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Run it right here. Six inputs, and the cost per billable hour updates as you type.

On a phone? This calculator only runs on a computer. Use your own copy in Google Sheets instead.

https://gem-resource-hub-calculators.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/labor-burden/index.html

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Make your own copy: open the calculator. It opens a fresh copy in your own Google Drive. Enter your numbers and your fully-loaded hourly cost calculates automatically.

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Your real cost per field hour is much higher than the wage.

A RocketLevel calculator for restoration owners, estimators, and finance leads, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 10-minute exercise on your own numbers.

When you bid a job off the hourly wage you pay a technician, you are pricing below your real cost. The wage is only the start. Payroll taxes, workers comp, benefits, and all the hours you pay for but cannot bill (drive time, training, shop time) push the true cost of a field hour well above the number on the pay stub. This calculator builds that fully-loaded number so you can price and job-cost against reality.

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Inputs

• Base hourly wage (what you pay the technician per hour).
• Payroll taxes as a percent of wage (employer side: Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, and similar).
• Workers comp as a percent of wage.
• Annual benefits in dollars (health, retirement match, and other per-employee benefit costs for the year).
• Paid time off (PTO) in days per year (vacation, holidays, sick).
• Non-billable / drive time as a percent of working hours (the share of worked, non-PTO time you cannot bill to a job: drive, shop, training, warehouse).

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What this rate leaves out, and where it goes instead. These six inputs cover wage, statutory burden, benefits, and the hours you cannot bill. They do not cover the truck and fuel, the phone, the small tools and PPE, or the annual Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification (IICRC) and safety training that person consumes. Those are real costs of putting a technician in the field, and the only thing that matters is that you carry them in exactly one place. If your books treat them as overhead, leave them out here and let your overhead rate pick them up, or you will charge the same dollar twice. If you would rather carry them inside the labor rate, the True Labor Cost Worksheet: Find Your Real Labor Burden has a line for them. That is most of why the worksheet's example returns $51.78 (2.07 times wage) against this page's $42.75 (1.71 times) on a $25 technician; the rest is that the two examples use different comp, benefit and billable-hour inputs. Strip the carrying costs out of the worksheet's example and it returns $47.20. Neither number is wrong. They draw the boundary in different places, so pick one and use it everywhere, including in your job costing.

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Run a second rate for overtime before storm season

Restoration does not run on straight time. A large loss puts crews past 40 hours for weeks, and the burden you calculated on straight time understates every one of those hours. Build a second column.