What do you have to charge an hour to survive the year?
Most hourly rates are set by looking at what the business down the road charges. This sets one from the other direction: the income you need, the overheads you carry, and the far smaller number of hours you can actually bill.
Your numbers
The answer
Charge-out rate, including GST
$177.80
$161.64 ex-GST, from $137.39 at break-even
Break-even rate
$137.39
Covers your income and overheads and nothing more
Billable hours a year
1,150
25 a week × 46 weeks
Overheads per billable hour
$41.74
$48,000 a year
Annual billings at this rate
$185,882
$27,882 of that is margin
Rate if you bill five fewer hours a week
$202.05
Same income, fewer hours to spread it across
How this was worked out
- Money to recover
- $110,000 + $48,000 = $158,000
- Billable hours a year
- 25 × 46 = 1,150
- Break-even rate
- $158,000 ÷ 1,150 = $137.39
- With margin
- $137.39 ÷ (100% − 15%) = $161.64
- Including GST
- $161.64 × 1.1 = $177.80
How the rate moves with billable hours
| Billable hours a week | Hours a year | Break-even rate | Rate at 15% margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 | 690 | $228.99 | $269.39 |
| 20 | 920 | $171.74 | $202.05 |
| 25 — your figure | 1,150 | $137.39 | $161.64 |
| 30 | 1,380 | $114.49 | $134.70 |
| 35 | 1,610 | $98.14 | $115.45 |
No published charge-out rate for any Australian trade exists from a source with a stated method, so there is no comparison row here. The rate that matters is the one that covers your own year.
What to do with this
- You need to recover $158,000 across 1,150 billable hours. That is $137.39 an hour just to break even, and $161.64 with 15% on top.
- A customer sees $177.80 an hour once GST is added.
- Overheads alone are $41.74 of every billable hour, before you have paid yourself anything.
- If billable hours fell by five a week — one slow week a month, or more travel than planned — the same rate would no longer cover the year. You would need $202.05 an hour instead. That sensitivity, not the competition's price list, is the reason to hold the rate.
- Recalculate this every time insurance renews or a vehicle is replaced. Rates get set once and overheads rise every year, which is how a profitable business quietly becomes an unprofitable one.
Change anything above and the link in your address bar changes with it, so you can send the exact result to whoever needs to see it. Nothing you type is sent anywhere — the whole calculation happens in your browser.
What this does, and how the maths works
What it does
- Adds what you need to take home to what the business costs to run, and divides by the hours you can genuinely bill.
- Applies your target margin on top, and shows the GST-inclusive figure a customer would actually be quoted.
- Shows how badly the rate moves when billable hours fall, which is the risk almost every rate is set without noticing.
How to use it
- Enter what you need to take home before tax, and every fixed cost the business carries in a year: vehicle, insurance, tools, phone, accounting, software, rent.
- Enter the hours you actually bill in a normal week. Quoting, travel, invoicing and materials runs do not count.
- Enter the weeks you work after holidays, public holidays and sick days.
- Set the margin you want on top of covering costs, then read the customer-facing rate.
The formula
- Money to recover = income needed + annual overheads
- Billable hours a year = billable hours a week × weeks worked
- Break-even rate = money to recover ÷ billable hours
- Charge-out rate = break-even rate ÷ (1 − target margin)
Reading the answer
- The break-even rate is not a price. It is the rate at which you have worked a full year for exactly the income you entered and nothing else — no reinvestment, no bad debts, no quiet month.
- If the rate comes back far above what you currently charge, the gap is almost always in billable hours rather than in greed. Most people bill far fewer hours than they work.
- Test the rate against a drop of five billable hours a week before committing to it. That is a normal amount of variation and it moves the number a long way.
What it cannot tell you
This is a labour rate. It does not price materials, markup on supplied goods, callout fees or after-hours premiums, all of which change what a job actually earns. It also assumes you fill every billable hour, which the capacity planner will tell you whether you can.
Where every figure on this page came from
Every default in the calculator above is either your own number or a figure from one of the studies below, with the market and the sample stated. Nothing here is an estimate somebody felt was about right, and no United States figure is wearing an Australian label.
Australian Taxation Office, GST
Australian Taxation Office · 2026 · measured in AU · high confidence
GST is 10% of the price of most goods and services sold in Australia.
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about working with SoudCoh
Have more questions? Let's chat!
Book a Free Strategy CallAdd what you need to take home to what the business costs to run, then divide by the hours you can genuinely bill — not the hours you work. A sole trader needing $95,000 with $32,000 of overheads and 27 billable hours across 46 weeks has to recover $127,000 over 1,242 hours, which is about $102 an hour just to break even. Adding a 15% margin takes it to roughly $120, and if you are registered for GST the customer is quoted about $132. Setting the rate by looking at the business down the road skips all of that and is how trades end up busy and broke.
Fewer than you work, and usually by more than people expect. Quoting, travel between jobs, materials runs, invoicing and chasing payment all come out of the same week and none of them are billable. Measure it for a fortnight rather than estimating — this input has more effect on the rate than anything else on the page, and getting it five hours wrong changes the answer by about a fifth.
No, keep them separate, which is why there are two fields. Your wage is what you need to live on and overheads are what the business consumes regardless. Mixing them makes it impossible to see which of the two is driving the rate — and when the rate comes back uncomfortably high, that is the first thing you need to know.
It shows both. The calculation is done excluding GST, and if you tell it you are registered it adds 10% to show the figure a customer would be quoted. GST is not income — it is collected on the Australian Taxation Office's behalf — so it must never be part of the rate you are trying to live on.
We are not going to publish one. The rates in circulation come from directory sites and lead-generation marketplaces with no stated methodology, and quoting a figure would set a price expectation on your business using a number neither of us can check. Your own costs and your own billable hours are the only inputs that produce a rate you can survive on, and they are the two this tool asks for.
Run these next
One number rarely settles anything on its own. These three answer the questions this one raises.
Job capacity planner
Compare the jobs your crew can complete in a month against the jobs your enquiries produce, and find how many more leads you can absorb before the business is full.
Your own numbers only — no benchmark used
Quote win rate
Turn quotes sent and quotes won into a win rate, the revenue behind each quote, and what a few points of improvement is worth against writing more quotes.
Your own numbers only — no benchmark used
Break-even ROAS and max cost per lead
Turn job value, gross margin and close rate into the maximum you can pay for an enquiry, the break-even return on ad spend, and how much headroom your current cost per lead leaves.
Your own numbers only — no benchmark used
We will read
your real ones.
Send us the account rather than the estimate. We will tell you what it is actually costing to win a job, which part of the chain is leaking, and whether it is worth fixing — before anyone asks you to sign anything.