Workbook — Career · Created October 5, 2026 · 1 min read
Fully-Loaded Rate Calculator
For the tradesman going out on his own: your wage is not your rate.
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The most common way a good tradesman goes broke is charging his wage as his rate. Self-employment tax, insurance, the truck, the phone and every unbillable hour have to come out of the same number.
Download: FullyLoadedRate.xlsx — free, no email required, and it opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets.
What This Workbook Does
- A target personal wage, which is what you actually want to earn.
- Payroll and self-employment taxes on top of it.
- Overhead — insurance, vehicle, tools, phone, licensing — spread across the year.
- A billable-hours figure that is honest about estimating, driving, invoicing and the weeks with no work.
How to Use It
- Start with the hourly wage you want to take home.
- Add self-employment and payroll taxes. This is the step most people skip.
- Total your annual overhead and spread it across the year.
- Estimate billable hours honestly. Forty hours a week is not forty billable hours.
- Read the fully-loaded rate. If it feels high, the alternative is working for less than you think you are.
What It Will Not Do
The billable-hours estimate drives the whole result, and optimism there is the usual error. If you are unsure, use last year's invoices rather than a guess.
Every workbook on this site is free. The full set — budgeting, debt, career, real estate and the kids’ sheets — is on the Worksheets & Planners page.
Where to go next: From Tradesman to Owner — the rest of going out on your own; Side Income & Self-Employment Tax — the tax half of the calculation; The Trades — where the trade career leads.