Hourly rate and job cost calculator

An hourly rate on its own tells you very little. What arrives on the invoice is the rate times the hours, plus whatever it cost to turn up, plus materials, plus a loading if the work happened outside ordinary hours, plus GST on all of it.

Put the pieces in above and it shows you each line and the total, and it works in both directions: if the figures you were quoted already include GST, switch the toggle and it pulls the GST back out rather than adding a second lot.

The four lines a quote should have

Call out or attendance. What it costs for someone to turn up, before any work happens. It covers the drive, the vehicle and the time. Ask whether it is waived, credited or charged on top when the job goes ahead, because all three arrangements are normal and only one of them is in your favour.

Labour. A rate and a minimum. A one hour minimum on a domestic job is standard, half hour increments after that are common. A four hour minimum to change a tap is a business telling you it does not want small jobs, which is fine, but it should be said rather than discovered.

Materials. Either itemised with a markup or as a single line. A markup on parts is how a trade business funds carrying stock so your hot water service gets fixed today rather than Thursday. What to watch for is materials not appearing at all on a job that obviously used some.

Loadings. After hours, weekend, public holiday, emergency. This is where the surprises live. Ask what triggers the loading and what the rate is before you agree to the visit, not after.

The border complication

On the New South Wales and Victorian border there is a second layer, because the two states do not share a public holiday calendar. Melbourne Cup Day is a holiday rate in Wodonga and an ordinary Tuesday in Albury. Labour Day is March on one side and October on the other. A business that works both sides has two of each.

If you are being charged a public holiday loading, the calendar that applies is the one for the state the work is in. The public holiday comparison lays both states out for any year, and the border check tells you which calendar applies to a given town.

GST on top or already in

Trade quotes to householders are usually given GST inclusive and quotes to businesses are usually given ex GST, which is exactly how the same job ends up looking like two different prices. Set the toggle to match the quote you were given and the breakdown will agree with the piece of paper in front of you.

A business that is not registered for GST cannot charge a GST line at all. If there is one on the invoice, the ABN checker will take you to the register that says whether they are entitled to it.

If you are the one quoting

This calculator answers what a job costs at a given rate. The harder question is what your rate should be in the first place, and that is a different sum: income target, plus superannuation, plus overheads, divided by the hours you can actually bill. The contractor rate calculator does that one.