Overview
Most contractors pick their hourly rate by guessing. This calculator runs the actual math, direct labor, labor burden, overhead allocation, profit target, and realistic billable hours, and outputs your true break-even rate and profitable target rate. It's the single most important number in your business, and most contractors have it wrong. There's also a free browser version of this calculator if you want to try the math before buying the Excel workbook.
What's inside
- Direct labor cost input
- Labor burden calculator (payroll tax, workers comp, insurance, PTO, benefits)
- Overhead allocation worksheet
- Billable hours per week assumptions
- Profit margin targeting
- Outputs: break-even rate + profitable target rate
- Editable Excel workbook (opens in Google Sheets too)
- Feeds directly into all Tradesman Office flat rate price books
The number most contractors get wrong
Ask a contractor his hourly rate and he will tell you what he charges. Ask what it costs him to put an hour of work in front of a customer and the room goes quiet.
Those are different numbers and the gap between them is usually larger than people expect. Your wage is only the start. Payroll tax, workers comp, liability insurance, the truck and its fuel and its insurance, tools, phone, the accountant, and every hour you spend driving, quoting, ordering, and chasing payment all have to be carried by the hours you actually bill. For a lot of one-truck operations the real number lands forty percent above the assumed one.
Why billable hours are the input people fudge
The single most common error in this calculation is assuming forty billable hours a week. Almost nobody bills forty. Between drive time, estimates that do not close, supply runs, callbacks, and paperwork, thirty is a good week for a solo operator and twenty-five is more honest for many.
That one assumption swings the output by a third. The workbook makes you enter it explicitly rather than letting it hide, because a rate calculated on forty billable hours when you bill twenty-eight is a rate that loses money on every job while looking fine on paper.
What comes out the other end
Two numbers. Your break-even rate, which is the point where you have covered every cost and made nothing, and your target rate, which is break-even plus the profit margin you set. Break-even is the floor you must never quote below. Target is what you actually charge.
Both feed straight into the settings sheet of any flat rate price book, which is where the number stops being a spreadsheet exercise and starts repricing your whole catalog.
Who it's for
See it alongside the other . Every single trade contractor. If you don't know your true hourly rate, everything downstream, your quotes, your flat rate pricing, your profit margins, is built on a guess.
Works best with
Tradesman Office products are designed to work together. Each one feeds into the next, so what you buy here compounds instead of sitting alone in a folder.
- Electrician Flat Rate Price Book, Plug your calculated rate into a Flat Rate Price Book
- Flat Rate Options Presentation Template, Present quotes in 3 tiers with the Options Presentation
See the full system on our How It All Works page.
Why buy from Tradesman Office
Every product in the shop is built by a working electrician, someone who actually uses these tools on real job sites. That means they're calibrated to the problems contractors actually face, not the problems a software designer guessed at from a spreadsheet.
- Excel-first. Buy once, own forever. No subscription, no vendor lock-in.
- Works on any device. Excel, Google Sheets, iPad, wherever you quote from.
- Part of a complete system. Every product here works with the others. See the full flow on our How It All Works page.
- Fast support. Message through Etsy and get a response from the founder within one business day.