The number is the loaded cost of one productive crew-hour. Almost no owner-operator can state it, and every price in the business should be built on top of it.
Labor. Wage is not cost. Payroll taxes, workers' compensation, and benefits add roughly 20 to 35 percent on top of the wage. Then divide by the productive ratio: a crew paid for eight hours is typically productive for about six, because drive time, loading, fuel stops, and equipment maintenance are paid but not billable. A worker at $20 per hour costs about $26 loaded, and closer to $38 for each hour that can actually be charged to a customer.
Truck. The payment is roughly half of it. Insurance, fuel, maintenance, tires, and repairs make up the rest. Divided by the hours the truck actually runs, a work truck commonly lands between $10 and $22 per hour — and a paid-off truck and a financed one produce genuinely different job costs.
Equipment. A machine wears out in operating hours, not calendar years. A $12,000 commercial mower with a 1,500-hour life is consuming roughly $6.70 an hour in depreciation before fuel and blades. Owning it outright does not make it free.
Overhead. Rent, insurance, phone, software, and the owner's own pay leave the account whether or not anyone works. Divided by monthly productive hours, this is frequently $12 to $20 per hour, and it is the component operators most often omit entirely.
Add the four and you get the floor. Below it the operator loses money regardless of how busy the schedule looks. To price above it, divide by one minus the target margin — do not multiply by one plus the markup. A job that costs $163 at a 30 percent target should be priced at $234, not $212. Confusing markup with margin costs the trade a fortune.
A ten percent discount on a thirty-percent-margin job removes about a third of the profit and requires roughly fifty percent more volume to recover. A ten percent price increase adds about a third to profit and still comes out even if a quarter of customers leave. Most operators have run neither calculation.
Bid the job at an estimated time. Measure the real time with a timer in the field. Compare. When a job bid at 90 minutes repeatedly takes 150, the problem is the bid, not the crew — and it can now be proven and corrected. Plumline exists to make that loop routine.