Day rate
What should your day rate be?
A day rate has to cover more than your wages. The van, the tools, the insurance, and every unbilled day of quoting all come out of the days you can charge for. Put your numbers in and see the least a day has to earn.
Your year
What you want the business to pay you. Tax comes out of this, so it is more than the amount you live on.
Holiday, sick days, the quiet weeks.
Worked, but not billed to anyone.
Business costs (£ a year)
Leave blank anything that doesn't apply.
Phone, software, accountant.
Why the honest number is higher than you'd guess
Five days a week for 47 weeks looks like 235 working days. Take off two days a month for quoting, paperwork and supplier runs and 211 of them are billable. Aim to pay yourself £35,000 before tax with £12,100 of business costs and the maths lands at £224 a day — a long way from the £150 that dividing wages by working days suggests.
Unbilled time is the expensive part
An evening writing a quote, a morning chasing an invoice, the run to the wholesaler — none of it lands on a bill, and all of it still has to be paid for. The only place that money can come from is the days you do bill. The more unbilled time a job carries, the more each billed day has to earn.
What to do with the number
It's a floor, not a price. Busy spells, awkward jobs and short-notice work can all charge more — the floor is where you stop cutting when a customer pushes back. Quote below it and the job runs at a loss before the first cable is pulled.
If the number here is higher than you expected, that is the usual outcome and it is worth understanding rather than arguing with. What should I charge? walks through where the gap comes from — the days you do not bill, and the fact that your old employer's rate was never your wage.
Once you know the rate, grafter.ly holds it. Labour goes on a quote by the hour or as a fixed fee, separately from the materials, and you confirm the hours you actually did before the invoice goes out. How labour lines work.
Charge what the year actually costs.
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