Overhead Recovery Rate Calculator

A hundred and twenty thousand of overhead, budgeted over six thousand chargeable hours. Twenty pounds an hour, built into every quote.

Sell four thousand eight hundred and twenty-four thousand of it is never recovered.

The overhead did not fall when the work did. That is what made it overhead. So a quiet year does not cost less to run — it costs exactly the same and there are fewer hours to carry it, which is why the cost per hour goes up precisely when you can least afford it.

The rate should have been twenty-five. Every hour you sold was priced five short, which is a quarter of the rate itself, and you find that out at the year end rather than at the time.

That is the second half of the problem and it is worth stating plainly: an absorption rate is budgeted overhead divided by budgeted hours, and the second of those is a forecast. When the forecast is wrong every quote made at that rate was wrong too, quietly, all year.

The table shows every level of trading against what it recovers and what rate would have been right, so you can see how fast the hole opens as the hours slip.

It does not tell you to raise the rate. That is the trap and the page will not pretend to resolve it: the moment the rate most needs raising is the moment work is scarce, and raising it then prices you out of the very work that would have recovered the overhead. Both of those are true at once. What the arithmetic can do is put the size of the hole in front of you while there is still time to decide something about it.

If a cost falls when the work falls, it is not overhead and it does not belong in the box. Materials, subcontractors, anything paid by the job — putting those in makes the shortfall look far worse than it is.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all. Comparing the year you set the rate with the year you lived through is the whole exercise.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.