Free tool · for contractors and service businesses with a crew
Free Trades Billable-Hour Check
This free billable utilization calculator returns two numbers: what share of your crew’s paid hours you can invoice, and what one billable hour of crew time actually costs you — a floor under any contractor hourly rate. Enter what you paid each crew member last week, the toolbox-talk, apprentice-class and drive-and-shop hours that never reached a customer’s ticket, and your labor burden (the payroll taxes, workers’ comp and benefits you pay on top of the wage). Rate calculators typically ask you to type your utilization percentage in rather than measure it — including two of the files in the paid bundle — and in our view it is the most leveraged number in the whole calculation, and the easiest one to guess wrong. This sheet measures it from hours you already record.
Take it with you — free, no signup
Direct download. No email, no account — just the files.
What it does
- Splits each crew member’s paid hours into billable and not — toolbox talks, apprentice class time, and drive and shop time.
- Computes your shop’s billable utilization from those logged hours instead of asking you to estimate it.
- Loads payroll burden onto the wage and returns the cost of a PAID hour and a BILLABLE hour side by side. On the example crew that is $40.92 against $53.67 — and the gap is what the non-billable time costs you.
- Stops at cost, on purpose. It tells you what an hour costs you — not the contractor hourly rate you should charge for it, which needs overhead recovery and a target margin this sheet does not carry.
- Ships pre-filled with an illustrative six-person crew that computes 76.3% utilization at $53.67 a billable hour, so the calculator works before you type anything. Every name and figure in it is made up, and there is room for twelve crew members.
- Counts three buckets of non-billable time, so read its utilization figure as a ceiling. The paid Control Panel counts a fourth — admin, waiting on a supplier, a day rained out — and on that same example crew it returns 70.2% against this sheet’s 76.3%. Lower, and truer.
- No macros, no signup, and nothing you type leaves your own file.
Related reading
Own it, don't rent it
Knowing what a billable hour costs is not knowing the contractor hourly rate to charge
This free sheet measures one number. The full bundle is seven finished products — estimating, flat-rate pricing, crew scheduling, route and job management, safety training, apprenticeship hours, and sixteen client documents — plus the eight-tab Control Panel, of which this sheet is a stripped-back version of one tab. The Control Panel adds the fourth bucket of non-billable time this sheet leaves out, spreads your overhead across the billable hours, and works out the rate you actually have to charge to clear a target margin. It also names the file, tab and cell each number belongs in, reconciles finished jobs to hand back the payroll burden your own work proved, and turns your safety and apprentice records into a crew-readiness gate.
A one-time purchase you keep and reuse — the structured file set between a blank spreadsheet and a monthly field-service subscription.
A business reference, not licensed accounting, legal, or tax advice. The pre-filled crew is illustrative and every figure in it is invented; the 34% payroll burden is a starting estimate, and the comparison bands are Ardent Workshop rules of thumb for a small trades crew, not published benchmarks. Free to use; please don’t resell or redistribute.