Free tool
What you need to charge to take home what you want.
Pick the wage you want to pay yourself. Add what the business costs to run. Divide it by the hours you can actually put on an invoice. That's your rate — and it's usually higher than the one you've been quoting.
What you want the business to pay you for the year, before tax.
Ute, fuel, insurance, phone, tools, accountant, advertising. The operating costs calculator adds these up for you.
Hours you can actually put on an invoice. A 40-hour week is never 40 billable hours — quoting, driving, ordering, invoicing and chasing money are all unpaid.
52 minus holidays, sick days and washouts.
What the business keeps after you're paid.
Charge out at
$118/hr
covers $90,000 in wages, $25,200 in overheads, and leaves 15% in the business
Billable hours are not worked hours
You might be at it twelve hours a day. Only some of those go on an invoice. The rest — quoting, driving between jobs, picking up materials, doing the books on Sunday — is real work that nobody pays you for.
On the same wage and the same overheads: at 30 billable hours a week you need $98/hr. At 20 you need $147/hr. Same bloke, same ute, same money at the end of the year.
That gap is where most tradies quietly lose money. They price off the hours they work and get paid for the hours they bill.
Break-even is $100/hr. Quote at that and you finish the year with the wage you asked for and nothing spare — no new tools, no slow month, no tax bill you didn’t see coming. That’s what the 15% is for.
What this assumes
- Billable hours are hours a customer pays for. Quoting, driving, ordering and invoicing are not billable, which is why the default is 25 and not 40.
- The wage figure is what the business pays you before tax. Income tax and super are not taken out here.
- Profit is added on top of break-even as a true margin, not a markup on cost.
- Overheads are the yearly total for running the business. The operating costs calculator works that number out from your monthly bills.
- Materials aren't in this rate. They get charged to the job separately, with their own markup.
Estimates only. This is a planning tool, not financial or tax advice — your own accountant knows your numbers better than a calculator does.
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