Service Business Hourly Rate Calculator
The single most expensive mistake in the trades is billing a rate that feels normal instead of one that covers reality. This calculator works backward from your real costs — wages, labor burden, overhead, and the fact that techs are only billable part of the day — to the hourly rate you must charge to hit a target profit.
Your numbers
How the math works
- Billable efficiency is the hidden lever. If a tech is paid 40 hours but bills 30, you recover all wage + overhead costs across only those 30 hours — so your true labor cost per billable hour is wage × (1 + burden) × paid ÷ billable.
- Overhead per billable hour = annual overhead ÷ (techs × billable hours × 52). Every truck, subscription, and insurance premium has to be earned back inside billable time.
- Profit is a markup on revenue, not a leftover. We solve rate = (labor + overhead) ÷ (1 − target%), so the profit is built into the price instead of being whatever survives.
Once you know the rate, sanity-check individual jobs with the profit margin calculator, and price the software that tracks all this with the software cost calculator. Job-costing visibility is what keeps the rate honest — see which platforms do it well in our 2026 rankings.