How to Start a Door Installation Business

How do you start a door installation business from zero?

Learn to hang a door dead plumb, register an LLC, buy a hinge template and lock kit, carry general liability, then start with interior pre-hungs and storm doors before you sell entry doors.

This trade is judged on one thing a customer can see from the hallway: the reveal. A door that closes without binding, latches without a shove, and shows a consistent 1/8 in. gap down the lock side is the whole product. The marketing, the truck and the shirts are all downstream of being able to produce that reveal in an out-of-square opening in under two hours.

So the first weeks are reps, not sales. Hang doors in your own house. Hang them for family at material cost. If a pre-hung interior door is still taking you four hours, go swing a hammer for a trim carpenter or a door yard until it does not, because every price in this guide assumes 1 to 2 hours per interior door including prep, jamb check, shimming and casing. At four hours a door, a $650 quote pays you like a $30 an hour helper and you will not notice until tax time.

• Look up your state dollar threshold before you quote anything. California requires a license above $1,000, Maryland above $500, North Dakota above $4,000, and Alabama not until $100,000. The threshold, not the trade, decides whether you need a card.
• Get real reps first. A pre-hung interior door should take 1 to 2 hours start to finish, including prep, checking the opening, shimming and trim.
• Register an LLC, get an EIN, and open a business bank account. Business registration and local permits for installation work run $500 to $2,000.
• Bind general liability. Door and window installation contractors average about $83 a month, or roughly $1,000 a year, which is the low end of contractor liability because the class is far safer than roofing or framing.
• Buy the door-specific tools, not just carpentry tools: a hinge butt template, a lock bore kit with an auto-centering guide, a self-leveling laser, and two boxes of cedar shims.
• Open a supply account at a local door and millwork yard. Yard pricing plus a 7.5 to 20 percent material markup beats big-box retail on anything custom, non-stock, or out of the standard 30 in. and 36 in. widths.
• Start with interior pre-hungs, storm doors and lockset swaps. They are indoors, forgiving, and they teach you the reveal before you are cutting into someone's weatherproofing.
• Photograph every job square-on with the door open and closed, and ask for a Google review the day you collect payment.

How much does it cost to start a door installation business?

Most start for $2,000 to $10,000 out of a home garage, hauling in a pickup. Add a 6x12 trailer and you are near $11,000; a new cargo van puts a one-truck outfit past $60,000.

The biggest early decision is not a tool, it is how you haul doors. A 2026 Ford Transit 250 cargo van starts at $51,795 and the high-roof extended version at $56,395. A 6x12 enclosed trailer runs $5,280 to $8,495, carries 36 in. by 80 in. pre-hung units lying flat, and costs roughly one-seventh as much. If you already own a half-ton pickup, haul on a padded rack for the first season, then buy the trailer out of revenue. The roughly $46,500 you did not spend on a van covers the entire tool kit, a year of insurance and a material float several times over.

The $2,000 end of the published range assumes you own the truck, you let the door yard deliver to site, and you are taking labor-only work where the customer or the dealer supplies the unit. The top end assumes you bought the trailer, the full tool kit and a year of insurance up front, and once the trailer is in the column below it lands closer to $11,000 than $10,000. Both are real businesses. Neither needs a shop.

Do not front-load the fleet. A $56,395 van financed over 60 months is about $940 a month before interest, and that payment starts before you have ten trade accounts. Buy the trailer, book the work, and let the second year buy the van.

What licenses, certifications, and insurance do you need?

There is no national door license. California has a dedicated D-28 Doors, Gates and Activating Devices classification; most states use a general or home improvement license. Budget about $1,000 a year for liability insurance.

California is the one state with a classification that names doors outright: D-28, Doors, Gates and Activating Devices, a C-61 Limited Specialty sub-classification. Its official scope covers residential, commercial and industrial doors, overhead and sliding assemblies, wood and screen doors, metal-clad doors, glass sliding and stationary doors and frames, automatic revolving doors, power activated doors, gates, and low voltage or manual door hardware. It takes at least 4 years of journey-level experience, a minimum age of 18, and a business and law exam only, with no trade exam. Filing runs $330, the initial license $200 for two years, and active renewal $450 for two years.

