A per-acre rate that starts from your machine, not a rumor.
Custom rate surveys report what other operators charged last season, on someone else's machine. This free calculator works out the rate a job actually needs to cover on yours — field capacity, fuel, repairs, the machine's own ownership cost spread over the hours it runs, and your labor — then checks a season of jobs against an income goal.
Annual ownership cost is depreciation, interest, insurance, and housing for the machine and implement together — the cost that applies whether it runs 50 hours or 500. Hours used per year should be every hour the machine runs across all your customers and your own ground, not just this one job.
Rate for this job
$0.00/ac
Field capacity
Hours for this job
Fuel cost
Repairs & maintenance
Ownership cost (this job's share)
Labor cost
Total cost
Break-even rate
Revenue at bill rate
Profit at bill rate
This is a planning floor from the numbers you typed, not a market quote or a published custom rate survey. It does not add hauling, drying, or a second machine's cost unless you fold those into the inputs above.
Your season this year
For each job, run it through the calculator above and enter its profit here. Blank or zero rows are ignored. Nothing you type here is saved or uploaded — refreshing the page clears it.
Job
Profit ($)
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Jobs counted
Total season profit
Average profit / job
Gap to income goal
Additional jobs to close it
Private by default
Everything on this page runs in your browser. Your job figures and season list are never uploaded, there is no account, and nothing is saved when you close the tab. We count only anonymous local feature events (job-priced, season-check) so we can tell whether the calculator gets used — no acres, rates, or profit figures are recorded, and Do Not Track / Global Privacy Control turn it off automatically.
Common questions
Why does the field efficiency percentage matter so much?
Because it directly scales how many hours a job actually takes. A machine rated for a given speed and width never works at 100% of that in the field — turns at the end of every pass, overlap between passes, and stops to refill or unload all eat into it. Overstating field efficiency understates hours for the job, which understates every cost that scales with hours: fuel, repairs, ownership cost, and your own labor.
Why spread the machine's ownership cost over hours used per year instead of just this job's hours?
A combine or planter costs money to own — depreciation, interest, insurance, and housing — whether it runs 50 hours a year or 500. Spreading that fixed annual cost over the hours it actually runs, then charging each job its share of the resulting per-hour figure, is what makes lightly used equipment carry a higher rate per acre than the same machine run hard across more acres and more customers.
Is margin here a percentage of cost or a percentage of price?
A percentage of price. Fifteen percent margin on a $3,000 job is $450 of profit; a 15% mark-up on $3,000 of cost is $450 too, coincidentally, but the two diverge as the margin percentage rises — a 40% margin and a 40% mark-up are very different numbers. This calculator always treats your target as a share of what you bill, since that is the number a season's revenue and profit actually depend on.
Does this replace a published custom rate survey?
No. Published regional custom rate surveys report what other operators charged last season, averaged across many farms and machines — useful as a market check, not as your own cost structure. This calculator works out what a job costs a machine with your specific speed, width, fuel burn, repair history, ownership cost, and hours of annual use, which the survey average cannot know. See this calculator vs. a published custom rate survey for more.
Is my data uploaded anywhere?
No. Every field on this page runs in your browser only. Nothing is sent to a server, there is no account, and the job list you type into the season section is never saved anywhere — it exists only in the page while it is open. Usage counting only tallies anonymous feature events, and you can turn it off with the button above.