Figure out what to charge per hour to actually take home a real wage. Enter your target pay, your overhead, and how many of your hours are truly billable, and instantly see the billable hourly rate that covers labor, overhead, and a target profit margin. No signup — it all runs right here in your browser, nothing is sent anywhere.
Enter your targets and costs. Results update as you type.
Charge this per billable hour to hit your take-home, cover overhead, and earn a 20% margin.
A full-time year is about 2,080 hours, so it's tempting to take the pay you want and divide. But you'll never invoice all 2,080 hours, and your rate has to carry overhead and profit too. That gap is why a worker who costs $36 an hour can require a $90-plus charge-out rate.
You get paid for 40 hours, but quoting, driving, and paperwork eat a big chunk. At 65% utilization, a 50-week, 40-hour year is only 1,300 hours you can actually put on an invoice — not 2,000.
Add your pay to your overhead, then divide by one minus your margin so profit is baked in. A 20% margin means you bill $131,250 to keep $105,000 covered and $26,250 in profit on top.
Divide the revenue you must bill by the hours you can actually bill and you get the real number: $131,250 ÷ 1,300 ≈ $101/hr. That's the rate that pays you, runs the business, and still leaves a margin — far above the wage you'd guess from salary alone.
Here's the full math behind the default numbers, step by step, so you can sanity-check it against your own.
You want to pay yourself $75,000, your overhead runs $30,000 a year, you work 50 weeks at 40 hours, about 65% of that is billable, and you want a 20% profit margin.
Setting a target rate is easy. Knowing whether your jobs actually earn it is the part that gets away from you. Claver tracks labor, materials, and overhead on every job, so you see your real revenue per billable hour next to the target you set here — not just the rate you hoped for.
Get started →Want to check a single job instead of your whole rate? Try the job profit margin calculator, browse all the free contractor tools, or read the guides.