Handyman Pricing Calculator
Price small jobs, task lists, and full-day projects from your real costs — loaded labor, truck-and-tools overhead, materials with markup — with your profit margin built in, not left to whatever the day happened to pay. This is the trade of many small jobs, which makes a minimum charge and honest drive-time math matter more here than anywhere else. (Work crossing into licensed territory? See our electrician and plumbing calculators.)
Your Company Setup
Set these once — they reflect your business, not the job.
Price a Job
Enter one job — the price updates as you type.
Instant Rate Card — Common Handyman Jobs
Twelve common handyman jobs priced with your company settings above. Change your labor rate or margin and the whole menu reprices instantly. Hours and materials are typical starting points — adjust for access, wall type, fixture condition, and how far the job is from your last one. Any job that prices below your minimum charge gets billed at the minimum, or bundled with more tasks from the client's list.
| Job | Typical hours | Typical materials | Your flat rate |
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We really appreciate feedback from working pros like yourself to get these numbers accurate — to help our fellow trades and businesses succeed, now and for the next generations to come.
Worked Examples: Three Real Handyman Jobs
Using the default company settings above ($28/hr loaded labor, $12/hr overhead, 30% materials markup, 20% target margin, 3% card fee, 2% callback reserve):
1. TV mount, up to 65" — hour and a half, $8 in hardware
Labor $42 + overhead $18 + hardware charged at $10 (your $8 cost with markup) = $70 base → about $99. Here's why the minimum job charge exists: the mount itself is 45 minutes of skilled work, but the visit is the drive, the stud-finding, the cable tidy-up, and the invoice. Price the visit, not the task — and if the client adds "while you're here, can you hang these shelves," that's a new line, not a favor.
2. Half-day task list — four hours, $30 in mixed materials
Labor $112 + overhead $48 + materials charged at $39 = $199 base → about $269. The bundled list is the best job in this trade: one drive, one setup, four billable hours back to back. This is what you offer the doorknob-swap caller — "my minimum is $99, but for $269 I'll knock out your whole list Saturday morning." Same client, triple the revenue, and they feel like they won.
3. Deck board & railing repair — four hours plus two helper hours, $60 in lumber
Labor $143 (your four hours plus a helper priced at 55% of your rate) + overhead $72 + lumber charged at $78 = $293 base → about $399. Notice the helper isn't free and the overhead runs on all six labor-hours — "I'll just bring my nephew" shows up in payroll whether or not it showed up in the quote.
What Does Handyman Overhead Actually Cost?
Overhead is every cost of being in business that isn't a specific job: the truck or van and its fuel and repairs, general liability insurance, the slow constant bleed of tool replacement (batteries, blades, bits, and the drill that walks off), phone, scheduling software, dump-run fees nobody passed through, licensing and registration where your state requires it, and the marketing that keeps next week booked. None of it appears on any invoice — all of it has to come out of every invoice.
The number that matters is overhead per billable hour — and handyman work has the worst billable-hour ratio on this site. Many small jobs means many drives: an eight-hour day with four stops might bill five hours. A solo operator might realistically bill 1,200–1,400 hours a year. Divide annual overhead by those hours: roughly $15,000 ÷ 1,250 billable hours ≈ $12 per billable hour — the default this calculator starts with. Skip that line and every "great day" quietly subsidizes the truck that got you there.
Common Handyman Pricing Mistakes
Recommended Profit Margins for Handyman Businesses
These are working benchmarks, not laws. The rule that matters most for a solo operator: pay yourself a real market wage in the labor line first, and treat the margin as the business's money, not a tip. That margin is what covers the January nobody calls, replaces the truck, and someday pays the first employee — who will cost market wages, at which point a business that never priced real labor discovers it never had a margin at all. Small defined tasks quoted flat carry the best margins in this trade; open-ended hourly days carry the worst.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much should a handyman charge per hour?
Build it from your numbers, not the neighbor's flyer: loaded labor (what your time actually costs, including taxes and insurance) plus overhead per billable hour (truck, fuel, tools, insurance, marketing), divided by one minus your target margin. With typical solo-operator numbers that lands an effective $50–$75 per billed hour in most markets, and more in expensive metros. If your rate came from what you earned as somebody's employee, it's missing the truck, the insurance, and the profit.
Should I charge hourly or by the job?
Quote flat, task by task — but build every task price from hours. Clients hate open meters; a known price for a known task wins the booking. Flat pricing also means your experience pays you: the faucet you've swapped two hundred times takes you 45 minutes and prices like the 90 it takes everyone else. Keep hourly only as a fallback for genuinely undefined work, with a clear cap-and-check-in agreement.
Should I have a minimum job charge?
Yes — it's the most important number in handyman pricing. Every visit carries the same fixed load: the drive, the quote, the unload, the invoice. A 20-minute doorknob swap consumes most of an hour of your day. Set a minimum that covers roughly an hour of fully loaded time — for most solo operators that's $89–$149 — and offer to fill the minimum with more tasks from the client's list. People rarely resent a minimum; they resent surprise.
What profit margin should a handyman business target?
Common working targets: 15–30% true net margin for an established handyman business, and 10–15% where you're competing with odd-job and app-marketplace pricing, after all costs, card fees, and a callback reserve. Solo operators must pay themselves a real market wage in the labor line first — the margin on top is the business's profit, and it's what funds the slow weeks, the replacement truck, and eventually the first employee.
What's the difference between markup and margin?
Markup is added on top of cost; margin is the share of the final price that's profit. A 20% markup on a $100 cost gives $120 — but only a 16.7% margin. To earn a true 20% margin you divide by 0.80, giving $125. On a trade built out of dozens of small jobs a week, a few dollars of confused arithmetic per job compounds into thousands a year.
Is this calculator really free?
Yes. No account, no email, no ads. The calculator runs in your browser and the numbers you enter are never sent to us. We use basic traffic analytics, described in our privacy policy.