---
title: "Wave's regional price list"
description: "Wave maintains a proprietary restoration price list, keyed to your loss address. US ZIP and Canadian postal codes both supported. Prices are sticky to the address you started with — if you change it mid-estimate, line items don't reprice."
group: "concepts"
lane: "explanation"
status: "published"
publishedAt: 2026-05-15
sidebarOrder: 50
tags: ["pricing", "regional", "concepts"]
relatedSlugs:
  - "concepts/defensive-bidding"
  - "estimates/start-an-estimate"
  - "reference/estimate-anatomy"
sidebarLabel: "Regional price list"
---

Wave doesn't pull pricing from a third-party feed. We maintain our own restoration price list, curated by people who do restoration work, and we key it to the address of the loss so the prices match the market you're actually bidding in.

## How it works

When you start an estimate, Wave reads the loss address and looks up the regional rate set:

- **United States** — keyed by city / state / ZIP
- **Canada** — keyed by city / province / postal code

The active region is shown on every estimate under **Estimate Details** as *"Pricing based on \[Region]"*. If you don't see your region, the rate set is falling back to the closest available match.

## The sticky-pricing gotcha

> **Pricing is locked to the address you started with.** If you change the loss address mid-estimate, **the existing line items do not reprice.** If the wrong region was used, you have to start a new estimate.

This is the most-asked question about pricing in Wave, so we'll say it again: Wave reads the region once, at the start of the estimate, and locks it in. The reason is consistency — we don't want an estimate to silently reshuffle in price if a typo gets corrected later. The cost is that fixing the wrong region means a fresh estimate.

If you spot the wrong region:

1. Don't try to "fix" it by editing the address — the prices won't change.
2. Open a new estimate at the correct address.
3. Re-describe the loss (or duplicate the bad one and start over).

## Why curated, not crowdsourced

Wave's price list is built and reviewed by restoration operators — not pulled from your historical estimates or anyone else's QuickBooks data. Three reasons this matters:

- **Day-one accuracy.** Wave works the same on estimate one as on estimate one thousand. There's no "your account gets better as you upload more data" period to wait through.
- **No baked-in bias.** If your past estimates underpriced antimicrobial application, that bias doesn't get inherited.
- **Defensibility.** When a carrier pushes back, you can point at the IICRC standard and the regional database. The number isn't pulled from a black box — it's a curated rate.

## What ships in a line item

For every line item Wave places, it composes:

- **Unit cost** from the regional database
- **Quantity** inferred from your description of the affected rooms
- **Equipment sizing** based on IICRC drying science
- **PPE and containment** based on category and class
- **Documentation** required by the IICRC standard for the loss type

## Roadmap

- More granular Canadian regional coverage
- Per-customer override rates (for shops that have negotiated rates with specific carriers)

## Related

- [Make your first estimate](/docs/estimates/start-an-estimate) — where the region gets set
- [Estimate anatomy](/docs/reference/estimate-anatomy) — where "Pricing based on \[Region]" appears
- [How Wave thinks about scope](/docs/concepts/defensive-bidding) — the philosophy behind the line items