---
title: A decade of rising materials prices, and what it did to your margin — QuoteToMe
description: Construction inputs have climbed far faster than general inflation since 2014. The contractors who held their margins did one thing differently.
url: https://quotetome.com/blog/material-pricing
markdown_url: https://quotetome.com/blog/material-pricing.md
image: https://quotetome.com/qtm/assets/site-earthworks.png
author: QuoteToMe
published: June 2026
tag: Market Trends
read_time: 4 min
---

# A decade of rising materials prices, and what it did to your margin — QuoteToMe

Construction inputs have climbed far faster than general inflation since 2014. The contractors who held their margins did one thing differently.

[Blog](/blog) / Market Trends

# A decade of rising materials prices, and what it did to your margin

Construction inputs have climbed far faster than general inflation since 2014. The contractors who held their margins did one thing differently.

QuoteToMe | June 2026 | 4 min read

If it feels like materials cost more every year, it’s not your imagination. Over the past decade, the price of core construction inputs, lumber, steel, concrete, copper, has risen sharply and unevenly, with pandemic-era spikes that reset baselines for good.

For a business where materials are **40 to 50% of project cost** and net margins often sit at just **2 to 4%**, that kind of input inflation is existential. A few points of unmanaged price increase can erase a project’s profit entirely.

> When materials are half your cost and margins are a few points, price discipline isn’t optional, it’s survival.

## Volatility is the real enemy

It isn’t just that prices went up, it’s that they stopped being predictable. Lumber swung through historic highs and crashes. Steel and copper moved with global demand. Estimators who locked a number months before buyout often discovered the market had moved against them by the time POs went out.
Input volatility turns a fixed-price bid into a moving target.

## The hidden cost: buying without comparison

In a rising market, the instinct is to lock in fast with a familiar supplier. But speed without comparison is expensive. Across QuoteToMe’s customer base, the highest quote on an order averages **3.2× the lowest**, a spread that widens precisely when prices are volatile and vendors are pricing in their own uncertainty.
3.2× high-to-low quote spread on a typical order 40–50% of project cost tied up in materials 2–4% typical net margin for contractors

## What the resilient contractors did

The businesses that protected their margins through the last decade didn’t predict the market, they shopped it. On every order that mattered, they put work out for competitive quotes, enforced negotiated rates, and tracked committed cost in real time so a price surprise never reached the invoice unexamined.

- Quote competitively instead of defaulting to one supplier
- Hold vendors to agreed rates on every line
- Track committed cost against budget as orders are placed, not after
- Keep a clean record of pricing history to negotiate from next time

## Price increases aren’t going away

You can’t control the commodity markets. You can control whether every dollar of materials spend was competed, approved, and accounted for. In a decade of rising prices, that discipline is the difference between shrinking margins and steady ones.

Sources & further reading

Industry research informing this article. Figures are paraphrased from each publisher's findings.

- 01[U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — _Producer Price Index, construction inputs_](https://www.bls.gov/ppi/) (monthly). The official index tracking month-to-month movement in materials prices.

- 02[Associated Builders and Contractors — _Construction Input Prices analysis_](https://www.abc.org/News-Media/News-Releases) (monthly). ABC's read on input-cost volatility, from Chief Economist Anirban Basu.

- 03[Associated General Contractors of America — _Construction Inflation Alert_](https://www.agc.org/learn/construction-data) (ongoing). Tracks escalation across materials and subcontract costs and its effect on bids.

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