no.

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