What goes into the result
- Wage and employee count
- Paid schedule and excluded hours
- User-entered payroll burden
- Benefits and bonuses
- Billable utilization
Price the hour you can actually sell
Fully Burdened Labor Rate Calculator
Calculate labor cost after wage burden, fixed benefits, paid-but-nonbillable time, and real billable utilization—for one role or a blended crew.
Planning estimateFormula v1.0.0Reviewed July 31, 2026
See both cost per paid hour and the more useful cost per billable hour.
Runs locallyYour result
Make every paid hour visible
Enter one role or build a crew. Valid edits recalculate automatically.
What comes back
- Annual employment cost
- Productive and billable capacity
- Cost per paid hour
- Cost per billable hour
- Blended crew rate
Worked examples
Follow the denominator.
These are hypothetical teaching examples, not market-rate recommendations. Your result uses only the values you enter.
$30 wage with 15% burden
2,080 paid hours · 240 excluded · 75% utilization · $6,000 benefits
$56.35 per billable hourUtilization falls from 75% to 65%
The same annual cost is spread over fewer billable hours
Billable-hour cost rises even though wage is unchangedIncluded in the math
- User-entered wage-based burden
- PTO, holidays, training, meetings, and other excluded time
- Fixed benefits and bonus
- Utilization sensitivity
Not modeled unless entered
- Hidden payroll-tax defaults
- Overhead such as office rent or marketing
- Local wage recommendations
- Overtime premiums unless entered as cost elsewhere
The formula can be right while the cost basis is wrong.
Dividing by every paid hour
Customers cannot be billed for PTO, meetings, most training, or empty capacity.
Using a legal-rate shortcut
Employer taxes and workers’ compensation vary. This tool intentionally has no hidden regional defaults.
Counting owner compensation twice
Put productive field work in direct labor or indirect leadership in overhead—never both.
Plain-language answers
Frequently asked
What is billable utilization?
It is the percentage of productive available hours that you expect to bill, after the excluded paid hours you identified.
Is this the rate I should charge?
No. It is a direct labor cost. Add overhead recovery and the appropriate profit target before treating it as a selling rate.