Free contractor tool
A worker costs far more than their wage. Enter the numbers to get the fully-burdened hourly rate — the one you should actually be bidding.
You pay $35.00/hr in wage, but the worker actually costs you $47.30/hr. Bid at the wage and you eat the $12.30 difference on every hour. The burden breakdown: FICA $2.68 · FUTA/SUI $1.23 · workers' comp $4.20 · GL $0.70 · benefits $3.50.
Estimate only — your actual rates depend on your WC class code, experience mod, state, and benefit plan. Use it to sanity-check your bid labor rate, not for payroll filing.
Why it matters
The number on the paycheck is the smallest part of what an employee costs you. Stack on employer payroll taxes, workers’ comp (brutal in construction), general liability, and benefits, and a $35/hr framer can really cost you $47+/hr.
Estimators who bid the bare wage are quietly underwater on every labor hour. Multiply that across a job — or a year — and the burden gap is often the entire margin. The fix is simple: bid the burdened rate.
Bullwork’s payroll engine computes real labor burden — taxes, workers’ comp, benefits — and posts it to the right job, so your job costs reflect the true cost of labor, not just gross wages.
Questions
Labor burden is everything an employee costs you beyond their wage — employer payroll taxes (FICA, FUTA, state UI/ETT), workers’ compensation, general liability, and benefits. The fully-burdened rate is the wage plus all of that.
Add the employer costs to the base wage: FICA (7.65%), FUTA + state unemployment, workers’ comp (a % of wage that’s high in construction), general liability, and employer-paid benefits. The total divided by the wage is your burden rate.
It varies widely, but construction burden often runs 25–45%+ of the base wage — workers’ comp alone can be 8–15% depending on the class code and your experience modifier. That’s why bidding the bare wage loses money.
If you bid labor at the wage instead of the burdened cost, you eat the difference on every single hour. On a job with thousands of labor hours, that gap is often the whole profit.
Bullwork prices labor with full burden and tracks it to the job. See it on your next bid — free.
Get a free bid →