PLAIN-ENGLISH CONTRACTOR MATH
Contractor Overhead Calculator
Insurance, vehicles, software, rent, office costs and non-billable time do not disappear just because they are not written on one customer's job ticket.
Calculate what the whole business needs
Our free Business Profit Checkup combines overhead with your owner-pay goal, direct job costs, working schedule and profit target so you can see the annual revenue and productive-hour contribution the business needs.
Overhead is different from direct job cost
Materials, subcontractors, rentals and permits that belong to a specific customer job are direct job costs. General expenses that keep the company operating are overhead. Mixing those two buckets can make job margins and pricing targets difficult to interpret.
Do not recover overhead using imaginary billable hours
The number that matters is productive customer-job capacity, not every hour you are awake or every hour an employee is paid. The full checkup lets you describe the schedule you actually work and, for teams, the productive capacity the crew actually creates.
Run the detailed checkup · See the job-performance dashboard