Fieldpaid › Free tools › Hourly Rate Calculator
To set your hourly rate: add the pay you want to your annual overhead, divide by your realistic billable hours for the year, then add a profit margin. The result is almost always higher than people expect — because your rate has to carry the truck, insurance, and slow weeks, not just your wage.
Contractor Hourly Rate Calculator
Find the hourly rate you actually need to charge to cover your pay, your overhead, and a real profit — not just break even.
Your business
Recommended hourly rate
Charge at least this to cover your pay, overhead, and target profit
Break-even rate
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Before any profit
Billable hours / yr
—
What you can actually invoice
Total to cover each year
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Your pay plus business overhead
Charge what the work is worth
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Why your rate has to be higher than your wage
The most common pricing mistake in the trades is charging a rate based on what you want to earn per hour, ignoring two facts: not every hour is billable, and your rate has to pay for the whole business, not just you.
You might work 40 hours a week, but you can only invoice the hours spent on a job. Driving, quoting, ordering materials, invoicing, and chasing payment are all unbillable — so a 40-hour week is often only 25–35 billable hours. Spread your target income across the smaller number and the real rate jumps.
Then there is overhead: the truck, fuel, insurance, licensing, tools, phone, software, and the slow weeks where the phone does not ring. Every billable hour has to carry a share of that. The rate that results — your fully-loaded labor rate — is what you should use when pricing jobs and logging actuals, not your personal wage.
For the full breakdown of how to build this number, read How to Calculate Your Fully-Loaded Labor Rate. To price a whole job once you have your rate, see How to Price a Job as a Contractor.
Built into Fieldpaid
Put your real rate to work on every job.
Fieldpaid prices labor at your set rate, builds quotes from your QuickBooks items, and then shows real margin vs quoted margin once the invoice clears — so you can see whether your rate is actually holding up.
Get started free7-day free trial · $20/month after · works with your existing QuickBooks
Common questions
How do I calculate my hourly rate as a contractor?
Add the take-home pay you want to your annual business overhead, then divide by your realistic annual billable hours (billable hours per week × weeks worked). That gives your break-even rate. Add a profit margin on top so the business earns more than a wage. Most solo trade contractors land between $75 and $150 per hour once overhead is included.
Why is my billable rate higher than what I pay myself?
Because not every working hour is billable and your rate has to carry overhead, not just wages. If you work 40 hours but only bill 30, and you also have to cover the truck, insurance, and slow weeks, the rate you charge per billable hour is far higher than your personal pay rate. This is the fully-loaded labor rate.
How many billable hours can a contractor actually charge?
Most solo contractors bill 25–35 hours in a 40-hour week once you subtract driving, quoting, invoicing, ordering materials, and admin. Over a year, allowing for holidays and slow periods, 1,200–1,700 billable hours is realistic. Using 2,080 (all working hours) badly understates the rate you need.