Elsewhere, door work rides under a broader class. Arizona folds it into R-7 Carpentry, which explicitly names metal doors and door frames. Nevada has no door-only classification and puts automatic and revolving doors under C-8 Glass and Glazing. Most other states have no door-specific class at all, so you fall under a general contractor, home improvement contractor, or carpentry license. What actually decides whether you need one is the dollar size of the job, and those thresholds vary enormously.

California also requires a $25,000 contractor bond. That is the face amount, not what you pay: the annual premium is typically $100 to $500 depending on credit, and new operators routinely mistake the first number for the second. Total state filing cost to get licensed in California lands around $1,000 to $1,500. One discrepancy worth verifying yourself: $450 is quoted as the original application fee for a standard classification while $330 is quoted for the C-61 limited specialty route, so confirm the current schedule with CSLB before you write the check.

Insurance is the part you cannot skip anywhere. General liability for door and window installation contractors averages about $83 a month, or $1,000 a year, which sits at the bottom of contractor liability pricing because the class is far lower risk than roofing or framing. A standard $1M per occurrence and $2M aggregate policy for a small contractor runs $750 to $2,500 a year. The moment you hire, workers compensation applies under NCCI class code 5102, Door and Window Installation, All Types, Residential and Commercial, and averages about $228 a month, or $2,734 a year, for door and window companies.

There is no door installer certification card to buy, and anyone selling you one is selling a class, not a credential. What exists is standards knowledge. NFPA 80, current edition 2025, requires fire door assembly inspections to be performed by a qualified person with knowledge of the operating components of the door being tested, and the 2025 edition added explicit trained rolling steel fire door technician language for drop tests and resets. Learn ANSI/BHMA A156.2 lock grades too: Grade 1 is 800,000 cycles, Grade 2 is 400,000, Grade 3 is 200,000, and mortise locks run a separate scale topping out at 1,000,000.

How much should you charge for door installation?

Interior pre-hungs install for $350 to $1,250, entry doors $550 to $2,400, sliding patio doors $800 to $3,500. Material is about half the ticket on average, far less on cheap interior swaps.

Quote per door, not per hour, but know your hourly equivalent so you can spot a bad job before you take it. Installation labor charged hourly runs $30 to $90 depending on experience: entry-level $30 to $50, mid-level $50 to $70, seasoned $70 to $90. New York and San Francisco push past $100 an hour, while rural markets sit at $50 to $70. If a per-door number does not clear your hourly floor after drive time, it is not a job, it is a favor.

Worked example. Marcus quotes a whole-house interior swap, eight hollow-core pre-hungs in a 1990s ranch, at $650 per door, so $5,200 for the job. He buys eight Masonite 30 in. by 80 in. primed six-panel pre-hungs at about $127 each, which is $1,016, and adds roughly $240 in casing, shims, fasteners and caulk, so $1,256 in material. At 1 to 2 hours a door he is on site two days, and he clears $3,944 over material, which is his own wage plus profit before fuel, overhead and insurance. Quote the same eight doors at $450 each and the job returns $2,344 over material for the same two days. That $1,600 gap is the whole difference between a business and a hobby, and it costs nothing to charge for.

Note what that example does to the rule of thumb. Material was $1,256 of a $5,200 quote, about 24 percent, not the 50 percent that gets quoted as the industry split. Cheap interior doors are labor-heavy and expensive entry units are material-heavy, and the 50/50 average sits between two jobs that look nothing alike. Price each lane on its own numbers.

Understand what drives the spread inside every range. On an interior door the low end is a hollow-core pre-hung dropped into a square existing opening with no trim work; the high end is a solid-core unit in an out-of-square opening needing reframing, new casing and a paint-grade finish. On an entry door the low end is a steel slab reusing the existing jamb; the high end is premium fiberglass or wood with full frame replacement, sidelights, new threshold and sill pan, exterior trim and flashing rework, and multi-point hardware.

Finally, learn the difference between markup and margin before you set your numbers. General contractors mark up total project cost 20 to 33 percent, and material specifically 7.5 to 20 percent, which is lower because material carries less risk and less handling. Custom builders run a 15 to 18 percent gross margin, which corresponds to a 20 to 25 percent markup, not a 15 percent one. Treating those as the same figure is the most common way a new installer prices a full year of work below cost.

