What Your Hour Actually Costs: Building a Billable Rate and a Service-Call Fee from Public Data

Quick answer: There is no published survey of what contractors charge per hour or per service call; the figures on ranking pages are unsourced. What is published is cost. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' May 2025 median hourly wage is $29.33 for HVAC technicians, $30.67 for plumbers, $30.38 for electricians, $29.12 for carpenters, $26.65 for roofers, $23.75 for painters, $21.75 for pest control workers, $18.82 for landscapers and $17.07 for house cleaners. The BLS June 2026 Employer Costs release puts benefits at 30 percent of total compensation for private industry, so a wage carries about 43 percent on top of it. Divide that loaded wage by the share of paid hours you actually bill, add overhead per billable hour, and divide by one minus your target margin: at the HVAC median, a 1.43 burden, 65 percent utilization, $30 of overhead per billable hour and a 20 percent margin, the arithmetic gives $118 per hour. A service-call fee is the trip (drive time at the loaded wage plus miles at the IRS rate, 76 cents since July 1, 2026) plus the first diagnostic block. After-hours pricing is derived from the FLSA: half-time over the regular rate on a technician's hours past 40, plus any standby that counts as work under 29 CFR 785.17. The output of this reference is your number, not an average.

The wage floor: BLS May 2025, nine trades

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program publishes hourly wage percentiles for about 830 occupations. The May 2025 national figures for the service trades, pulled from the BLS public API on October 26, 2026:

Three things to know about this table. It counts employees, not owner-operators, so your own labor is priced here at what you would pay someone to replace you. The mean sits above the median in every trade because the top of the distribution pulls it up; use the median for a typical technician and the 75th or 90th percentile for a lead. And it is national; the same series exist by state and metro area, and your market's figure is the one to use.

Errata: what the ranking pages get wrong

From wage to loaded cost

The burden. The BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026: "Total employer compensation costs for private industry workers averaged $46.89 per hour worked in June 2026. Wages and salaries averaged $32.82 and accounted for 70.0 percent of employer costs, while benefit costs averaged $14.07 and accounted for the remaining 30.0 percent." Benefits divided by wages is $14.07 ÷ $32.82 = 42.9 percent. That figure includes legally required costs (the employer's Social Security and Medicare share, unemployment insurance, workers' compensation), paid leave, insurance and retirement. A small contractor who pays no health insurance and no retirement will sit below it; one in a high workers' compensation class (roofing) may sit above it. Use your own payroll numbers if you have them; the BLS ratio is the public default.

Loaded wage = wage × (1 + 0.429). At the HVAC median: $29.33 × 1.429 = $41.91 per paid hour.

Utilization. A technician is paid for every hour on the clock and billed for the hours on a job. Drive time, shop time, callbacks, training, quoting and idle time are paid and unbilled. If a technician is paid 2,080 hours and bills 1,350 of them, utilization is 65 percent. Cost per billable hour = loaded wage ÷ utilization = $41.91 ÷ 0.65 = $64.48.

Overhead per billable hour. Everything that is not technician labor: vehicles, insurance, software, phone, office, licenses, tools, advertising, the owner's unbilled time. Annual overhead divided by annual billable hours. This number is yours; $30 per billable hour is used below only to carry the example through.

Margin. Rate = (cost per billable hour + overhead per billable hour) ÷ (1 − target margin). At a 20 percent margin: ($64.48 + $30.00) ÷ 0.80 = $118.10 per billable hour.

The same arithmetic across trades, at the May 2025 median, 1.43 burden, 65 percent utilization, $30 overhead per billable hour and 20 percent margin, so the inputs are identical and only the wage moves:

These are not rates to charge. They are what the median wage implies at one set of assumptions. Change utilization to 80 percent and the HVAC figure drops to $103; add $20 of overhead and it rises to $143; raise the margin to 30 percent and it is $135. The spread between contractors in the same trade is almost entirely those three numbers.

The service-call fee, built the same way

A service call or diagnostic fee recovers the cost of showing up and the first block of diagnostic time, whether or not the job proceeds. Its components are public:

1. Drive time, paid but unbilled: (minutes ÷ 60) × loaded wage. Twenty minutes each way at the HVAC loaded wage is 0.67 × $41.91 = $27.94.
2. Vehicle: round-trip miles × the IRS business rate. The IRS set the 2026 rate at "72.5 cents per mile driven for business use" (IR-2025-128, December 29, 2025) and raised it to "76 cents per mile" for expenses on or after July 1, 2026 (Announcement 2026-11). Twenty miles round trip at 76 cents is $15.20.
3. The first diagnostic block at the billable rate: 30 minutes at $118 is $59.
4. Overhead on the visit is already inside the billable rate if overhead was spread over billable hours; do not count it twice.

That trip costs $43 before any diagnosis and about $102 with a half hour of it. A fee below the trip cost is a subsidy; a fee at the trip cost is break-even on a no-sale.

Waive or credit. Crediting the fee against the job when the customer proceeds means the trip is recovered inside the job price; waiving it means the job price must carry it. Both are legitimate. The arithmetic only requires that someone pays for the drive.

Emergency and after-hours. Two federal rules set the cost. Overtime: a technician's hours over 40 in the week earn half-time over the regular rate (29 CFR 778.111 for piece-rate workers; the same half-time premium applies to hourly workers). Standby: "An employee who is required to remain on call on the employer's premises or so close thereto that he cannot use the time effectively for his own purposes is working while 'on call'"; one "merely required to leave word at his home or with company officials where he may be reached is not working while on call" (29 CFR 785.17). An evening call that pushes a technician past 40 hours costs 1.5 times the wage for those hours; a technician required to stay within fifteen minutes of the shop all weekend is on the clock the whole weekend. The after-hours multiplier is whatever those costs come to over the hours billed, not a convention.

Worked example, one truck

An HVAC owner-operator pays one technician at the 75th percentile ($37.05) and bills 1,300 of 2,080 paid hours (62.5 percent). Overhead, including the owner's own unbilled time at a replacement wage, is $78,000 a year, or $60 per billable hour. Target margin 25 percent.

• Loaded wage: $37.05 × 1.429 = $52.94
• Cost per billable hour: $52.94 ÷ 0.625 = $84.70
• Rate: ($84.70 + $60.00) ÷ 0.75 = $192.93 per billable hour
• Service call, 25 minutes each way, 24 miles: drive 0.83 × $52.94 = $44.12; vehicle 24 × $0.76 = $18.24; first half hour $96.47; fee at cost $158.83

A contractor with the same technician who bills 1,800 of those 2,080 hours instead of 1,300, because the service area is tighter and the schedule denser, runs the same arithmetic to a rate near $140. Density, not the wage, is the lever.

Method and limits

Wage figures are the May 2025 OEWS national estimates retrieved from the BLS public API on October 26, 2026; the BLS website blocks automated readers, so the HTML profile pages are linked for human verification. The benefits ratio is the private-industry average from the June 2026 ECEC release; construction-industry and regional ratios differ and were not pulled. Utilization, overhead and margin are assumptions stated in the text, not measurements, and every rate shown is the output of those assumptions at the median wage. No survey of contractor rates or fees was found that states its sample and method; none is cited. This reference will be refreshed when BLS releases May 2026 estimates.

Last verified 2026-10-26. Not pricing, legal or tax advice.