Free labor cost calculator
The wage is not the cost. Put in the wage, the employer taxes, workers' comp, the overhead that rides with the worker, and the hours that never get billed — and see the loaded rate your bids should be using. Free, no signup.
Burdened = wage × (1 + taxes% + comp%) + overhead/hr. True cost = burdened ÷ billable share. Placeholders are examples, not advice — rates vary by state, trade, and policy. Runs in your browser — nothing you type is sent or saved.
Say you pay a lead carpenter $30 an hour. That is what his check says — it is not what his hour costs you. The employer's share of payroll taxes rides on top. Workers' comp rides on top of that, at a rate that depends on your trade and your history — a roofer's comp and a painter's comp are different worlds, which is why this calculator asks for your percentages instead of pretending one number fits everyone. Then the truck he drives, the tools he swings, and the insurance that covers him all cost real dollars that exist only because he is on the payroll.
And then the quiet one: not every paid hour is a billable hour. Drive time between jobs, the supply run, the shop morning, the callback — you pay for all of it, and no client is invoiced for any of it. If 15% of paid time is non-billable, every billable hour has to carry its own cost plus a slice of the ones that earned nothing. That division is the difference between a labor rate that works on paper and one that works in your bank account.
Two costs this calculator deliberately leaves to your judgment: overtime and the slow season. If summer runs heavy overtime, your real average wage is higher than the base number; if February is thin, the crew's paid hours spread across fewer billable ones. Run the calculator with your honest annual averages, not your best week's — the loaded rate only protects you if it describes the year you actually have.
Take that $30 wage. Add, for the sake of the example, 10% employer payroll taxes and 8% comp: $30 × 1.18 = $35.40. Add $6 an hour of allocated overhead: $41.40 burdened. Now divide by an 85% billable share: $48.71 per billable hour — 62% above the wage. Bid a 120-hour job at $30 labor and you priced $3,600 of labor that will really cost about $5,845. That $2,245 does not come out of the client. It comes out of you.
Your percentages will differ — pull them from your payroll provider and comp policy, not from this example. The point survives any inputs: the loaded rate is the real one, and it belongs in the job cost calculator's labor line, under a markup that covers what is left.
This calculator prices the hours you plan. Jobs are lost on the hours that happen— the demo day that ran long, the second trip, the "quick fix" that took a morning. I run a remodeling company, and the single biggest upgrade to my own labor numbers was not a better spreadsheet — it was GPS clock-in tied to the job, so every crew hour lands where it was actually worked and the job's live margin shows the drift while I can still do something about it. That half lives in job costing software, not a calculator.
Start with the wage, add employer payroll taxes and workers’ comp, add the per-hour share of overhead that follows the worker (truck, tools, insurance), then divide by the share of hours that are actually billable. That loaded, billable-hour cost — not the wage — is what belongs in your bids.
The true cost of an hour of work: wage plus employer taxes, workers’ comp, benefits, and allocated overhead, adjusted for non-billable time. A $30/hr wage commonly loads to a meaningfully higher true cost — run your own numbers above rather than trusting a rule of thumb.
You pay for every hour on the clock, but only billable hours earn. If 15% of paid time goes to drive time, shop time, and rework, every billable hour has to carry its own cost plus a slice of the unbillable ones — dividing by the billable share prices that in.
They vary by state, trade, and your claims history — workers’ comp especially can swing widely between a painter and a roofer. Pull the real percentages from your payroll provider and comp policy; the calculator takes whatever numbers are true for you and does not assume any.
No. It runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type is sent or saved. If you want actual hours landing on actual jobs, that is what the app’s GPS crew clock-in does.