Plumber Flat-Rate Price Calculator · guide
Short answer: work out what one billable hour truly costs you, multiply by the hours the job takes including the drive, divide by one minus the margin you want, add the parts at a tiered markup and round up. The calculator does it for your own numbers and builds a whole price book you can export as CSV.
Everything below is arithmetic on invented numbers. Not business, tax, legal or licensing advice. Costs, prices and rules belong to your shop and your area. No warranty.
Take a plumber paid $35 an hour with 25 percent burden (payroll tax, workers' comp, benefits): $43.75 an hour loaded. Over 2,080 paid hours that is $91,000.00 a year, but only 1,300 hours a year are sold, so each billable hour carries $70.00 of wages. Add $15,000 of truck, $6,000 of insurance, $3,500 of tools and $14,500 of phone, software, licence, office and marketing: $39,000 a year, or $30.00 per billable hour. The true cost is $100.00 an hour.
The billable-hours figure does most of the damage. Count every paid hour as billable and the cost looks like $62.50 an hour; at 1,000 billable hours it is $130.00.
A job with 2 hours on site, 0.75 hours of travel and a parts run is 2.75 hours of your day. At $100.00 that is $275.00 of time cost. A flat rate has to carry the travel; there is no line to add it on afterwards.
At a 30 percent margin the time charge is $275.00 / 0.70 = $392.86. Parts cost $120.00 and are marked up on tiers like tax brackets: 100 percent on the first $25, 60 percent from $25 to $100, 40 percent from $100 to $500 and 25 percent above that. That is $25.00 + $45.00 + $8.00 = $78.00 of markup, so the parts charge is $198.00.
$392.86 + $198.00 = $590.86, rounded up to the next $5 is $595.00. Your cost is $395.00, so the job leaves $200.00, a margin of 33.6%, and an effective $172.73 an hour after parts.
3.5 hours on site, 1 hour of travel and $900.00 of parts. The time cost is $450.00 and the time charge $642.86. The parts markup is $25.00 + $45.00 + $160.00 + $100.00 = $330.00, so parts are charged at $1,230.00 and the job prices at $1,875.00. Cost is $1,350.00, the profit is $525.00 and the margin is 28.0% because the rounding and the lower tier on the big part both pull it away from the 30 percent aimed at time; the effective rate is $216.67 an hour after parts.
List your common jobs, give each an honest on-site time, travel time and parts cost, then price every one the same way: true cost per billable hour times hours, divided by one minus your margin, plus parts at a tiered markup, rounded up. On the default numbers a 2.75-hour job with $120.00 of parts prices at $595.00.
Because only billable hours earn money. On the defaults $70.00 of wages and burden and $30.00 of truck, insurance, tools and overhead make a true cost of $100.00 per billable hour. Assume every one of the 2,080 paid hours is billable and the same job prices at $445.00; at 1,000 billable hours it needs $710.00.
Many shops use a sliding scale so small parts carry a high percentage and big parts a low one. On the default tiers $120.00 of parts earns $78.00 of markup, an effective 65.0%, and $900.00 of parts earns $330.00, an effective 36.7%.
No. It is arithmetic on invented numbers; check every figure against your own records. Not business, tax, legal or licensing advice. No warranty.