Toolkit

HVAC labor rate
calculator.

Find the hourly revenue your planned billable work needs to recover the labor and team costs you enter.

Separate paid time from billable time, allocate overhead once and compare a break-even rate with your chosen margin. This is a planning scenario built from your assumptions.

Use it free, without an account, and just as usefully if you never use OrdexisOne: this is an independent tool, not part of the platform.

See how the calculation works

Your annual operating assumptions

Use one currency throughout. Enter zero only when a cost is deliberately excluded.

People and paid time

Whole people in this cost model.

Use a blended wage if paid rates vary.

Your allowance for employer payroll costs and benefits; exclude them from overhead below.

Include paid time off in this 52-week model.

Time available to bill

Use technician-hours billed to customers, including each technician's time on a multi-person job.

Exclude paid travel, training and other time you will not bill.

Exclude weeks without billable work. Cannot exceed paid weeks.

Annual costs allocated to this team

Enter team totals once. These figures are not multiplied by the technician count. Include only the share you intend to recover through this labor rate.

For example, the relevant office and administration costs. Leave out wages, employer costs, vehicles and equipment already entered.

A share of selling revenue, not a percentage added to cost. Zero gives a cost-recovery scenario.

Understand the model

Recover paid time through the hours you can bill.

A technician can be paid for time that does not appear on a customer invoice. This model spreads the entered annual wage, employer and allocated team costs across the billable technician-hours you plan to sell.

Annual cost
Average wage × paid hours/week × paid weeks × technicians, plus the entered employer percentage and annual team costs.
Break-even rate
Total included annual cost ÷ annual billable technician-hours.
Target-margin rate
Break-even rate ÷ (1 − target margin). For a hypothetical 80-unit cost, a 20% margin means a 100-unit selling price; adding 20% to cost would produce 96.

Keep the scenario tied to your operation.

Use paid and billable hours for the same team and planning year. This model uses one average wage and does not calculate overtime premiums, tax obligations or changing staffing levels.

Parts, job materials, taxes and costs not entered are outside the result. A modeled surplus is not a forecast of net profit. Avoid recovering the same cost twice through labor and another separate charge.

Other free tools: junk removal planning estimator, software cost comparison, heating loss estimator and every tool in the toolkit.

Background: Business Victoria's explanation of margin, markup and break-even. The inputs and hourly planning model here are your scenario.

Compare the plan with recorded work.

OrdexisOne connects staff time, service delivery and operational financial context. Review the hours and costs your business records when reconsidering the assumptions behind your labor pricing.

Explore operational cost tracking OrdexisOne for HVAC