What Home Service Contractors Actually Earn Per Hour in 2026

The $189 Rate That Becomes $42

The gap between the invoice rate a contractor charges and the dollars that actually land in the owner's pocket is one of the most misunderstood numbers in the trades. When a customer sees $189 per hour on an HVAC invoice, the instinctive reaction is to assume the technician is earning something close to that figure. The time-and-earnings data collected for this study tells a sharply different story. After backing out burdened labor costs, unbillable time, materials markup that passes through to suppliers, and the share of revenue that covers overhead, the average owner-operator retained $42 per working hour. That figure represents actual take-home pay, the money available for personal use, savings, and taxes, calculated across every hour the owner was on the clock, whether billable or not. The compression happens in layers. First, only 61 percent of the working day is billable, which immediately cuts the effective rate from $189 to approximately $115. Second, burdened labor costs for the business (or for the owner treating themselves as an employee) consume another $62 per billable hour. Third, overhead allocation and non-labor costs pull an additional $11 per hour. What remains is the $42 figure. This is not a number most contractors carry around in their heads, and when it was calculated live during survey interviews, the reaction was frequently disbelief followed by quiet agreement that the figure matched what their personal bank account was actually telling them.

The gap between invoice rate and take-home per hour averages 78 percent across the trades.

Windshield Time: The Invisible Tax

Windshield time, the unbillable hours contractors spend driving between jobs, to supply houses, and from home to their first call, averaged 1.9 hours per day across the sample. At the median, that is roughly 9.5 hours per week of unpaid driving, or nearly 25 percent of a 40-hour work week. Plumbers logged the most windshield time at 2.3 hours per day, reflecting the dispersed nature of emergency service calls. Electricians and HVAC techs averaged 1.7 and 1.8 hours respectively. Carpenters reported the lowest at 1.1 hours, because remodeling work tends to concentrate at a single jobsite for days or weeks at a time. The cost of windshield time is not just the driving itself; it is the opportunity cost of the billable work that could have happened during those hours. At a $189 average billing rate, 1.9 hours of daily windshield time represents approximately $359 in foregone revenue per day, or roughly $86,000 per working year for a solo operator. Even when a business is dispatched efficiently, the nature of residential service work imposes a floor on drive time that cannot be eliminated. It can, however, be reduced significantly through smarter routing, better call scheduling, and same-side-of-town clustering. Contractors who reported using active routing tools logged an average of 1.3 hours of daily windshield time, a 32 percent reduction from the overall average, and reported take-home earnings roughly $6 per hour higher than peers without routing support.

Trade-by-Trade: Who Actually Earns What

Take-home earnings varied substantially by trade, though not always in the directions that industry folklore would predict. HVAC owner-operators led the sample at $47 per working hour, benefiting from high ticket sizes on equipment replacement, strong recurring revenue from maintenance memberships, and relatively concentrated seasonal demand. Plumbers followed at $45 per hour, with emergency service work commanding premium pricing that offset lower ticket sizes. Electricians came in at $41 per hour; their earnings were held down by longer job durations on residential rewiring and panel work, but they reported the most consistent year-round demand. Roofers averaged $39 per hour, reflecting high materials costs, heavy weather dependence, and significant unbillable estimate time (roofers reported spending an average of 4.2 hours per week on estimates that did not convert). Carpentry and remodeling specialists brought up the rear at $34 per hour, weighed down by longer project timelines, materials float, and the administrative overhead of managing change orders and client communications across multi-week engagements. These figures represent owner-operators; W-2 technicians working for an employer reported lower take-home figures because a share of their productive output is retained by the business to cover overhead and profit. The full report provides a breakdown of W-2 earnings by trade and region.

Burdened Labor: The Number Nobody Talks About

The burdened labor rate is the true cost to employ a technician, including base wages, payroll taxes, workers compensation insurance, health benefits, paid time off, uniforms, tools, vehicle costs, fuel, and training. For a journeyman-level technician earning a base wage of $32 per hour in 2026, the average burdened rate across the sample was $62 per hour. That is a 94 percent markup over base wage, and it explains why contractors who quote jobs based on wage alone almost always underprice their work. Workers compensation premiums have climbed steeply in the past three years, particularly for roofing (where rates now exceed $28 per $100 of payroll in some states) and for electrical work above 25 feet. Commercial auto insurance for service vehicles rose an average of 17 percent nationally between 2023 and 2026, according to industry filings reviewed for this study. Health insurance for technicians and their dependents added an average of $9.40 per hour to the burden rate for contractors who offered it. Only 38 percent of surveyed businesses offered health insurance to their techs, a figure that has been roughly flat for a decade despite broader workforce expectations. The cumulative effect is that a contractor whose base wage looks competitive to a new hire often cannot afford to match that wage once the full burden is layered on, which is one of the structural drivers of the ongoing trades labor shortage.

The 55-Hour Week Is Standard, Not Exceptional

Sixty-seven percent of surveyed owner-operators reported a typical work week exceeding 55 hours. The median was 58 hours, and 18 percent reported weeks of 70 or more hours. This total includes field time, drive time, estimates, invoicing, parts runs, customer calls, dispatch work, and bookkeeping. When take-home pay is recalculated against actual hours worked rather than a standard 40-hour baseline, the $42 per hour figure holds up but tells a less flattering story: the same owner-operator is taking home the equivalent of a $120,000 annual salary, but only by working the hours of a 1.4 FTE position. Compared to a BLS-reported average wage of $38.50 per hour for a W-2 journeyman in the same trades, the owner is earning roughly $3.50 more per hour in exchange for accepting all of the risk, all of the administrative burden, and a work week that exceeds standard employment by 15 to 30 hours. Several interviewees described the realization as sobering. One HVAC owner in the Mountain region said the numbers matched what his accountant had been telling him for years but that he had never accepted until he saw it in his own time diary. The implication is that small improvements in billable utilization, even a five-percentage-point increase, translate directly into meaningful increases in effective hourly take-home without requiring any additional hours worked.

Where the Hours Actually Go

When the 14-day time diaries are aggregated into a composite workday, the average contractor's time breaks down as follows: 4.9 hours of billable on-site work, 1.9 hours of windshield time, 1.4 hours of administrative work (invoicing, customer communication, scheduling), 0.7 hours of parts procurement, 0.5 hours of estimate time, and 0.4 hours of callback or warranty work. That totals 9.8 hours of on-the-clock time, of which only 50 percent is billable at the invoice rate. The administrative bucket was the largest source of variation across the sample. Contractors using integrated dispatch and invoicing tools logged an average of 0.9 hours per day on admin, while those using paper or disconnected systems logged 2.3 hours. That difference, 1.4 hours per day, is equivalent to roughly 340 hours per year of reclaimed time, time that could either become billable hours or could simply come off the work week entirely. At the average take-home rate of $42 per hour, reclaiming even half of that gap is worth approximately $7,140 per year in real money. Contractors who had adopted call-handling automation and virtual receptionist services reported an additional 0.6 hours per day saved on customer communication, suggesting that the technology gap between well-tooled and poorly-tooled shops now accounts for a meaningful share of the earnings gap between the top and bottom quartiles of the sample.

Only 50% of a typical 9.8-hour workday is billable at the invoice rate.