Hiring Break-Even Calculator: Can You Afford Another Technician?
Test one marginal seat: loaded wage plus truck and tools against the billable hours and jobs a week that hire has to sell before the seat pays for itself.
How this is calculated
The whole test is one division. Work out what the seat costs you in a month, work out what one billable hour of that person's time actually contributes, and divide. Everything else on the page is presenting that answer in units you can act on: hours a week, jobs a week, and revenue the hire has to add.
loadedWage = wage × (1 + burden)
paidMonth = paidHoursPerWeek × 52/12
seatCost = loadedWage × paidMonth + truck + tools + overheadShare
billRate = hourly mode ? rate : avgTicket ÷ hoursPerJob
contribution= billRate × (1 − jobMaterials)
revenueAdd = seatCost ÷ (1 − jobMaterials)
hoursMonth = seatCost ÷ contribution
hoursWeek = hoursMonth ÷ (52/12)
jobsWeek = hoursWeek ÷ hoursPerJob
targetHours = (seatCost + targetProfit) ÷ contribution
coverage = billableHoursMonth × contribution ÷ seatCost The burden convention is borrowed, not reinvented. Burden
here means exactly what the
labor burden rate calculator
reports: a percentage on top of the base wage covering payroll taxes,
workers' comp, general liability and benefits, so the loaded rate is
wage × (1 + burden). Work it out there, read the percentage off
the screen, and type it here. The truck, the tools and the phone are
deliberately not part of it, because they have their own boxes on this page.
Putting them in both places is the one double-count this tool cannot see for
you.
Why this is the marginal test and not the whole-business one. The service-business break-even jobs calculator asks how many jobs the whole company has to deliver to cover its total fixed overhead. This page asks a narrower question: does one more seat pay for itself? Point it at your entire overhead and you get the wrong answer twice, once by charging the new hire for overhead you already recover on existing work, and once by crediting them with revenue the existing crew produces. The overhead box is there for the slice that genuinely goes up because this person exists, and it starts at zero for a reason.
The billable-hour target is the input that decides the answer. A seat that clears at 30 billable hours a week is underwater at 18, and the difference is not effort, it is drive time, quoting, returns and shop time. Measure it rather than hoping for it: the technician utilization calculator turns your own paid and billable hours into the percentage this page then holds you to. The tool shows utilization back to you as a check, and refuses to let the billable week quietly exceed the paid week.
No wage, rate or ticket defaults anywhere. Every currency box starts empty. There is no national technician wage seeded here, no average ticket and no going bill rate, because nothing this page could stand behind publishes one. The only pre-filled numbers are structural conventions in editable boxes: a 40-hour paid week, a two-hour job, and the calendar's own 52 weeks over 12 months. The verdict is arithmetic too, never a judgement band: it compares required hours against the target you entered and against the week you are paying for, and nothing else.
Everything runs in your browser. No account, no email gate, nothing stored or sent.
The question this answers
Not “is my business profitable”, but “does one more seat pay for itself”. Those are different sums and mixing them is how good operators talk themselves out of a hire they could afford, or into one they cannot. This page takes a single wage, loads it, adds the truck and the tools that come with the person, and converts the result into the three things you can actually act on: what the seat costs a month, how many billable hours and jobs a week it has to sell, and how much revenue the hire has to add before any of it is worth doing.
If the question is the whole company rather than one seat, the service-business break-even jobs calculator is the right tool. It works from your total fixed overhead to a monthly job count for the business as a whole. This one starts where that sum stops.
Load the wage before you judge it
An hourly wage is not what an hour of that person costs you. Payroll taxes, workers’ comp, general liability and whatever benefits you offer land on top of it, and on a field-service seat the gap is large enough to flip the decision on its own. Work your own figure out in the labor burden rate calculator and bring the percentage back here: this page uses that tool’s convention exactly, a percent on top of the base wage, so the loaded rate is the wage times one plus the burden.
No burden figure is seeded here. It swings on your state, your classification codes and what you actually offer, and a borrowed number would quietly change the answer. The same goes for the wage, the bill rate and the ticket: every currency box on this page starts empty, and the only pre-filled numbers are structural conventions you can overwrite, a 40-hour paid week and a two-hour job.
The truck goes in its own box, once
Burden is the employment cost of the hour. The truck payment, the insurance, the fuel, the tools, the phone line, the uniforms and the software seat are the cost of putting that person on the road, and they get their own monthly lines. Enter them in both places and the seat looks unaffordable for no reason. Leave them out altogether and it looks like a bargain, which is the more expensive mistake.
Billable hours are the input that decides it
Once the cost side is honest, everything turns on one number: how many hours a week this person will actually bill. A seat that clears comfortably at 30 billable hours can be well underwater at 18, and the difference is not effort. It is drive time, quoting, returns, restocking and paperwork. Measure it in the technician utilization calculator rather than hoping for it, and expect a first-year hire to sit below whatever your own figure is. The tool shows the utilization your entry implies and refuses to let the billable week quietly exceed the paid week.
The narrative version of this whole test, from the readiness signal through to the first week on the job, is in how to hire your first technician, which states the marginal case in prose and routes the employee-or-contractor question to where it belongs. This page is the arithmetic that guide describes.
Break-even is the floor, not the target
Nobody takes on payroll risk to break even. Fill in the profit target box and the tool recalculates the hours and jobs a week needed to clear that profit on top of the seat, and warns you when the target needs more hours than the paid week holds. When it does, the fix is your rates rather than your new hire’s schedule, and the service hourly rate calculator is where that conversation starts.
Everything runs in your browser: no account, no email gate, nothing stored or sent. A planning aid, not employment or tax advice.