Most trade owners set their hourly rate by asking what the shop down the road charges. That number has nothing to do with what your business needs. This calculator works your rate backward from the pay you want, the overhead you actually carry, and the hours you can truly bill. Runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
Math: (target pay + overhead) ÷ (billable hours/week × weeks), then divided by (1 − margin). Estimates only; not financial advice.
A one-truck electrician bills "$95 an hour" and feels competitive. Then the year ends and there is nothing in the account. The reason is almost always the same: the rate covered the electrician's wage and the parts, but never the overhead, and it was multiplied by 40 hours a week when only 28 of those hours were ever billed. Overhead does not disappear because you forgot to price it in. It comes out of your pay.
You are paid for the hours a customer is charged for, not the hours you work. A typical week in a small shop looks like this: eight hours driving between calls, four hours buying parts and quoting, three hours on the phone and paperwork, and the rest on the tools. That leaves under thirty billable hours out of forty. If your rate assumes all forty are billable, you are giving away a quarter of your income before you start. Lower the billable-hours number in the calculator and watch the required rate climb. That gap is real money.
Notice the calculator asks for your pay and your margin as two separate things. That is deliberate. Your wage is a cost of doing business, the same as insurance. Profit is what the business earns after that wage is paid. If you lump them together, you end up with a business that only survives as long as you personally keep swinging a wrench, which is a job with extra paperwork, not a company you could ever sell or step back from.
The number this calculator gives you is the point below which the work loses money. It is not necessarily what goes on the customer's invoice. Most successful shops charge their raw hourly rate only for diagnostics and open-ended time-and-materials work, and switch to flat-rate pricing on defined jobs where speed and skill deserve a premium. But you cannot price above your floor until you know where the floor is. This is the floor.
A correct rate only helps if you actually bill it, every time, without the "I'll round it down so they don't complain" reflex at the kitchen table. That is where the money leaks back out. FieldForge keeps your rate and your price book in the app that also does your invoicing: speak the job from the driveway and the invoice builds at your real numbers, then texts the customer a payment link before you have pulled away. The rate you just calculated becomes the rate every job actually bills.
Add your target annual pay to your annual overhead, divide by your real billable hours for the year, then divide by one minus your margin. That is exactly what the tool above does.
Because driving, quoting, and admin are unpaid. Most one-truck shops bill 25 to 32 hours a week. Pricing as if all 40 are billable takes the difference out of your own pay.
Net margin in the residential trades commonly runs 10 to 20 percent, on top of a real wage for yourself. If you are not paying yourself and then earning a margin, the business is not yet profitable.