Guide

What to bill for a helper's hours without losing money

A $22/hour helper doesn't cost you $22 an hour, and billing them out at half your rate almost never covers what they actually cost. Here's the maths, step by step.

Start with what the helper actually costs you

The wage on the offer letter is never the real number. On top of it you're paying employer payroll taxes, workers' comp, and usually a share of liability insurance and benefits. That's before they've picked up a tool.

A rough rule that holds up across most states and trades: multiply the hourly wage by 1.25 to 1.4 to get the loaded cost.

• $22/hr wage x 1.25 = $27.50/hr loaded (light overhead, no benefits)
• $22/hr wage x 1.40 = $30.80/hr loaded (comp-heavy trade, some benefits)

So call it $28-$31 an hour before they've generated a cent of billable work. If you want the exact multiplier for your state and comp class, run your numbers through the hourly rate calculator rather than guessing at 1.3 and hoping.

Why you can't just bill the loaded cost

Loaded cost only covers what the helper costs to employ. It says nothing about:

• Your overhead per billable hour — the van, insurance, tools, office, marketing, all the stuff that has to be spread across every hour anyone on the crew works.
• The supervision tax — every hour you spend showing, checking, or fixing the helper's work is an hour you're not billing at your own rate.
• Profit — the reason you're doing this at all.

That's why the working rule is to bill a helper's hours at 2.2 to 3x their loaded cost, not their wage.

Loaded cost	Bill at 2.2x	Bill at 2.5x	Bill at 3x
$28.00/hr	$61.60/hr	$70.00/hr	$84.00/hr
$30.80/hr	$67.76/hr	$77.00/hr	$92.40/hr

Use the low end (around 2x) in the first three to six months while you're still supervising heavily and their output is unreliable. Move toward 2.5-3x once they're working independently and your check-ins are quick.

The year-one discount nobody accounts for

Here's the bit most bill-out calculations miss: a new helper doesn't convert most of their paid time into billable time. In year one, expect 55-65% of their paid hours to actually land on an invoice. The rest goes to training, driving with you instead of solo, redoing mistakes, and general ramp-up.

Worked example: your helper is paid for 40 hours a week. At 60% billable conversion, that's 24 billable hours. If you're billing those hours at $70 (2.5x a $28 loaded cost), that's $1,680 a week in revenue from their labour, against $1,120 in wage-plus-burden cost for the full 40 hours ($28 x 40). Gross margin on the helper: $560/week, before you count the hours it cost you in supervision.

Now compare a second-year helper at 85% billable conversion: 34 billable hours x $70 = $2,380/week, same $1,120 cost. Margin jumps to $1,260/week. Same person, same wage, roughly double the margin, purely because their billable conversion improved. That's the whole economic case for keeping a decent helper past year one instead of cycling through new hires.

The throughput break-even: does the helper actually pay?

A helper only makes financial sense if your total billable output rises by more than their loaded cost, once you account for the hours you lose to supervising them.

The formula: Helper is worth it if (new billable hours generated x your effective rate) > loaded cost of helper + (your lost billable hours x your own rate).

Say your own bill-out rate is $95/hr. You reckon the helper will free you from doing grunt work yourself, letting you pick up 6 extra billable hours a week on higher-value jobs, but you'll lose 4 hours a week to training and checking their work.

• Value gained: 6 hrs x $95 = $570/week
• Cost: 40 hrs x $28 loaded = $1,120/week, plus 4 hrs x $95 lost = $380
• Total cost: $1,500/week vs $570 gained from your own extra capacity

On this alone the helper looks like a loss — but that's because we haven't added their own billable output back in. Add the $1,680/week from the year-one example above and the picture flips: $570 + $1,680 = $2,250 in value against $1,500 in cost, a $750/week net gain. Run your own numbers through the break-even calculator before you commit to a hire, because the answer is genuinely different for every shop depending on your rate and how much supervision the helper needs.

The two-man job trap

This is where a lot of small shops quietly bleed money. A common habit is to quote a two-man job at 1.5x your solo rate — "one and a half times because there's two of us, but it goes faster." It feels fair. It usually isn't.

If your loaded cost as the owner-operator is, say, $45/hr and the helper's loaded cost is $28/hr, your combined loaded cost for the crew is $73/hr — that's 1.62x your solo cost, not 1.5x. Bill at 1.5x and you're pricing the job below your combined cost before overhead and profit even enter the picture.

Approach	Rate charged	Combined loaded cost	Result
Habit: 1.5x solo rate	1.5x	1.62x	Underwater before profit
Crew rate, priced properly	1.8x-2x solo rate	1.62x	Covers cost with margin

The fix isn't to itemise your rate and the helper's rate separately on every quote — that invites the customer to ask why they're paying two different rates for one job. Quote a single flat crew rate that's built from the real combined loaded cost plus your normal markup, then present it as one number: "Two-person crew, this job: $X." The customer doesn't need to see your internal split, and you stop anchoring your price to a "1.5x feels fair" habit that doesn't match your actual costs.

Putting it together

Four numbers to keep in your head:

• Loaded cost = wage x 1.25-1.4
• Bill-out rate = loaded cost x 2-2.5x while training, x 2.5-3x once competent
• Billable conversion = 55-65% in year one, rising toward 80-85%+ once trained
• Crew rate = combined loaded cost x your standard markup, quoted as one flat price

If you're weighing up whether to bring someone on at all, or trying to work out what a specific candidate should cost you fully loaded, the hiring guide walks through the decision alongside these numbers.