← CAT Adjuster Fee Schedule & Deployment Profit Calculator
This calculator vs. comparing fee schedules by spreadsheet or mental math
The arithmetic is the same either way: net profit and effective hourly rate, after daily cost and unpaid travel days come out of the gross. The difference is what happens when that arithmetic gets built from scratch, under time pressure, for a second offer that just came in.
What each approach actually does
A spreadsheet or mental math can produce exactly the same answer as this calculator — the math is multiplication and subtraction, not anything exotic. What a blank spreadsheet or a phone screen does not give you is a place that already has every line an offer needs: estimating-software cost, lodging, per diem, vehicle, mileage, the large-loss bonus rate, and the two categories of day — in-zone and unpaid travel — that get billed differently. Building that structure correctly once, for one offer, on a deadline between claims, and then building it again identically for a second firm's offer, is where a dropped line or an inconsistent assumption creeps in.
This calculator is that structure already built. Fill in the same fields for each firm's offer and the comparison table applies the same formula to both, so the two offers are judged by the same rules rather than by however carefully each spreadsheet happened to be built that day.
| Question | Where to answer it |
|---|---|
| What does this specific offer actually pay per hour? | This calculator's deployment profit result — free, private, no account. |
| Which of two or three offers pays the best effective rate for the same trip? | This calculator's fee-schedule comparison table. |
| My deployment has a rule this calculator doesn't model (a stepped per diem, a shared rental). | A spreadsheet you build yourself — it can represent any rule you can describe. |
| Is this firm reliable, and will it actually assign the claim volume it promised? | Neither. Check with other adjusters who have worked for that firm. |
| Is my data uploaded anywhere? | No. Everything runs in your browser; your figures stay on this device. |
This tool needs no account and no sign-in: it is a static page, the arithmetic runs in your browser, and nothing you type is uploaded anywhere.
Common questions
Isn't a spreadsheet just as accurate as this calculator?
A correctly built one is, because the arithmetic itself is simple multiplication and subtraction. The risk is not the math, it is building it correctly twice: once for each firm's offer, under time pressure, often on a phone between claims. A spreadsheet has no built-in reminder to price the unpaid travel days the same way for both offers, or to apply the same large-loss bonus rate consistently — and a single dropped line changes which offer looks better without showing an error.
When is a spreadsheet actually the better choice?
When the deployment has a wrinkle this calculator does not model — a per-diem that steps down after a set number of days, a firm that pays mileage only past a threshold, or a shared rental vehicle split three ways. A spreadsheet you build yourself can represent any rule you can describe. This calculator trades that flexibility for a form that is quick to fill in correctly and hard to get wrong by accident, for the common case of a flat per-claim fee, a large-loss bonus, and steady daily costs.
What does mental math miss that either a spreadsheet or this calculator would catch?
The unpaid travel days, almost every time. It is easy to estimate a per-claim rate against a rough daily cost in your head and get a directionally sane answer, and much harder to also carry two unpaid travel days of full daily cost through that mental estimate without a place to write it down. Both a spreadsheet and this calculator force the travel-day cost onto the page as its own line, which is what actually closes the gap between a fee schedule that looks fine and a deployment that pays a few dollars an hour.
Does this replace comparing IA firms on anything other than price?
No, and it is not built to. This calculator and a spreadsheet both stop at the arithmetic: net profit and effective hourly rate from the numbers you supply. Neither one evaluates a firm's reputation, how reliably it pays, or whether its claim-volume promises for a given storm are realistic — that still has to come from other adjusters' experience with that firm, checked independently before accepting a deployment.
Open the deployment profit calculator, or see a worked example comparing two firms' offers.