Termite Bond Pricing Calculator: Initial Fee and Annual Renewal
Price a termite bond from your own numbers: annual re-inspection labor, a funded retreat reserve, repair exposure, station upkeep, admin, and the renewal your target margin needs.
How this is calculated
A bond is priced backwards from what it costs you to carry for a year. Four lines make up that carrying cost, and three of them never appear on an invoice: the annual re-inspection, a retreat reserve, a repair reserve on a repair-and-retreat bond, and the admin of keeping the file open. The renewal fee is that total marked up to the margin you set.
crewHours = (inspectionHours + driveHours) × crewSize
labour = crewHours × costRate
retreatCost = retreatCostPerFt × perimeterFt × retreatExtent
retreatRes = retreatCost × retreatProbability
repairRes = repairClaimCost × repairProbability (repair bonds only)
stations = stationCount × perStationPerYear (bait and combined only)
carry = labour + retreatRes + repairRes + stations + admin
renewal = max(carry ÷ (1 − targetMargin), minimumRenewal)
margin = (renewal − carry) ÷ renewal
yearOne = initialPrice + issuanceFee + renewal (renewal only if year one is not included)
termNet = Σ renewal × (1 + escalation)^n − carry × years
(n starts at 0: the first renewal you invoice is un-escalated)The worked example above the code. A 200 ft perimeter, one tech for an hour on site plus a half-hour round trip at a 60 loaded cost per crew-hour, is 1.5 crew-hours and 90 of labour. A retreat costing 8 per linear foot over a quarter of that perimeter is 400, and a one-in-ten chance of it each year reserves 40. A 1 percent chance of a 5,000 repair claim reserves 50. Twenty stations at 3 each a year is 60, and 25 of admin brings the carrying cost to 265. At a 40 percent target margin the renewal is 265 divided by 0.60, which is 441.67 before tax.
No price presets anywhere. Every currency box and every probability box starts empty or at a neutral value, because no primary source publishes a bond renewal fee, a callback rate or a claim rate. The only pre-filled numbers are the example 200 ft perimeter, the visit time, the crew size, the drive time and a retreat extent of 100 percent, and all of them sit in editable boxes: a scoping starting point, not a benchmark. The perimeter is a placeholder dimension so the page has something to work with, never a typical house. The retreat extent starts at the whole perimeter deliberately, so the reserve is conservative until your own callback history says otherwise.
Two lines are dropped rather than zeroed. A retreat-only bond carries no repair reserve, and a liquid barrier carries no station upkeep. Switching either control removes the line from the arithmetic instead of asking you to type a zero, so the carrying cost always matches the bond you actually wrote.
The term block measures the warranty, never the treatment. The initial treatment price is entered here for the year-one total, but its own cost is not, so it stays out of both sides of the term roll-up. When the first year is included in the initial price, year one carries cost with no renewal against it: that is the point of the block, and the initial price is where that year has to be funded. Carrying cost is held flat at today's numbers, because guessing how your own costs escalate would be fabrication.
Everything runs in your browser. No account, no email gate, nothing stored or sent.
Why a bond is priced differently from a treatment
A termite treatment is a job. A termite bond is an obligation you have to fund every year for as long as it runs, and the two are not priced the same way. The treatment prices off linear feet, gallons and a day’s labor, and the termite treatment cost estimator already does that arithmetic. This page starts where that one stops, at the renewal line it leaves as a footnote, and asks the question that footnote cannot answer: what does it cost you to keep the promise, and what does the renewal have to be so that keeping it earns something.
The answer is built from four lines, and three of them never appear on an invoice.
The four lines that make a carrying cost
The annual re-inspection. Crew time on site plus the round trip to get there, at your loaded cost per crew-hour. The drive counts in full, because you pay for it whether or not the customer sees it on a bill.
The retreat reserve. This is the line most bonds are missing. A warranty retreat is measured along the foundation, so the tool prices it per linear unit: your cost to retreat one linear foot, times the perimeter you warranted, times the share of it a typical callback actually covers. Multiply that by your own chance of a callback in any one year and you have what one year of the promise costs. The extent box starts at the whole perimeter on purpose, so the reserve stays conservative until your own file history says otherwise.
The repair reserve. Only a repair-and-retreat bond carries one. It is a rarer event with a much larger number attached, so it is reserved separately rather than folded into the retreat line. Switch the bond type to retreat only and the line is removed from the arithmetic rather than zeroed by hand.
Station upkeep and admin. A bait or combined system has consumables in the ground every year. Size the ring itself in the termite bait station quantity estimator and bring the count back here. Admin is the quiet one: renewal notices, records retention, billing and the chase when it goes unpaid.
Every money field starts empty, and so does every probability
Search for a termite bond renewal fee and you will find numbers. Follow their citations and they resolve to homeowner cost pages and lead-generation directories quoting each other. No regulator, trade body or published survey states a bond renewal fee, a warranty callback rate or a damage claim rate, so under this site’s cite-or-omit rule the tool ships with none of them.
That applies twice over to the two probability boxes. Your callback rate and your claim rate are the most operator-specific numbers on the page: they depend on your soil, your construction mix, your product choice and your crews. They come out of your own file history, and nowhere else. If the retreat probability is left at zero the tool says so plainly, because a bond with no reserve behind it is not priced, it is hoped for.
What the bond actually is, on paper
The economics on this page describe a bond plan: recurring treatments paired with a warranty, which is what converts a one-time termite job into an account that renews. The warranty wording, the damage-repair limits and what the bond obliges you to do are a contract question rather than a pricing one, and they belong in the pest control service agreement you actually sign. Nothing here is legal advice about what your bond should promise, only arithmetic about what the promise you wrote is costing you. The word itself can be regulated: Georgia Structural Pest Control Commission rule 620-4-.01(3) does not require a licensee to carry a performance bond, but a licensee that advertises itself as bonded has to maintain one, tell every customer in writing whether the job is covered by it, and file proof with the Commission, which the Georgia pest control license guide sets out in full.
If you are sizing the treatment side rather than the warranty side, the termite treatment sizing hub maps the calculators that turn a perimeter into gallons, stations and a slab pre-treat, and it is the right place to start before a number comes back to this page.
Everything runs in your browser: no account, no email gate, nothing stored or sent. A planning aid, not a binding quote and not an actuarial model.