Free tool
What should you actually charge per hour?
Most sole traders pick a number that sounds about right and hope. This works out the number properly: target take-home, minus HMRC's slice, minus your van and tools and insurance, divided by your real billable hours, plus a margin for the bad weeks.
Your trade
What you want to earn
Annual overheads
Your recommended rate
£58
/hour
Or about £405 a day. Includes a 15% safety margin for bad debt, sick days, and quiet weeks.
Bare minimum
£50/hr
To hit your target with zero margin
Suggested call-out
£75
First hour included
Sanity check
The going rate for a plumber / gas engineer in Midlands / East Anglia is around £55/hour.
Your number sits in the normal range for your trade and area. The rate is sustainable.
The maths
- Target take-home
- £35,000
- Tax + NI (rough estimate)
- £7,848
- Annual overheads
- £9,060
- Materials at 25% of revenue
- +25%
- Total revenue needed
- £69,211
- Total billable hours
- 1380 hrs
Where your website fits in
Your marketing line includes the website. We do all of it for £20/month - design, hosting, edits, schema. That's £240 a year instead of the £960 you typed in.
Request your siteWhy most sole traders under-charge
The classic mistake is dividing your target salary by 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. That gives you 2,080 hours. The real number is closer to 1,200-1,500 once you take off holidays, sick days, admin, travel, picking up materials, unpaid first quotes and the customer who's 20 minutes late.
The second mistake is forgetting tax. A plumber wanting £40k in their bank needs to gross about £55k. That extra £15k doesn't come out of thin air - it has to come from the rate.
The third is treating overheads as small. Add up the van lease, the fuel, the public liability insurance, the tools you replace each year, the accountant, the phone bill, and the website. Most sole traders spend £8,000-£15,000 a year on overheads. That has to come from somewhere too.
The calculator does all three. The number it gives you is what you actually need to charge to hit your target. If it feels high, your overheads or target are out of line with your billable hours - not your pricing.
Once you know your rate, put it on your website
The single biggest reason customers don't ring you is they can't see your starting price. We wrote about this - if your call-out fee and hourly rate aren't on the page, the customer rings the next plumber whose site does show them. You've worked out your number. Put it where customers can see it.
Stop putting it off.
£20 a month. Your business website live next day.