How the math works
Your hourly rate is not what you'd like per hour; it's what your year requires divided by the hours you can bill. Add the take-home pay you want to your business costs (fuel, insurance, tools, phone, software), gross that up for the tax you set aside, then divide by billable hours. At $60,000 take-home plus $12,000 costs with a 25% tax set-aside, you need to bill $96,000. At 1,200 billable hours a year, that is $80 per hour.
Calculator
- Minimum hourly rate
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- You need to bill per year
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- Billable hours per year
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Your rate, in one line
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This is a floor, not a ceiling: it covers your costs, your tax set-aside, and your take-home, with nothing left for profit or a bad-debt buffer. Charge above it when the market allows.
Why 40 billable hours a week is a trap
A 40-hour week at a billed-out rate almost never happens on your own. Quoting, driving between jobs, picking up parts, invoicing, and chasing payment are real work that nobody bills for. If you assume 2,000 billable hours a year and actually deliver 1,200, every hour you do bill has to carry 40% more. Counting honest billable hours is the single number that keeps a rate from quietly being too low.
On the invoice itself, most solo trades show labor as hours × rate per job, or as a flat price per fix — both work, as long as the rate behind them clears the floor this calculator gives you. The handyman guide to invoicing multiple small fixes shows the line-by-line structure.
Next step
Once the job is billed, the other two numbers that matter are when payment is due and what happens if it slips. The invoice due-date calculator turns terms like Net 30 into a real calendar date, and the late-fee calculator sizes the cost of paying past it. All three tools are on the free invoice tools page.
Voice Invoice turns a spoken description of the job into a client-ready PDF invoice, labor and materials on their own lines. Free for 3 invoices a month.
Download Voice Invoice on the App Store