HVAC Calculator
HVAC Employee True Cost Calculator
Estimate annual employee cost and cost per billable hour from wages, payroll burden, benefits, training and tools.
HVAC employee true-cost formula
Annual cost = hourly wage × paid hours × (1 + payroll burden) + annual benefits + training and tools. Divide annual cost by expected billable hours to find cost per billable hour. Enter a 20% burden as 0.20 in the formula.
HVAC Employee True Cost Calculator
Estimate annual, monthly, and billable-hour employee cost from wages, burden, benefits, and work-support costs.
Your estimate
This is a planning scenario based on entered assumptions. It is not a guaranteed price, payment, profit, or business outcome.
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What does an HVAC employee cost beyond wages?
This calculator separates wages from the additional costs you enter for payroll burden, annual benefits, and training, uniforms and tools. It estimates employment cost; it does not calculate the customer’s hourly billing rate or automatically allocate shop overhead and profit.
Worked employee-cost example
- Hourly wage: $35.
- Paid hours per year: 2,080.
- Payroll burden: 20% of wages.
- Annual benefits: $6,000.
- Annual training, uniforms and tools: $2,500.
- Expected billable hours: 1,400.
Annual wages are $35 × 2,080 = $72,800. The entered burden adds $14,560. Benefits and work-support costs add $8,500, producing $95,860 estimated annual employee cost, $7,988.33 per month, and $68.47 per billable hour. The percentages and dollar amounts are illustrative inputs, not prescribed payroll rates.
Paid hours and billable hours are different
Paid hours determine wages. Billable hours determine how many customer-facing hours carry the annual cost. If the same employee bills 1,200 hours instead of 1,400, cost per billable hour rises to $79.88 even though annual employment cost stays the same.
Avoid counting benefits or burden twice
Use payroll and benefit records to decide what your burden percentage includes. Keep separately entered benefits out of that percentage if they are already counted elsewhere. This model does not calculate jurisdiction-specific payroll taxes, overtime premiums or employee classification rules.
Use the billable efficiency calculator to test available customer hours. For a technician-focused comparison of paid-hour and billable-hour cost, see the technician labor cost calculator. To recover overhead and target margin in a customer price, continue to the HVAC labor rate calculator.