How do you get your first door installation customers?

Your first jobs come from millwork yards, door dealers, remodelers and property managers who already sold the door and need someone to hang it. Back it with a Google Business Profile and reveal photos.

Door work has a channel most trades do not: other companies sell doors and do not want to install them. Millwork yards, big-box special-order desks, window and door dealers, and general remodelers all take orders for units and then scramble for an installer. Labor-only entry door work inside the $230 to $1,300 band, with no material outlay, no delivery risk and no collection risk, is unglamorous and it will fill your calendar faster than any advertising you can buy.

Worked example, run honestly in both directions. One thousand door hangers cost about $300 printed, plus one Saturday hanging them on the streets around a job you just finished. At a 0.5 percent response, which is a good day for door hangers and not a pessimistic one, that is 5 calls; close two at the $1,450 entry-door average and the run bills $2,900, of which roughly half is material, so about $1,450 gross on $300 spent. At 0.1 percent you get one call, and one closed entry door still returns about $725 gross on the same $300. The reason this works in doors and not in most trades is that your finished work is visible from the sidewalk, so hang the flyers on the street you just installed on.

Set up the Google Business Profile in week one and treat it as the asset it is. Add photos after every job, shot square-on with the door open and closed so the reveal shows, and ask for the review while you are still standing there with the invoice. Ten reviews with real door photos will outrank a competitor with a nicer website in local map results, and door replacement is an almost entirely local search.

Then go build the accounts that repeat. Property managers turn apartments constantly and need interior doors and locksets on a schedule. Insurance restoration contractors need kicked-in entry doors replaced within days. Real estate agents need pre-sale repairs done before a listing goes live. Facility managers at schools, hotels and medical buildings own commercial hollow metal openings at $800 to $2,500 each plus an NFPA 80 obligation to have fire doors inspected annually. One good account is worth more than fifty cold leads.

What tools, equipment, and software does a door installer need?

The core kit is a cordless drill and impact driver, a sliding compound miter saw, an oscillating multi-tool, a hinge butt template, a lock bore kit, a laser level, and shims.

Two jigs separate a door installer from a general handyman. The first is a hinge butt template such as the PORTER-CABLE 59381 kit, which mortises hinges for 3-hinge doors from 6 ft to 7 ft and 4-hinge doors from 7 ft to 8 ft, takes hinge sizes 3 in. to 6 in. in half-inch increments, and includes the mortising bit, template guide and lock nut. The second is a lock installation kit such as the Milwaukee 49-22-4073, a bi-metal hole saw set with an auto-centering guide that bores lockset and deadbolt holes in wood, metal and fiberglass without wandering. Neither jig has a reliably published street price, so quote them at your supplier rather than budgeting from a web number.

The rest is trim carpentry. A Milwaukee M18 FUEL 3697-22 hammer drill and impact driver combo at $349, marked down from $399, covers driving and boring. A DEWALT DWS779 12 in. double-bevel sliding compound miter saw, listed at $449 when last checked in March 2025, cuts casing all day. A Milwaukee M18 FUEL 2836-20 oscillating multi-tool undercuts jambs for flooring, trims proud shims flush without disturbing the jamb, and cuts through nails on demo, and it runs on the same M18 batteries as the combo. A Bosch GLL3-330CG three-plane green-beam laser, seen at $279 against a $579 list in a late-2024 price capture, sets jamb plumb, header level and threshold in one pass instead of three separate level checks.

Then the tool nobody thinks to buy and everybody wishes they had: a one-hand door carry clamp such as the Gorilla Gripper, about $36 marked down from $49.99, gripping 1-1/4 in. to 2 in. panels. It turns a two-person door carry into a one-person carry, which on a solo whole-house interior job is the difference between eight doors in a day and six.

Software should stay boring. A measure sheet template that captures rough opening width and height, jamb depth, wall thickness, swing and hand for every opening. A quoting and invoicing app. A shared photo folder. Your door yard's online ordering portal. Add a CRM only when you are tracking more than about ten open quotes at once. A wrong-hand pre-hung costs you a restocking fee and a week of schedule, and a printed measure sheet prevents that far more reliably than any app.

