Most trade owners set their rate off what the guy down the road charges. He doesn't know either. This works out what an hour of your time actually costs to put on a job — then carries the number into every other calculator here.
Saved to this browser carries into every other tool here
Your rate carries down from above. Put in a job you actually finished — one you felt good about, and one you didn't.
Labor costed at $0/hr carbon · Tool 2
Your numbers are above and they're free — nothing is hidden behind this. But nothing here is saved to any account, so I'll send you a copy you can keep.
The business side of a skilled trade: what to charge, which jobs pay, and what it's worth without you. Twenty-one tools, of which you've just used two.
Not out yet. The form above is how you'll hear when it is.
Almost every trade owner sets their hourly rate one of two ways. They ask around, or they take what they used to earn as an employee and add some. Both produce a number that has nothing to do with what their business costs to run.
The error is almost always the same, and it's in Part C above. You bill fewer hours than you work — a lot fewer. Drive time, quoting, parts runs, invoicing, warranty callbacks, and the hour on the phone with a customer who never booked all come out of the same day, and none of them go on an invoice. If you're working fifty hours and billing twenty-nine, your overhead and your pay have to be recovered across twenty-nine hours, not fifty.
Miss that and you undercharge by 40% while feeling busy the entire time.
Note the last line. To keep 10%, you don't add 10% — you divide. Adding 10% to a $95 break-even gives you $104.50 and a margin of 9.1%. Dividing gives $105.56. The gap is small on one hour and large on a year.
Anything you'd still pay in a week where you didn't turn a wrench. Truck, insurance, phone, software, licenses, accounting, advertising, storage. Not materials — those belong to the job.
People guess high, because the unbilled hours don't feel like work. They feel like the gaps between work. Track it honestly for two weeks before you trust the number. Most single-truck operations land between 50% and 65%. If you have an apprentice riding along, yours is likely lower than you think, not higher.
Straight answer: if you're a one-truck operation doing under fifteen jobs a month and you're getting paid on time, no. A spreadsheet and a phone will do it, and $50 a month is real money at your size.
The point where software starts paying for itself is usually one of three things — you have a second truck and can't see what the other guy is doing, your receivables are aging past 30 days because invoicing keeps slipping to Sunday night, or you're losing jobs because you take three days to send a quote. If none of those describe you, keep your money.
If one of them does, the two most commonly used by small trade businesses are Jobber and Housecall Pro. Both do scheduling, quoting, invoicing and card payments, and both have free trials. The one that fits depends more on how you already work than on the feature list.
No, and this trips up nearly everyone. Your pay is one input into your rate. The rate also has to carry overhead, unbilled time, and profit. If you pay yourself $35 an hour, your billing rate is likely north of $100.
You already do, whether you know it or not. Either you bill it directly as a trip charge, or you bury it in your hourly rate by lowering your billable percentage. What you can't do is pretend it's free. This calculator handles it the second way — which is why the billable percentage matters so much. If you'd rather bill it directly, the minimum charge calculator works that version out.
That's the most common result, and it doesn't mean the math is wrong. It usually means one of three things: your overhead is genuinely high and needs cutting, your billable percentage is low and needs fixing, or the people around you are undercharging and slowly going out of business. The third happens more than the trades admit.
Run the number. If your real rate is $105 and you're charging $85, that's $20 an hour across your billable hours. At 1,400 billable hours it's $28,000 a year — roughly what most one-truck owners think their whole profit problem is.