Free Tool
What is your gross profit per hour?
The truest measure of whether your labor is making money. Revenue and margin percent can look fine while the hours your crew works are underpriced. Calculate your gross profit per billable hour and compare it to your trade.
Why this number
Gross profit per billable hour = (revenue minus direct job costs) divided by total field labor hours. It is the truest measure of whether your labor is making money, because it normalizes for job size and mix. Revenue and even margin percentage can look fine while the hours your crew actually works are underpriced. In the Level Index, skilled labor is the scarce input, so gross profit per human hour is the number that matters most.
Calculate your gross profit per hour
Enjoying the tools?
Enter your info to keep using all Level calculators.
What this means for you
Revenue and margin percentage both hide the truth. A shop can grow revenue and still make less per hour worked, because the scarce input is skilled labor, not demand. Gross profit per hour is the number that tells you whether the hours your crew actually works are paying off.
Quick win this week
Pull last month: (revenue minus direct job costs) divided by the field labor hours your crew actually billed. Compare it to the trade band above. If you are below median, the fix is pricing and utilization, not more jobs.
Strategic fix
Track gross profit per hour weekly by job type. Reprice or re-scope the job types that fall below your target per-hour. Protect billable hours by cutting drive time, callbacks, and unbilled add-ons. This is the single metric that reconciles pricing, utilization, and mix.
What is your real gross profit per hour, by job type?
We pull your actual revenue, direct costs, and field hours and show you which work is making money per hour and which is quietly losing it. Free audit included.
No commitment. Real numbers, not generic advice.
Frequently asked questions
How do you calculate gross profit per hour?
Gross profit per hour equals revenue minus direct job costs (labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment), divided by the total field labor hours your crew billed over the same period. It normalizes profit for job size and mix, so it reveals whether the hours your people actually work are making money.
What is a good gross profit per hour for a contractor?
It varies by trade. Directional bands, derived from the Level Index job-margin and bill-rate ranges (median bill rate about $79 per hour) applied to typical utilization, are roughly: HVAC and plumbing healthy around $95 to $100 per billable hour with best-in-class near $140 to $145; electrical around $92 median; mechanical around $105; roofing around $78; landscaping around $45. These are directional reference points, not a measured per-trade distribution. Below the median for your trade usually means you are busy but structurally underpriced for the hours worked.
Why is gross profit per hour better than profit margin percentage?
Margin percentage and revenue can both look healthy while the business makes less per hour worked. For trades where skilled labor is the constraint, the scarce resource is the hour, not the dollar of revenue. Gross profit per hour ties pricing, utilization, and job mix into one number that tells you if your labor is paying off.
Want your real gross profit per hour, by job type?
We pull your actual revenue, direct costs, and field hours from your books and show you gross profit per hour by service type (service call, install, maintenance, after-hours), then flag which work is quietly losing money per hour.
From clients
What contractors say after working with us.
“We were doing $7M and I almost missed payroll twice in one quarter. Sam pulled the cash report apart line by line, turns out we had ~$340K in unbilled WIP sitting in the field. Got most of it billed and collected inside two weeks. The CFO retainer basically paid for itself the first month.”
“The eye-opener for me was when Sam showed me my biggest GC was actually losing me money on a fully-loaded basis. I'd been chasing that account for years. We repriced, lost them for 90 days, then they came back at better terms. That doesn't happen if nobody's running the math.”
“AR was a mess, $1.2M older than 60 days and probably $480K I'd written off in my head. Sam set up a weekly escalation cadence that we actually stuck to. Recovered about $620K in five months. Some of those calls were uncomfortable but they worked.”
Simple pricing
Three tiers, one ladder.
$99-$500/mo
Bookkeeping
The clean data layer: monthly books, reconciliations, and organized financials AI can work with.
$1,500-$5,000/mo
Scale
The full AI operating layer: custom agents, weekly actions, and benchmarks to grow margin per hour.
Custom
Platform / Multi-Office
Multi-branch benchmarking and scorecards for PE-backed and multi-location groups.
Find out which jobs make money per hour
Drop your info and the Level team will build your gross profit per hour by job type from your actual numbers. Free audit included.
No commitment. Real numbers, not generic advice.