What should the first 90 days look like?

Weeks 1 and 2 are licensing, insurance, and tooling. Weeks 3 to 6 are your first paid interior doors and trade referrals. Weeks 7 to 12 are entry doors and repeat accounts.

The sequence matters because the risk climbs with the ticket. An interior door you hang badly is a callback. An entry door you flash badly is water inside a wall and a claim against the $1,000 policy you just bought. Earn the second job with the first.

Time the 90 days against the calendar if you can. Starting in January means weeks 7 to 12 land in March, when replacement decisions are already climbing and dealers are looking for subcontract labor. Starting in September means your entry-door push lands in the November trough, so plan on interior and commercial work instead.

What mistakes kill new door installation businesses?

The killers are quoting a door without measuring the rough opening, skipping shims behind the hinges and strike, pricing labor-only work like a handyman, and taking spring deposits you cannot deliver on.

• Ordering before measuring properly. Rough opening width and height, jamb depth, wall thickness, swing and hand all have to be right. A wrong-hand pre-hung is a restocking fee, a lost week, and a customer who now believes you are careless.
• Skipping shims. Shims go in opposing pairs behind every hinge and behind the strike plate, at every mounting screw location, to build a flat load-bearing surface that will not twist the jamb when you drive the screw home.
• Trusting the level instead of the opening. Floors are not level, bottom plates are misaligned, and walls are not plumb. Plumb and shim the hinge side first, then hold a consistent 1/8 in. reveal down the lock side. Even 1/8 in. out of plumb over 6 ft is enough to bind a door.
• Assuming a bad install shows up on the invoice. Improper installation is the leading cause of doors that sag or stick, and it shows up months or years later, which means the callback lands long after you were paid and long after you costed the job.
• Selling a 32 in. door as an egress door. IRC R311.2 requires 32 in. of clear width measured between the door face and the stop with the door open 90 degrees, and 78 in. of clear height from the threshold to the stop. Subtract the stop and the leaf and a 3-0 slab is the practical minimum.
• Quoting a dead tax credit. Section 25C gave homeowners $250 per exterior door up to $500 a year on ENERGY STAR units, and it is not allowed for property placed in service after December 31, 2025. Any competitor still closing with it in 2026 is promising a refund that will not arrive.
• Pricing like a handyman. Labor alone is $100 to $300 on an interior door and $230 to $1,300 on an entry door. Charging $150 to hang an entry door does not cover the drive, the sill pan, the flashing or the callback.
• Confusing markup with margin. A 15 to 18 percent gross margin corresponds to a 20 to 25 percent markup, not a 15 percent one. Well-managed contractors still only net 5 to 7 percent pre-tax, so a pricing error of a few points is your entire profit.
• Booking all of spring and none of winter. If February through June is the only revenue you plan for, November through January will take the business apart.

Is a door installation business worth it and what can you actually make?

A solo installer grosses $85,000 to $160,000 in year one and about $261,000 with a genuinely full book. A two-person crew on entry and commercial work reaches $300,000 to $500,000.

Run the math per day, not per year. Four billable days a week for 45 weeks is 180 days on site. At the $1,450 entry-door average that is $261,000 gross solo; at three interior pre-hungs a day at the $800 average it is $432,000, which is a number no solo installer holds for a year because bad openings, drive time, measuring and ordering eat the week. Year one is not a full book either. Figure 110 to 145 site days while you are still building accounts, at a blended $775 to $1,100 a day once you mix labor-only doors at $230 with supply-and-install entries at $1,450, and $85,000 to $160,000 is the honest first-year gross.

On material share, the industry shorthand is that about half of an installed door ticket is labor and half is the unit. Check it against the actual doors. A Therma-Tru fiberglass pre-hung with glass starts at $2,498 for the door alone, which is more than the entire $1,354 to $2,057 installed range published for fiberglass entry doors, because that published range is entry-level fiberglass with no glass. The moment a customer points at a glass-lite unit in a showroom you are quoting $3,500 or more and material is roughly 70 percent of it. Interior and labor-only work is where your hourly rate lives; entry-door work is where your revenue lives.

