Labour Burden Calculator

A wage is not a cost. What lands in someone’s pocket is the smallest part of what they cost you, and pricing labour at the wage is the single largest source of underpricing in every trade.

This works out the rest: employer payroll taxes, workers compensation, general liability, benefits, and the vehicle, tools and phone you buy so they can do the job at all.

Then it does the part almost no other burden calculator does. Most of them divide the annual cost by hours paid. That is the wrong denominator, because you cannot invoice holiday, sickness, training, the drive between jobs, the trip to the merchant, or the hour spent waiting for another trade to finish. Divided by the hours you can genuinely bill, the same person costs considerably more — and that larger number is the one that belongs in a quote.

It shows both figures side by side, so you can see exactly how much of the gap has been hiding, and it converts the answer into the burden percentage that goes straight into the labour section of any pricing tool.

It is uncomfortable arithmetic. A business can be busy every week of the year and end it with nothing, and this is usually where the money went.

One HTML file, no account, no subscription, no internet needed. The readme covers the extra step on iPhone and iPad.