How to Price Christmas Light Installs

There are many factors that go into creating your pricing structure- including materials, gas, labor, insurance, workers comp, waste, etc. In Winston-Salem, NC, we charge $7-$8/LF, depending on the time of year. The average price point for Christmas light installation is around $6-$12/LF, with the average cost for materials being $2-$3/LF. You can check out our ROI Breakdown and our calculator for more information regarding how you should price your work based on outside factors.

Structure your offers

Once your pricing is figured out, you will need to structure your offers. Here are a few offers we have found success using.

Lease

• We have found the most success selling everyone towards a leasing option, which allows the customer to lease the lights from us year after year.
• From a business standpoint, this allows us to keep equity in lights, even if customers don’t come back for future years. Leasing lights also makes retention easier year over year. 
• The price stays consistent for the customer year over year (unless offering special deal such as early install) due to us taking care of any maintenance and replacements of the lights as well as storage

Buy

• We provide buying the lights as an option because a lot of people ask about it. We offer this option at the same price as leasing but there are not as many services offered with this, such as maintenance throughout the season, storing the lights for the customer, and replacement of lights for future years (since they now own them and we are not in control of the lights). 
• This tends to push value towards the lease option since the customer does not need to worry about taking care of the lights.

Provide your Own

• This option allows customers to provide their own Christmas lights. We do not recommend this option for a number of reasons...
  • 90% of the time they are providing non-commercial grade lights, which are not meant for extended outdoor use
  • Risk of light failure, fire, electrocution, etc 
  • This option also reduces the value of your offering and average ticket price, which can be tough on your business
• For us, the only situation where we will allow this option is if they are 100% commercial grade lights, typically this is if someone used the buy option with us in a past year and they would like to install them again. 
• We usually do $1-$2 cheaper per linear foot
  • It is crucial to test all of the lights before you leave the job because we typically won’t come back if we find out they are not working after we have already left for the day. (mostly because that would be considered maintenance, which is not covered under this option.
• Based on the information above, it tends to push people towards the leasing option

How to Utilize your Offers

This chart is a further deep-dive into what services are included in the three offers we use. Please note that there are plenty of services and offers that are not listed in this chart. It is solely based on the model we use and have most success with.