Not the wage. The wage plus payroll taxes, workers comp, benefits, the truck and every hour nobody can bill. Change the numbers below to match your shop and the readout updates as you type.
A number that makes you feel sick is only useful if you know what to do next. Start at the top.
Everyone watches the wage. The bigger lever is how many hours actually make it onto an invoice. Slip from 30 billable hours a week to 24 and your cost per billed hour climbs 25%, without anybody getting a raise.
Payment, fuel, insurance, maintenance and the wrap routinely run $10,000 to $16,000 a year per vehicle. Bid without it and you are donating a truck to every job.
Rent, insurance and the office run whether the trucks roll or not. Spread across fewer billable hours in a slow month, the per-hour number climbs exactly when you can least afford it.
This calculator is an estimate for planning. It is not tax, legal or accounting advice, and your actual workers comp and payroll tax rates depend on your state, your class codes and your experience rating.
Most service shops land between 24 and 29. If you have never measured it, start at 26 and expect the real number to come in lower than you hoped. Paid time off, holidays, drive time, shop time, warranty callbacks, training and waiting on materials all come out of the same 40. Crews working one big new construction site usually run higher, because they are not driving between calls all day.
That first number only covers the technician. Breakeven adds your share of keeping the doors open, which is rent, insurance, the office, software and your own pay, divided across all the hours your crew actually bills. Charge only what the tech costs and you cover him while the company loses money.
Only for the hours you genuinely bill. If you are in the field half the time, counting yourself as a full tech understates your rate and hides the fact that the business cannot run without you swinging tools. If you plan to work on the business instead of in it, run it again with yourself taken out of the count and see what the rate has to become.
That is a real constraint and worth taking seriously. It usually means one of three things: too few of your paid hours are making it onto invoices, your overhead is too heavy for your revenue, or you are competing in a category that does not support your cost structure. All three are fixable, and knowing which one you are looking at is the point of running the number.
The calculator uses assumptions. Accurate, current books replace every one of them with your actual payroll, overhead and billable hours.