Calculate your labour rate
The labour rate is the number every calculation hangs on: it decides whether an hour of work earns money or spends it. Enter your figures — the result appears immediately, in your browser, and nothing is sent anywhere.
Productive hours
Costs per year
Result
Productive hours per year
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Break-even rate
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Labour rate, net
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Enter your figures.
Carries the rate into your workshop settings. From there Werkstattsystem turns tracked time straight into invoice lines.
How it is calculated
The calculator takes the same three steps a management accounts review takes.
- Productive hours. Public holidays, leave and sickness come off the working days of the year; what remains is attendance. Only part of that is billable — setting up, ordering, cleaning, training and waiting are work, but not labour values. That share is the productivity rate, and in independent workshops it typically sits between 70 and 85 per cent.
- Costs. Staff costs are gross pay plus the employer's share and special payments — carried here as one percentage. On top come the overheads of the business, which arrive whether or not a lift is occupied.
- Margin. The break-even rate holds the business at zero. Profit and risk have to go on top, or no year finances the next year's investment.
Where the rate usually goes wrong
Almost never in the formula. Three places produce the overwhelming majority of rates that are too low:
- Productivity is set too high. Anyone calculating with 95 per cent is calculating with a technician who never takes a break and never waits for a part. Every percentage point too many lowers the rate and turns into a loss over the year.
- The overheads are incomplete. Rent and electricity occur to everyone. Tool wear, diagnostic subscriptions, training, accident insurance, waste disposal, software licences and the depreciation on the lift rarely all do.
- The profit margin is missing entirely. A break-even rate is not a price, it is the floor.
The result is a basis for calculation, not a price recommendation. What you can achieve in the market depends on location, specialisation and utilisation — the arithmetic only tells you where it starts paying off.
It continues where the rate turns into money: invoicing converts tracked time into invoice lines at this rate, and how they reach the customer is decided by e-invoicing.