Free calculator · no account needed
What’s your labor per hour — really?
Work it out from your payroll, your overhead and your billable hours. Not from a number you inherited, and not from what the shop down the road charges.
Worked example
| Technician wage | $33.00 |
| Annual overhead | $150,000 |
| Billable techs | 4 |
Rate needed to cover it
$81.13/hrThe model’s own nominal case, pinned by its test suite. An example of the arithmetic, not a claim about your business.
What the number is made of
Every line has a source, and the gaps stay visible
A wage is not a cost. The cost is the wage plus what an employer pays on top of it, spread over the hours you can actually bill. The components below come from published employer-cost data, named and dated, so you can check them rather than take our word for it.
| Component | $ / hour | % of wage | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base wage | 32.17 | — | BLS ECEC, Jun 2026 |
| Legally required | 4.22 | 13.12 | BLS ECEC, Jun 2026 |
| Insurance | 3.80 | 11.81 | BLS ECEC, Jun 2026 |
| Retirement & savings | 2.37 | 7.37 | BLS ECEC, Jun 2026 |
| Truck, tools, training | — | — | Unknown — you enter these |
Three lines are marked unknown rather than guessed. Truck, tools and training vary too much between shops for a published average to mean anything, so you enter them. A number invented to fill a gap is worse than a gap you can see.
What it costs to be wrong
Under-pricing does not announce itself
A job priced below what it cost still looks like revenue. It shows up in the bank, it closes on time, and the customer is happy. The shortfall only appears at the end of the year, in a margin nobody can trace back to a particular week.
of annual profit is what an industry association attributes to pricing roughly a fifth of jobs below cost.
ACCA financial benchmarks. Cited as their finding, on their population — not as a prediction for your shop.
Beyond the calculator
One number is a start. The loop is the work.
Working out your rate once tells you where you stand today. What changes how a shop runs is doing it every month against what actually happened — and keeping the trail.
01 · Estimate
Price the job on your loaded rate rather than a rate you inherited.
02 · Actual
Record what the job really consumed in hours and materials.
03 · Variance
Compare the two, and carry what you learn into the next quote.
Fair questions
The objections worth taking seriously
My field service software already does job costing.
Often it can, and often it is not switched on, or it is fed a labour rate that was never worked out. The question worth asking is not whether the feature exists but what number it has been given, and how that number was arrived at. This works out the number. Whatever you run it in afterwards is your call.
A spreadsheet does not justify a subscription.
Correct, and we are not selling one. Nothing here downloads. What you pay for is the method, the saved history, and the comparison between what you estimated and what the job actually cost — none of which a one-off file gives you three months later.
My costs are specific to my city and my shop.
They are, which is why nothing here is presented as a universal benchmark. Every assumption is shown, and every one of them can be replaced with your own figure. Where a cost is unknown, it is left visible rather than filled in with an average.
I do not have time to feed another system.
The free calculator asks for what you already know and returns a result before you make an account. If it is not worth your time in the first few minutes, it will not become worth it later.
Scope
What this is not
- Not a field service platform, and not a replacement for one
- Not accounting software
- Not a coaching programme
- Not a pack of templates
- No sales call to get the value
- No contract, and no minimum term
- No feature held back behind a paid add-on within your plan
- No promise about your margin — the arithmetic is yours to act on