What hourly rate should I charge for detailing work? Turn owner-income goals, expenses, working capacity, taxes, fees, payroll burden, and reserves into a practical billable-rate estimate.
Your costs and assumptions stay in this browser unless you print or save a document. This is a business planning tool, not a customer-facing market-price estimate.
Revenue needed per hour across all working time, including admin.
Entered operating expenses divided by billable hours; it excludes owner income.
The rate charged through customer work to recover non-billable time.
The billable rate including entered income, profit, taxes, fees, burden, and reserves.
The calculator builds a monthly revenue target, then spreads it across realistic customer-work capacity instead of every hour spent running the business.
Owner income, operating expenses, desired business profit, available weeks, non-billable work, crew capacity, taxes, payroll burden, processing fees, and equipment reserves all affect the recommended rate.
A solo operator working 40 hours with 12 non-billable hours has 28 billable hours per week before time-off adjustments. Reducing non-billable time increases capacity; ignoring it produces an unrealistically low rate.
Planning estimate only. Choose assumptions appropriate to your business; this is not tax, legal, or accounting advice.
Add the monthly revenue needed for owner income, expenses, desired profit, taxes, fees, payroll burden, and reserves, then divide by realistic monthly billable hours.
Billable hours are working hours that can be assigned to customer work and recovered through customer prices.
Travel, quoting, scheduling, bookkeeping, tool cleaning, and administration use capacity but usually cannot be charged as separate customer hours.
The break-even rate shown covers entered operating expenses only. The recommended billable rate also includes owner income, desired profit, and selected allowances.
Include an owner-income goal when the rate must support compensation for the owner's work. Keep it separate from desired business profit or reserves.
Enter working weeks per year and subtract vacation or unpaid weeks so unavailable weeks do not inflate billable capacity.
Include a reasonable allowance if processing fees are a recurring cost of collecting customer revenue.
No. This is a planning estimate based on entered assumptions and is not tax, legal, payroll, or accounting advice.
