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The problem

Ask plenty of restoration owners what a tech costs and they say the wage. "That's a $25-an-hour tech." That number is wrong, and it is wrong in the direction that quietly eats your margin.

The wage is only part of what an employee costs you. Once you add payroll taxes, workers' comp (a bigger line than most owners expect), benefits, training and certifications, the phone, the vehicle, and the tools, then divide by the hours that person is actually billable and not driving, staging, or standing by, the real number lands far above the wage. As a working rule of thumb, this worksheet plans on the fully loaded, per-billable-hour cost landing somewhere between 1.6 and 2.2 times the base wage. Price from the number your own inputs produce.

Price off the wage and you are pricing below your real cost. This worksheet finds that real cost.

The framework: burden and billable hours

Two adjustments turn a wage into a true cost.

1. Burden. Everything you pay on top of the wage to employ the person.

• Payroll taxes: employer FICA (the Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax) is 7.65% of wages, 6.2% Social Security plus 1.45% Medicare. The Social Security half stops at the 2026 wage base of $184,500 and only Medicare runs on every dollar. Add federal and state unemployment on top.
• Workers' compensation: restoration and remediation class codes are not cheap; this line alone can be a meaningful percentage of payroll.
• Benefits: health, retirement match, any stipends.
• Paid non-working time: holidays, paid time off (PTO), sick days. You pay for the hour and you bill nothing. Count these on the realization side below, not here, so the same lost hours are not charged against you twice.
• Carrying costs: phone, vehicle and fuel, uniforms, small tools, ongoing Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification (IICRC) and safety training.

2. Realization. Of the hours you pay for, how many actually land on a billable ticket. Drive time, shop time, rework, standby on a stalled job, and admin all get paid and none of it invoices. A tech paid for 2,080 hours a year who is billable 65% of the time gives you about 1,350 billable hours, not 2,080.

True cost per billable hour = (annual wage + annual burden) divided by annual billable hours.

Run it: the inputs

Every field has a plain-language prompt.

<aside> 🧮

Three ways to use this worksheet

• On a computer: run it right below. Seven inputs, and your loaded cost per billable hour updates as you type.
• On a phone, or to keep your numbers: make your own copy in Google Sheets.
• No Google account? Download it for Excel and open it in Excel or any spreadsheet app. </aside>

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