General Contractor Fees in Canada: Markup and What It Covers

Every renovation price carries a fee for the firm running the job, on top of the trades and materials it buys, and builders' 2026 figures from Toronto and Vancouver put it at 10% to 20% of project cost. Whether you can see it depends on the contract: a cost-plus quote shows the fee as its own line, and a fixed price builds it into one number.

How much general contractors charge in Canada

Builders' 2026 price guides from Toronto and Vancouver put a general contractor's fee at 10% to 20% of project cost for a managed renovation. Most of their figures sit at 15% to 20%, cost-plus jobs included, and project management and overhead take 15% to 20% of a Toronto kitchen renovation budget.

What changes from one billing model to the next is whether you can see the fee.

What a general contractor's fee pays for

The fee pays for two things: the firm's overhead, which it carries whether or not your job is on, and its profit. The trades, materials and site costs are a separate set of costs, billed at cost on cost-plus and folded into the price on a fixed quote.

For that money the general contractor prices the job, books and supervises the trades in order, orders materials, pulls the building permits the job needs when the contract assigns them to it, books the inspections and answers for the result when something fails after handover.

Markup vs margin: why 20% is not 20%

Markup is the amount added to job costs, as a share of those costs. Margin is the same dollars as a share of the selling price. The two are never equal, so a contractor and a homeowner can both say 20% and mean different sums.

From the contractor's side, a renovation firm with $500,000 of yearly revenue, $100,000 of overhead and a 10% profit target ($50,000) has $350,000 left for job costs. Its price has to be 1.43 times those costs: a 43% markup, which is a 30% gross margin.

The common shortcut fails that test. Adding 20% for overhead and 10% for profit to $350,000 of costs gives $455,000, leaving the firm $45,000 short, because both percentages were taken on cost when the targets were shares of revenue.

For a homeowner, a fixed-price quote 43% above the job costs is not 43% profit: in that example, $100,000 of the $150,000 gap is overhead and $50,000 is profit. A 15% to 20% cost-plus fee can come from the same kind of firm, because on cost-plus more of the firm's own costs are billed to the job, and you carry the risk a fixed price would have priced in.

Fixed price vs cost-plus: where the fee shows

On a fixed-price contract the fee is built into one number: the contractor carries the risk of costs rising and prices that risk in. On a cost-plus contract the builder's labour, trades, materials, equipment and site costs are billed at cost and the fee is added on top, as a percentage or a fixed sum. Design fees, permits and items you buy yourself are often kept outside a cost-plus contract.

Which contract suits a job depends mostly on how finished the drawings are: a fixed price needs drawings and selections that are close to final, while cost-plus tolerates a design that is still moving. The catch with a percentage fee is that it rises with every dollar of cost, overruns included.

In Ontario, the province's home renovation rights page recommends keeping the deposit to 10% and says that when an estimate is part of the contract, the final price cannot run more than 10% over it unless you agreed to new work or a new price. On cost-plus the costs are invoiced as the job goes, with receipts, and Ontario's Construction Act has the payer retain a 10% holdback on the work as it is supplied.

Hourly rates and time and materials

A Toronto builder's 2026 price guide puts the hourly rate for general contractors in Toronto and the GTA at $65 to $150 before 13% HST, and finds that scope, access and site conditions move the price more than the municipality does.

Hourly billing suits small jobs and work nobody can scope before the walls are open, such as a repair or a punch list. On anything larger it puts the risk of slow work on you, so agree in writing which hours are billable, the markup on materials, and a dollar threshold at which the contractor stops and asks.

HST, GST and PST on the contractor's fee

The fee is taxed like the work it manages. CRA lists construction services as taxable supplies, and a registered contractor building or substantially renovating housing on your land charges GST or HST on its labour and materials. The rate is your province's, from CRA's GST/HST rate table.

BC's rule holds for time-and-materials and lump-sum contracts alike, under the province's PST rules for real property contractors. Manitoba (7%) and Saskatchewan (6%) charge provincial sales tax beside the 5% GST; ask whether a quote shows PST as a line or carries it in the materials.

In Ontario, a 10% to 20% fee plus 13% HST adds 24% to 36% to the cost of the trades and materials, which on a full-home renovation comes to tens of thousands of dollars.

Managing the trades yourself: when it saves the fee

Running the job yourself saves the fee and hands you the work it pays for: vetting each trade, checking each one's workers' compensation coverage, booking them in order, buying materials, arranging inspections and absorbing the delay when one trade holds up the next. It pays off on a narrow set of jobs:

• One or two trades. A bathroom refresh with a plumber and a tiler, or new flooring and paint.
• No structural change. Nothing for an engineer to design and fewer inspections to sequence.
• You can be on site most days. Trades left on their own make the decisions you would have made.
• A flexible finish date. A two-week gap between trades costs you time, not money.

It is the wrong call for:

• Additions, underpinning and second storeys. Many trades in a fixed order with an engineer and inspections between them; if you have moved out, each month of delay costs $4,000 to $10,000 in Toronto rent.
• Full-home renovations. Sequencing mistakes across many trades can cost more than the fee you saved.
• Work where the trades must answer to one firm. With no general contractor, a leak behind new tile is a dispute between the plumber and the tiler, and you referee it.