Did this job make money?

Hours at what the person really costs, plus materials and subs, against what you billed. The answer, and where it went.

The job
Labor

The hours actually worked and what you pay the person — not what you charge for them. The charge-out rate belongs on the invoice, not here.

What goes into burden?
  • Employer payroll taxes — The employer half of Social Security and Medicare, plus federal and state unemployment. Paid on top of the wage, not out of it.
  • Workers' compensation — Priced per $100 of payroll against a class code, so it scales with wages and varies enormously by trade — a roofer's rate is not a bookkeeper's.
  • General liability and other insurance — Often rated on payroll or revenue, which makes it a real per-hour cost rather than a flat overhead.
  • Paid time off — Holidays, vacation and sick days are hours you pay for and cannot bill. They raise the cost of every hour you can bill.
  • Benefits — Health insurance, retirement contributions, a phone or tool allowance — whatever you actually provide.
  • Unbillable time — Travel between jobs, loading, shop time, training, warranty callbacks. Paid hours that no customer is invoiced for.

Your own percentage is the only one worth using: add a year of these costs up and divide by a year of wages paid. The default here is a starting point, not a finding about your business — and if you are a sole trader with no payroll, your burden is your own taxes and insurance, which is usually lower.

Materials
Subcontractors
Everything else
What you billed

The number almost everybody gets wrong

You pay a tech $22 an hour and bill $45. That reads like a comfortable spread, and it is not one, because $22 is not what the tech costs. Payroll taxes, unemployment, workers’ compensation, liability rated on payroll, paid time off, and the hours spent driving, loading and going back to fix something all sit on top of the wage. The loaded figure is routinely a quarter to a third higher.

Price against the wage and that difference does not disappear — it comes out of the profit, on every job, without ever appearing on a document. Which is why this tool will not show you a margin against the bare wage. It shows both figures, side by side, and names the gap between them.

Margin is not markup

A 50% markup on cost is a 33% margin on revenue. They describe the same job and they are not the same number, and quoting one while thinking of the other is a reliable way to price work that looks profitable and isn’t. Both are on the sheet, labeled.

Where it meets the other tools

This is the end of the loop the rest of the site starts. A work order dispatches the job, the work log records the hours, the invoice bills it — and this tells you whether any of it was worth doing. Invoices you have already made on this device show up here, so the billed figure is one tap rather than a retype.

When the answer is bad, the fix is usually upstream. If the job overran because the customer kept adding to it, that is a change order you did not write. If the estimate was simply too low, the estimate tool is where the next one gets priced — with a real cost per hour this time.

Arithmetic on figures you enter. CompliMaint asserts no rates, no benchmarks and no industry averages — the burden percentage is a starting point to be replaced with one worked out from your own books, not a finding about your business. Not accounting or tax advice. Everything runs on your device.

Questions people ask

What is labor burden?
Everything employing somebody costs on top of their wage: the employer's share of payroll taxes, unemployment, workers' compensation, general liability rated on payroll, paid time off, any benefits, and paid hours nobody is invoiced for such as travel, loading and warranty callbacks. A worker's true cost per hour is their wage plus all of that. Work out your own percentage by adding a year of those costs and dividing by a year of wages paid — a figure taken from an article is somebody else's business.
What is the difference between margin and markup?
Margin is profit divided by what you billed. Markup is profit divided by what the job cost. They are different numbers from the same job: a 50% markup on cost is a 33% margin on revenue. Confusing the two is a common way to price a job that looks profitable and isn't, so this tool shows both and labels which is which.
Why did my job lose money when the hourly rate looked fine?
Usually because the rate was compared against the wage rather than the burdened cost. If you pay a tech $22 an hour and bill $45, that looks like a healthy spread — but if burden puts their real cost near $29, the spread is much smaller than it appeared, and a couple of unbilled hours or an unpriced scope change turns it negative. The other common cause is scope added mid-job that was never written up as a change order.
Should vehicles and tools go into labor burden?
Usually not. Vehicles, shop rent and small tools are generally carried as business overhead recovered across all work, rather than loaded onto an hourly rate — putting them in both places double-counts them and overstates the cost of a job. Where a cost genuinely belongs to one job, such as an equipment rental or a dump fee, put it in with the other direct job costs instead.