A dirty detector at 2 a.m. isn't warranty work
The building is a year old, the detector is dusty, the fire department rolled, and you sent a tech in the middle of the night with no PO.
The call comes at night, there's no PO, and the owner on the other end is still holding your retention, so nobody in your shop wants to be the one who sends the invoice. Every one of those hours is fully burdened labor with a night premium, charged against jobs you already closed and already reported a margin on. It settles into overhead where it looks like the cost of doing business.
The size of it
Fifteen to forty unbilled callback hours per completed job in year one take the last two points of margin off work that closed months ago.
Fire alarm's callback tail looks like nobody else's, because a failure calls the fire department. Dust and humidity in a first-year building push smoke detectors into drift and nuisance trips. Sealed lead-acid standby batteries are a wear consumable that dies inside the warranty window. Elevator recall, smoke control, and duct detector interlocks quit working when another trade rebalances a system months after you left the site. NFPA 72 also requires an annual inspection and test starting one year after acceptance, which the owner reads as still under warranty.
Three moves, in order
Step 03: Overhead calculation
What indirect cost really comes to at your size, and the rate your estimating template should be carrying.
What else costs fire alarm contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What fire alarm owners ask
Charging owners for fire alarm nuisance alarm calls during warranty?
The building is a year old, the detector is dusty, the fire department rolled, and you sent a tech in the middle of the night with no PO.
What does it cost?
Fifteen to forty unbilled callback hours per completed job in year one take the last two points of margin off work that closed months ago.
What do I do first?
Keep the job's cost code open for twelve months past acceptance and code every callback by reason: warranty defect, nuisance trip, battery, other trade, or owner-billable inspection.
What are fire alarm contractors supposed to be making?
Fire alarm runs 24% gross margin, 16% overhead and 8% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade sits 1 points above it. The CFOS target is 11%.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 03, overhead calculation. What indirect cost really comes to at your size, and the rate your estimating template should be carrying. It comes from chapter 3 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.
Josh Luebker ran commercial construction projects before he ran the numbers behind them, on data centres, military bases, hospitals, and high-rises. He wrote CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System, which is an eight-step framework for commercial subcontractors, and it publishes on October 1, 2026. He is a master electrician who moved into the office and kept the field vocabulary.
Sulphur Prairie Operations LLC maintains the benchmark reference behind these figures. Every edition is reconciled against the newest CFMA survey release before it publishes here. Where a figure changes between editions, the older edition keeps its year in the title so a citation to it stays correct.