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Stop charging what the shop down the road charges.

Start from what you need to earn and what the doors cost to keep open. Divide by the hours you can honestly bill for — not the hours you work. That's your floor.

What you need

Yearly figures for pay, monthly for the bills. Rough is fine — this is a floor, not a forecast.

Take-home pay you want$a year, after taxTax you set aside%income + self-employmentShop overhead$rent, power, insurance, software — a monthMachines$payments or replacement fund — a month

Hours you actually have

The one that catches people out: quoting, cleaning, buying stock and machine fettling all come out of the same week and none of them are on an invoice.

Hours workedhra weekWeeks workedwka year, after holiday

Of those hours, billable — 55%1056 billable · 864 unbilled, a year

Materials & running costs$a year — optional, sharpens the overhead %

Charge at least

$74.49

per billable hour, all in

Your pay$47.35/hr

Tax set aside$15.78/hr

Keeping the doors open$11.36/hr

That's a floor — it covers the year and pays you, with nothing left over. Profit is what you add on top, and that's the target margin on a quote.

Against what you're using now

Every estimate is costing your time at $25.00/hr. This says the labor part alone should be $63.13/hr — you are $38.13/hr short, or $40,265.28 across a year of billable hours.

Or price it flat: $1,000.00 a month over the jobs you run in one. At 30 jobs that is $33.33 a job — switch the estimator to $ / job and put that in.

Your overhead, machine costs and tax rate are kept as you type them — the profit and loss statement uses the same three numbers, so you are never asked twice.

The labor button writes pay and tax only — $63.13, not the $74.49 headline. The estimator adds overhead separately as a percentage, and counting it in both places is how a quote quietly doubles.

!Overhead % is measured against labor alone — add your yearly materials and running spend to sharpen it.