Platform Features
From first call to final invoice — RevoField covers every step of the job lifecycle in one unified platform built for trade professionals.
Explore all features"What should I charge per hour?" is the question that quietly decides whether your business makes money. Enter the salary you want, your overhead, your real billable hours, and a profit margin — and this labor rate calculator for contractors tells you the exact rate to bill. No signup, instant results.
The charge-out rate that covers pay, overhead, and profit.
Most contractors bill between $75 and $200/hr depending on trade and market.
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No black box. Here's the exact math this calculator runs — the same way an accountant would build your rate from the ground up.
All your salary and overhead has to be recovered from the hours you can actually invoice. A 40-hour week with 30 billable hours means 25% of your time earns nothing directly — and that pushes your rate up, not down.
Insurance, your truck, fuel, tools, phone, and invoicing software all get paid before you do. Leaving overhead out is the single most common reason contractors quietly lose money on every job.
A 20% margin means profit is 20% of the price, so you divide by (1 − 0.20), not multiply by 1.20. Margin and markup are different — see the markup vs margin calculator to avoid that trap.
Say you want to pay yourself a $70,000 salary and your business runs on $30,000 of overhead a year — insurance, a truck, fuel, tools, phone, and software. You realistically bill 30 hours a week across 48 working weeks, and you want a 20% profit margin on top.
| Billable hours/year (30 × 48) | 1,440 hrs |
| Salary + overhead ($70,000 + $30,000) | $100,000 |
| Base cost rate ($100,000 ÷ 1,440) | $69.44 /hr |
| Divide by (1 − 0.20) | ÷ 0.80 |
| Recommended hourly rate | $86.81 /hr |
At $86.81/hr, every billable hour covers $69.44 of your salary and overhead and leaves $17.37 of profit. Charge the "round" $70/hr instead and you cover costs but earn zero profit — and if a slow month drops you to 25 billable hours a week, even breaking even gets tight. Pressure-test that with the overhead break-even calculator, then price whole jobs with the job profit calculator and the labor cost calculator template.
The number one pricing mistake in the trades isn't greed — it's forgetting two things: non-billable time and overhead. Owners look at a $70,000 salary target, divide by 2,080 hours (40 × 52), and land on ~$34/hr. But you can't bill all 2,080 hours, and $34 doesn't touch your insurance or your truck payment. The real recoverable base is closer to $69/hr before a cent of profit.
The second mistake is confusing markup with margin. Adding "20%" to your cost is a markup and only yields a ~16.7% margin. To actually keep 20%, you divide by 0.80 — which is exactly what this calculator does.
Know your real rate and quoting gets calmer: you can hold your price, walk away from jobs that won't clear it, and stop subsidizing customers out of your own paycheck. Plug in your real numbers above, then start a free trial and put that rate on every quote and invoice.
A rate on a napkin doesn't help if it never reaches the invoice. RevoField puts your correct hourly rate straight into quotes and invoices, tracks billable time on every job, and lets you take card payments on-site — so the number you calculated is the number you actually collect.
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