A solid flooring contract has eleven clauses: your business and license number, the customer and address, the scope by room with square footage, the material and grade or a stated allowance, subfloor prep and waste assumptions, the price, a milestone payment schedule, the dates, the warranty, a change-order clause, and dated signatures. Copy the outline below into Google Docs or Word and you have an agreement that holds up when a job gets complicated.
We run our own home-service companies — a cleaning company in Tucson and an HVAC company in Sacramento — and the lesson that carries to flooring is clear: the two clauses that cause almost every fight are materials and subfloor. Name the product or set an allowance, and write down what you assume about the subfloor before you lift a plank.
"Hardwood" is not a spec. Name the product and grade or set an allowance. Otherwise the customer expects the showroom sample and you priced the builder grade.
Rot or an uneven slab under old flooring is real work. If the contract assumes a sound subfloor and says repairs are extra, the change order is fair instead of a fight.
Asking for it all before work starts scares good customers and may break state rules. A deposit, a start payment, and a completion balance protects everyone.
Cuts, patterns, and defects mean you order extra. Bake a waste factor into the material line so a couple of extra boxes is expected, not a surprise charge.
You do not need a twelve-page contract for every job. A clean template is enough when:
Once you take large installs, custom materials, or commercial work, have an attorney review your template once. That one-time cost pays for itself the first time a subfloor or material dispute lands on a signed clause instead of a verbal promise.
The contract protects a job you already won. The harder part is winning it — being the flooring contractor a homeowner finds and trusts when they search. That is the part we handle: a hand-built site with project photos, reviews, and 24/7 AI lead capture that turns "flooring installer near me" into named, callable requests instead of voicemails.
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Name the product and grade or set a per-square-foot allowance, say who supplies it, and explain how overage on a pricier pick is billed. Add a waste factor so a couple of extra boxes is expected.
A deposit to order material, a progress payment at start, and the balance on completion. Avoid full payment up front, and tie each payment to a milestone the customer can see.
State in the contract that you assume a sound subfloor and that hidden damage is a priced change order. Then you can fix rot or leveling fairly instead of arguing it was included.
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