Labor burden calculator
What an hour of that employee actually costs you, once taxes, insurance, and unproductive hours are in the number.
You pay a carpenter thirty dollars an hour. That is not what an hour of their time costs you, and on most crews the real figure is 30 to 60 percent higher before you account for the hours you pay for and cannot sell.
Fill in what you actually spend. The second output is the one that matters, because it divides by the hours you can bill rather than the hours you pay.
Payroll taxes, workers comp, liability, health, retirement, PTO, training, tools, phone, take-home vehicle.
Total base wages the indirect costs above sit on top of.
Full time is usually 2,080.
Hours you can actually put on an invoice. Commonly 1,600 to 1,800.
What an hour really costs
Estimating from the paid-hour figure understates your cost by 18.3%. On a 40 hour job that is $362.12 of margin you never charged for.
A burden of 30 to 60 percent of base wage is the common range. High-risk trades sit at the top of it, mostly on workers comp. Yours is 35.0%, which works out at 35 cents on every wage dollar.
Productive hours are the hours you can put on an invoice. Subtract holidays, vacation, sick days, training, shop time, travel between jobs, and waiting on deliveries. A full-time year is 2,080 paid hours and frequently 1,600 to 1,800 billable ones.
Dividing by paid hours instead of productive hours understates your cost by roughly twenty percent, and it hides inside a calculation that otherwise looks careful. That is why both numbers are shown.
If you work on the tools yourself, your hours belong in here at a burdened rate too. Treating your own labor as free makes every job look more profitable than it is.
The reasoning behind these numbers is in What labor burden actually costs you per hour.