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From first call to final invoice — RevoField covers every step of the job lifecycle in one unified platform built for trade professionals.
Explore all featuresTwo quick numbers every contractor should know cold: how much overhead you have to recover on every billable hour, and the monthly and daily revenue you need just to break even. Enter your figures below — results update as you type. No signup.
Spread your fixed overhead across the hours you actually bill. Add this number to your labor and material cost on every hour, or you lose money.
The revenue at which you cover all costs and make exactly zero profit. Everything above it is profit; everything below is a loss.
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The formula is simple and unforgiving:
Overhead per hour = Total annual overhead ÷ Annual billable hours
Overhead is every cost that keeps the doors open but is not tied to a specific job: rent, general liability and vehicle insurance, office and dispatcher wages, phones, software subscriptions, accounting, marketing, and truck payments. Direct job cost is the opposite — the labor hours, materials, and subcontractors you can trace to one job. Overhead is the trap, because it does not show up on any single invoice. If you only price to cover direct cost plus a bit of profit, overhead silently drains that profit away.
Annual billable hours is the number of hours you actually invoice — not the hours your crew is on the clock. Drive time, restocking, warranty callbacks, and admin are usually not billable, so this figure is almost always lower than owners expect. Because billable hours sit in the denominator, over-estimating them makes your overhead rate look artificially low, which is exactly how businesses end up underpricing. If you want an accurate billable-hour count, use your job records rather than a guess; RevoField's executive dashboard tracks billed vs. logged hours for you.
A three-person plumbing shop has $60,000 a year in overhead and bills 1,800 hours.
$60,000 ÷ 1,800 = $33.33 per hour
Every billable hour has to carry $33.33 of overhead before you add your labor cost, material markup, and profit. Bill a tech out at $85/hr with a $40/hr loaded labor cost and you are left with $45 — but $33.33 of that is just overhead recovery, leaving roughly $11.67/hr of real profit. Drop the rate to $70 and you are barely breaking even. This is why the number matters.
Break-even is the sales figure where total revenue exactly equals total cost:
Break-even monthly revenue = Monthly fixed costs ÷ (Gross margin % ÷ 100)
Then divide by your working days for a daily target:
Break-even per day = Break-even monthly revenue ÷ Working days per month
Fixed costs are the monthly slice of the same overhead from Calculator A — the bills that arrive whether you run 5 jobs or 50. Gross margin is the percentage of each revenue dollar left after direct job costs. The logic: if 40 cents of every dollar is gross profit, you need enough revenue so those 40-cent slices add up to your fixed costs. A thinner margin means you must sell far more to cover the same fixed nut, which is why chasing volume at low margins rarely fixes a cash problem.
$8,000 monthly fixed costs at a 40% gross margin, over 22 working days:
$8,000 ÷ 0.40 = $20,000 per month
$20,000 ÷ 22 = ~$909 per day
At $20,000 of monthly revenue this business generates exactly $8,000 of gross profit — enough to cover fixed costs and nothing more. Book below ~$909/day on average and the month runs at a loss.
Break-even is survival, not the goal. Using common trade and field-service benchmarks, aim for a gross margin of roughly 25–35% and a net margin of about 8–15% after overhead. If your net margin sits below that band, the usual culprits are prices set by gut feel, overhead creeping up faster than revenue, or billable hours leaking into unbilled drive time and callbacks. To pressure-test your pricing before a job, pair this tool with the hourly rate calculator and the job profit calculator. See how RevoField's flat-rate pricing plans keep your own software overhead predictable, or browse every free tool on the calculators hub.
Overhead rate and break-even only stay accurate if your billable hours, margins, and costs are current. RevoField pulls them straight from your jobs and invoices, so you always know exactly where the line is.
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