Hourly Rate Calculator for Trades
What you must charge per hour to cover a technician’s real cost and make the margin you want.
- Charge-out rate you need
- $114
- Cost per billable hour
- $91
- Fully loaded hourly cost
- $52
- UtilisationBillable hours as a share of paid hours.
- 68.4%
What this assumes
- On-costs cover superannuation, leave, insurance and payroll tax: the employee costs you more than their wage.
- Billable hours are the hours you actually invoice, not the hours they are at work.
Why this number matters
The mistake this corrects is charging a multiple of the hourly wage. A technician on $40 an hour does not cost $40 an hour: on-costs add a third or more, and the hours you can invoice are well below the hours you pay for. Travel, quoting, loading the van and waiting on site are all real hours that no customer is billed for. The rate you need is the fully loaded cost spread across the hours you genuinely sell, plus overhead, plus the margin you intend to make.
How it is worked out
- Loaded hourly cost = wage × (1 + on-costs %)
- Weekly cost = loaded hourly cost × paid hours + overhead per week
- Cost per billable hour = weekly cost ÷ billable hours
- Charge-out rate = cost per billable hour ÷ (1 − target margin)
- Utilisation = billable hours ÷ paid hours
The same formulas run in your browser as you type; nothing you enter is sent anywhere.
Quoting in Primemgr
Send a quote that can be accepted on a phone, and invoice it in one click when it is. Quoting: how it works.
Other calculators
- Job Profit Calculator
What a single job actually made once labour, materials and travel are counted.
- Markup Calculator
Turn a cost and a markup into a sell price, and see the margin it actually produces.
- Profit Margin Calculator
Enter what a job costs and what you charge, and see the profit, the margin and the markup.
- Margin Calculator
Work backwards from the margin you need to the price you have to charge.