You charge $80 an hour. Or maybe it's $100 an hour. Perhaps you matched what the bloke down the road was charging when you started out and haven't thought about it since.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: most tradies have no idea what they actually earn per hour. Not what they charge. What they earn. And that gap is where businesses slowly bleed out.
The Number on Your Invoice Is Not Your Hourly Rate
Let's say you quote a job at $100 per hour and it takes six hours on site. That's $600, right? Simple.
But what about the 45 minutes you drove there? The half hour on the phone sorting materials? The 20 minutes writing the invoice that night? The follow-up when the client had a question?
That six-hour job can easily become eight and a half hours of your life. Your $100 per hour just dropped to about $70 per hour — and we haven't even started talking about expenses yet.
The Costs Nobody Thinks About
Most tradies, when they think about costs, think about the obvious stuff. Materials, maybe fuel, maybe the ute repayment. The real list is longer.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
When you don't know your true hourly rate, every business decision is a guess. Guesses have consequences.
You underprice jobs. You think you're making money on a quote, but once you factor in travel, admin, and overheads, you're breaking even or losing money.
You can't compare opportunities. Is three small jobs across town better than one bigger job in one place? Without your real rate, you can't answer that.
You work more hours for less money. You're doing 50 or 60-hour weeks and at year end you wonder where it went. Often you've been giving away hours for free without realising.
You can't grow. Without real numbers, it's hard to hire, invest in gear at the right time, or decide which work is worth pursuing.
How to Work Out Your True Hourly Rate
It doesn't need to be complicated. Run through these four steps for any given month:
Trackexa tracks profit per hour for every job
Log your time, materials, and job price — Trackexa does the maths automatically. See your true rate per job and your average across the whole financial year.
Try it free — no card needed →What Does a Good Hourly Rate Actually Look Like?
There's no single right answer — it varies by trade, location, and how lean you're running the business. But here are some rough benchmarks to calibrate against. These are take-home rates after expenses, not what you charge on the invoice.
Electricians and plumbers tend to sit at the higher end — anywhere from $80 to $120+ per hour net, partly because licensing requirements limit competition and partly because the work is technical. Painters and cleaners typically land between $50 and $90, depending heavily on job size and how much travel is involved. Builders and carpenters vary widely based on project type — a cabinet maker doing custom work will look very different from a labour-hire framing carpenter.
HVAC and refrigeration trades often punch above their weight on hourly rate because call-out jobs are quick and high-margin. Landscapers and pest control operators frequently struggle with the rate because travel time is high relative to job duration — small jobs spread across a wide area are profit killers when you factor in drive time properly.
The consistent pattern across all trades: the ones earning the best net rates aren't necessarily charging the most per hour — they're spending the least time on unprofitable work. They know which job types and which clients are worth their time, and they've stopped chasing the ones that aren't.
If your true hourly rate is below $50 after all expenses, that's a signal worth taking seriously. It doesn't mean the business is broken, but it means something needs to change — rates, job mix, overhead costs, or all three.
What to Do Once You Know the Number
Knowing your true hourly rate isn't meant to be depressing. It's meant to be useful.
There's also a less obvious benefit: once you're tracking your true hourly rate regularly, you start to notice patterns. Certain job types consistently perform better than others. Certain clients always drag out the timeline or create extra admin. Certain months are lean for reasons you can now actually see and plan around.
That's the difference between running a business and being self-employed. One makes decisions based on data. The other makes decisions based on gut feel and hope.
Stop Guessing, Start Knowing
The tradies who build businesses that actually work — who aren't burnt out, underpaid, and wondering why they didn't stay employed — they're the ones who know their numbers.
Your hourly rate is not what's on your invoice. It's what's left after everything else is accounted for. Until you know that number, you're running blind.
Take an hour this week and do the maths. Or use a tool like Trackexa that tracks job time, materials, and profit automatically — so you can see the same picture without the spreadsheet headache.
You might not love what you find at first. But you'll be ahead of the 90% who never bother to look.