The ceiling scales with the second truck, not the second helper. A window and door installer costs $58,958 to $67,358 a year, about $28 to $32.38 an hour, plus roughly $2,734 a year in workers compensation under class code 5102. A second installer roughly doubles site-days, and shifting the mix toward entry doors, patio sliders and commercial hollow metal, where a full commercial steel door project averages around $8,000 and fire-rated assemblies run $3,500 to $12,000 per opening, is what carries a two-person crew to $300,000 to $500,000 a year. After overhead, vehicle and payroll, well-managed contractors still average only 5 to 7 percent pre-tax net, with top-tier firms at 10 percent or more.

The quiet asset in this trade is the recurring line. NFPA 80 requires fire door assemblies to be inspected and tested not less than annually, by a qualified person, with a written record kept for the authority having jurisdiction listing the date, the inspector name, the opening identifier, the deficiencies found and the corrective action taken. Every school, hospital, hotel and apartment building in your county has dozens of those openings, and the obligation recurs every year whether or not anything is broken. That is annual, mandatory, per-opening revenue, and almost nobody in residential door installation goes after it.

When is the busy season for door installation?

Homeowners decide on door replacement between February and June, with May and June the peak. Good contractors are booked out by April. November through January is the trough, so line up indoor work.

The revenue year is front-loaded. Homeowners most often decide on a door replacement between February and June, with May and June the peak decision months, and by April and May reputable window and door contractors are commonly booked out. Spring and summer are when schedules fill and material prices climb with demand. Fall and winter are the inverse: construction slows on weather, demand falls, manufacturers run seasonal promotions from late fall through early spring, and contractors quietly cut rates to keep crews busy. Homeowners are told to buy in winter for exactly that reason, which is the same fact from the other side of the invoice.

Plan for the trough on purpose rather than discovering it in November. Interior pre-hungs at $350 to $1,250, pocket door retrofits at $800 to $3,500, lockset and hardware upgrades, and commercial hollow metal openings at $800 to $2,500 are all indoor and schedule-driven rather than weather-driven, which makes them the standard November through January fillers. Fire door inspection work is the best of them because it is contractual and repeats annually. Book your equipment purchases, training and time off against those months, not against May.

How do you compete with the big window and door dealers?

You will not beat a dealer on door price, so compete on the install. Show up within days, quote a fixed number on site, and guarantee the reveal, the swing and the weather seal.

Understand what the big dealers actually sell. Their business is the unit, not the labor, and much of their labor is subcontracted anyway. A Therma-Tru fiberglass pre-hung with glass starts around $2,498 at retail, and their pitch is brand, financing and a showroom. You will never buy units cheaper than they do. What you can do is be there faster, be the same person who measured and who installs, and put a fixed number on paper at the kitchen table instead of scheduling a second visit with a closer.

Then become their subcontractor as well as their competitor. Dealers, millwork yards and big-box special-order desks all need installers and all pay labor-only: $100 to $300 for an interior door, $230 to $1,300 for an entry door depending on whether the frame comes out, $175 to $350 for a storm door. No material outlay, no delivery risk, no chasing a homeowner for the balance. Dealer labor is what keeps a one-truck calendar full between retail jobs, and it pays on net terms instead of on a handshake.

Win the work the big crews will not take. The out-of-square 1940s opening that needs reframing before anything hangs. The same-week storm door at $350 to $950. The pocket door retrofit into a finished wall at $800 to $3,500, with demo, header, drywall patch and repaint. The commercial opening that needs a fire label and an inspection record. Those jobs are priced on skill and speed, not on unit cost, and that is the only ground where a one-truck installer wins outright.

One more edge specific to 2026: know the standards well enough to sound like the expert in the room. Read the DP rating off the sticker and explain where it comes from, which is AAMA/WDMA/CSA 101/I.S.2/A440-22, the fifth edition of the North American Fenestration Standard, published in 2022 and superseding the 2017 edition. Explain that a Grade 1 lock is 800,000 cycles against 200,000 for Grade 3. And do not repeat the mistake half your competitors are still making by promising the Section 25C energy credit, which is gone for anything placed in service after December 31, 2025.