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What does this job actually cost you?

Price a job off your tech’s wage and you’ll lose money on work that looks profitable. Load labor for burden and utilization, add materials, and see what you’d really have to charge to hit your margin — benchmarked against the Home Services Metrics Scorecard.

To job-cost a home-services job, start with the loaded labor rate — base wage × (1 + payroll burden %) ÷ billable utilization %. A tech paid $35/hour at 30% burden and 60% utilization costs about $76 per billable hour, not $35. True job cost is loaded labor plus materials; to hit a target gross margin, divide that cost by (1 − target margin %). Pricing off the unloaded wage is the single most common reason a contractor’s jobs look profitable while the business isn’t.

This job’s numbers

Best guesses are fine — this is directional. Your books will tell the real story.

True cost of a billable hour

$75.83

A tech you pay $35.00/hr costs this much per billable hour once burden and idle time are counted.

Loaded labor on this job$1,213

$75.83/hr × 16 hrs.

True job cost (labor + materials)$3,013
Margin at your price6%

$187 gross profit at $3,200 — against a 50% target.

Underpriced by$2,827/job

To hit 50% you’d charge $6,027. Across 150 jobs a year that’s $424,000 in margin left on the table.

Book a CallOne conversation. Your actual costs.
How we compute this
  • Loaded rate: base wage × (1 + burden%) ÷ utilization% — you pay for every hour but only bill a share of them.
  • True job cost: loaded labor + materials and equipment.
  • Recommended price: true cost ÷ (1 − target margin%).
  • Benchmarks (≈30% burden, 60% utilization, 50% margin) come from the Home Services Metrics Scorecard — the same catalog M1COS dashboards run on. Directional, not a bid.

Common questions

Job costing & loaded labor — FAQs

What is the loaded cost of labor for a contractor?
Loaded labor cost is a technician's base wage plus payroll burden (payroll taxes, workers' comp, benefits, and PTO — typically 25–35% on top of wage), divided by billable-hour utilization (usually 55–65%). A tech paid $35/hour with 30% burden at 60% utilization actually costs about $76 per billable hour. Contractors who price off the base wage instead of the loaded rate quietly lose margin on every job.
How do you calculate job cost for a service job?
True job cost = loaded labor (loaded hourly rate × labor hours) + materials and equipment. To hit a target gross margin, divide the true job cost by (1 − target margin %). At a 50% target, a job that truly costs $3,000 should be priced at $6,000. Anything less is eating into the margin that covers overhead and profit.
What gross margin should a home-services contractor target?
The Home Services Metrics Scorecard benchmark is a 50–60% gross margin, with 42% as the warning floor. Below that, the business is usually underpricing labor, underestimating materials, or absorbing callbacks it never priced for.
Why does my job look profitable but my business isn't?
Almost always because jobs are priced off unloaded labor. Individual tickets show a paper profit, but once burden, idle time, and overhead are counted, the real margin is a fraction of what the invoice implies. Multiply a small per-job shortfall across a few hundred jobs a year and it becomes the gap between a busy shop and a profitable one.

Get the labor number right first

This calculator takes burden and utilization as single percentages. To build those from your actual payroll — taxes, workers’ comp, benefits, PTO, and the hours you can’t bill — use the loaded labor cost calculator, or read how loaded labor cost is calculated. Then check the result against Margin One’s KPI operating thresholds and find what else is bleeding with the margin leak check.