What are you actually making per job?
Labor and materials are the costs you see. Overhead is the cost you forget to allocate. Most contractors who run this calculator discover their real margin is 8-12 points lower than they thought.
You see labor and materials. You forget overhead.
Every truck payment, insurance bill, and software subscription gets paid whether you run 1 job this month or 40. The question is which jobs carry it. When you price using only labor and materials, you assume overhead costs nothing.
Then you wonder why the month looks fine on paper but the bank account does not match the numbers.
True margin benchmarks by trade.
After full overhead allocation. Tracked financials, not self-reported survey numbers.
// TRUE EBITDA MARGIN AFTER FULL OVERHEAD ALLOCATION · NOT GROSS MARGIN
5 rules for pricing to real margin.
Divide total monthly overhead by billable hours. That is your true cost per hour beyond labor. Most contractors find it is $35-65/hr when they calculate it the first time.
A 25% markup is not a 25% margin. 25% markup = 20% margin. Price to the margin you want to keep, not the number you apply to cost.
A 1-hour service call and a 40-hour installation both pull from the same monthly overhead pool. Allocate proportionally or you subsidize small jobs with large ones.
Monthly margin variance above 8% is a symptom of unmeasured job-level losses. Three bad jobs in a month can erase what looks fine on paper.
Some job types carry your margin; others erode it. Blanket price increases miss the opportunity to selectively reprice the jobs where you leave the most money.
Get the full breakdown as a PDF.
Overhead rate, job-level margin, annual underallocation, and a pricing fix roadmap. In your inbox.
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About job margin and overhead.
Command gives you real-time job margin.
Same-day job costing. Overhead allocated automatically. See your real margin before the invoice goes out.