Hourly rate calculator
Most rates in the trades are set by looking at what the shop down the road charges. This works yours out from your own numbers instead: what you need to earn, what the business costs to run, and how many hours you can actually bill.
The reason a busy shop can still be broke is usually here. A forty hour week is not forty billable hours. Driving, quoting, buying parts, chasing the invoice and doing the books all come out of the same week, and none of them are on a customer bill. If you divide what you need by forty instead of by what you really bill, your rate is wrong before you start.
Put in the pay you want to take home, what the business costs you a year, the hours you genuinely bill in a week and the profit you want on top. What comes back is the rate that makes those true. It is often higher than what people are charging, which is worth knowing before the next quote goes out.
Nothing here is stored and nothing is sent anywhere. Run it a few times with different billable hours and you will see why the biggest lever is not your rate, it is how much of your week disappears into work nobody pays for.
Questions about the rate calculator
The short version of the arithmetic.
What counts as overhead?
Everything the business pays for that is not the material on a specific job: the truck, fuel, insurance, tools, phone, software, the accountant, rent if you have a shop.
How do I know my billable hours?
Take a normal week and count only the hours that ended up on a customer invoice. Most owners are surprised. If you are not sure, use 25 and see what it does.
Does it include materials?
No. This is the labor rate. Materials get marked up separately, which is what the markup calculator is for.
My rate came out higher than the competition.
That happens, and it is information rather than a mistake. Either your overhead is high, your billable hours are low, or the shop down the road is quietly not covering its costs.
Free tools you can use right now
- Markup and margin calculatorTurn cost into price, and see the margin you actually kept. They are not the same number.
- Quote generatorLine items, tax, a deposit line, and a clean page you can print or save as a PDF.
- Invoice generatorThe same builder with an invoice number, a due date and how you want to be paid.
Knowing the rate is half of it.
The other half is getting it onto every quote without retyping it. Join the early access list.