Free tool
What should you charge an hour?
Put in your numbers, get your rate. Built for roofing, plumbing, electrical and HVAC owners. Your answers stay on this page unless you ask us to email them to you.
How it's worked out
The arithmetic, in plain words
- Paid crew hours a year: the people in the field, not counting you, times 40 hours a week, times 50 weeks.
- Crew cost: those hours times the average crew pay per hour.
- Yearly cost: crew cost, plus everything else the business spends, plus your own pay.
- Billable hours a year: the people in the field, including you, times the hours each one bills a week, times 48 weeks.
- Break-even rate: the yearly cost divided by the billable hours.
- Your rate: the break-even rate divided by one minus your profit. Profit is a share of the price, not a markup.
- One unbilled hour a week, for each person in the field, costs your rate times the people in the field times 48.
The 40 hours, 50 paid weeks and 48 billable weeks are assumptions, not facts about your business. Money is shown to the cent, rounded half up; the unbilled-hour cost is shown in whole dollars.
This calculator does not know what your market pays, never shows another company's rate, and adds no figure that is not worked out from what you typed.