True labour cost calculator
Find what an hour of work actually costs your business — wages plus employer on-costs, spread over the hours someone really works and the share of time that's productive — the number your job pricing should use.
Labour cost
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Why the headline wage is never the real rate
Someone on £28,000 at 40 hours a week looks like £13.46/hour. But the business also pays on-costs (say 15% — £32,200 total), and they're actually at work fewer hours than contracted once 28 days of holiday and a few sick days come out (1,824 of 2,080 hours). That's already £17.65 per worked hour.
Then only part of a worked hour is productive: machines get cleaned, quotes get written, deliveries get signed for. At 75% productive utilisation, the cost per productive hour is £23.54 — about 1.75× the headline wage. If your job pricing charges labour at £13.46, every job is subsidised.
Using the result
Use cost per productive hour as the labour rate in the job profit calculator, or add a margin on top of it if you want labour itself to be profitable. The multiplier output is a useful rule of thumb for quick quotes: headline wage × multiplier ≈ true rate.
Assumptions
The 15% on-costs default is an illustrative starting point, not a statutory rate.
A working day is contracted weekly hours ÷ 5.
The 75% productive-share default assumes a hands-on production role.
Limitations
- An estimate for pricing, not payroll or tax guidance.
- Doesn't model overtime, seasonal patterns, or training time separately — fold them into the productive share.
Common questions
What on-costs percentage should I use?
Take it from your own payroll: employer social contributions plus pension plus any benefits, divided by gross pay. It varies by country and salary level, so the calculator deliberately doesn't hardcode a statutory rate.
Does this apply to my own time as an owner?
Yes — decide the salary you should be paid, and run it through. Owners who price their own hours at zero build businesses that can't afford to employ their replacement.
Calculator
Print job profit calculator
Work out the true cost, profit, and margin on any print or decoration job — materials, labour, setup time, and overhead included — and see the price you'd need to charge to hit a target margin.
Guide
How to price print jobs: costs, margin, and what shops get wrong
A practical pricing method for print and decoration businesses: build the true cost of a job (materials, labour, setup, overhead), choose margin deliberately, and avoid the mistakes — free owner labour, margin/markup confusion, and copying competitor prices.
Calculator
Break-even calculator
Find how many jobs or units you need to sell each month to cover your fixed costs, and how many more to hit a profit target — using contribution margin, the standard break-even method.
Turn these numbers into quotes customers can approve
damantra takes the pricing you work out here and runs the whole job — quote, approval, production board, portal, invoice — in one calm system.