Net Profit Pricing · free tool
What does your hour have to be worth?
You own an HVAC business and you do everything yourself. You run the calls, you quote the work, you buy the parts, you send the invoices and you chase the money. Nobody has ever told you what your hour has to be worth for any of that to add up.
Change any figure below and watch the arithmetic rebuild. It starts filled in with a plausible one-man shop, so you can see how it works before you put your own numbers in.
Nothing you type leaves your browser. There is no account and nothing is saved.
1 · What you pay yourself
Not what the business turns over. What has to land in your pocket for this to be worth doing.
What you need to live on. Most owners put their draw in and forget the two lines underneath.
Nobody employs you, so you pay both halves. It is not optional and it is not in most men's rates.
You buy your own. The single most forgotten number for a man with no employer behind him.
2 · What it costs to open the doors
Everything you spend before anybody turns a wrench. Open the list — that is where you find the one you forgot.
Edit this directly, or open the lines below and it adds them up for you.
Show the eight lines it is made of
3 · The truck
Payment or depreciation, fuel, insurance, tires, maintenance, registration. The one cost every contractor underestimates, because it leaves in small pieces.
That is $10.00 for every hour you bill.
The small stuff that never reaches an invoice: consumables off the truck, the fitting you threw in, the twenty minutes you did not write down, the job you wrote off. It is small and it is real, and over a year it is a number.
4 · The hours you actually bill
The number that decides everything else, and the one men get wrong by the widest margin.
The other half is real work you do not bill for: driving, quoting, buying parts, chasing money, answering the phone, and the job that cancelled. If you think you bill more than this, check it against last year's invoices before you raise it.
Door to door, including the drive and the paperwork.
5 · What you keep, and how you get paid
Profit is not what is left over. It is a number you set first, and the price is built to leave it.
Added by division, not by markup. Adding 20% on top leaves you 16.7% — that gap is why shops that "add 20" never see 20.
6 · What you charge today
Optional. Fill it in and the page will tell you what the difference is worth over a year.
The build-up
What you pay yourself
What it costs to open the doors
÷ 1,000 billable hours
÷ (1 − 20% net profit)
÷ (1 − 3% card fee)
Charge at least
$262
an hour, for your time
Your floor is $203.16. Below that you are paying to go to work.
This is a rate for your time, and nothing else. Parts, equipment and materials go on top of it. Do not quote this number for a job with a compressor in it.
What it still can't tell you
Every question below has a real dollar answer for your company. None of them is answered by the number above.
Sales tax is left out on purpose — it was never your money. The rest are not left out because they are small. They are left out because each one needs facts about your company that a page like this has no way to ask for.
One rate for everything is better than guessing, and worse than doing it properly
This page gives you a single blended rate — the same number for a capacitor on a Tuesday and a changeout in August. That is not how the work behaves. Service, maintenance and installation do not share an efficiency, do not carry the same overhead, and do not come back at the same rate.
What this page is for is getting you off zero: a floor you can defend, worked out from your own figures instead of from what the shop down the road charges.