How this calculator works
The sum has four steps. Work out how many hours your technicians are present and paid for in a year. Work out how many of those hours actually reach a job card and get sold, because the difference between the two is where most workshops lose their margin. Add up everything the year has to pay for. Divide the second into the third.
Attended hours are technicians multiplied by their weekly hours multiplied by the weeks they actually work, after holiday and bank holidays have come off. Sellable hours are that figure reduced by your productivity percentage, which is the share of attended time that ends up on an invoice rather than on a tea break, a parts run, a warranty rectification or a car that turned out not to need anything.
The costs side is technician wages fully loaded with employer National Insurance and pension, plus every other cost the business carries, plus the profit you intend the year to make. Parts are deliberately left out. Parts carry their own margin and mixing the two produces a labour rate that hides whether either is working.
The door rate at the end is the required rate grossed up for the discount that habitually comes off before an invoice is paid. If you routinely knock 10% off, a rate set at the required figure recovers less than the required figure, every time.
These are illustrative figures for planning, not accounting advice. Run the sum on your own numbers and have the result sense-checked by your accountant before you reprice anything.
The productivity number nobody likes
This is the input most workshops get wrong, and they get it wrong in the same direction. A technician paid for forty hours does not sell forty hours. Between the job cards there is collecting parts, moving cars around the yard, road tests, cleaning up, talking to customers, warranty work being put right for nothing and the diagnostic job that took three hours and got billed at one.
The honest way to find your own figure is to take the hours you actually sold last month off the job cards and divide them by the hours your technicians were paid for. Not the hours you think they were busy. The hours that appeared on invoices.
Most independents who do that exercise for the first time find a number lower than the one they had in their head. That is not a failure, it is the reason the rate has to be set against sellable hours rather than attended hours. A workshop that recovers its overheads across attended hours is a workshop that looks profitable on paper and runs out of money in February.
What belongs in the overhead figure
Everything the business pays for in a year that is not technician wages and not parts. Rent and business rates. Utilities, which for a workshop with a compressor and a ramp is not a small line. Insurance, including motor trade cover. Equipment, tooling and calibration. Software and subscriptions. Diagnostic data licences. Waste disposal. Accountancy. Marketing. The wages of anybody who does not turn spanners, which usually means reception, a parts person and you.
Your own drawings belong somewhere and it is worth being deliberate about where. If you take a wage, put it in overheads. If you take profit, put it in the target profit box. Putting it in neither is how a garage arrives at a rate that pays everybody except the owner.
Leave parts out entirely. Parts should be making their own margin, and a labour rate that is quietly subsidising a thin parts markup will not tell you which of the two is the problem.
The door rate and the rate you recover
The rate on the board and the rate that reaches the bank are rarely the same number. Between them sit goodwill discounts, trade rates, the hour written off because the job overran, the customer who has been coming for fifteen years and the job quoted at four hours that took six.
None of that is unreasonable and most of it is good business. The mistake is not knowing the size of it. If you can put a number on the average discount, the calculator will gross the rate up so that what you recover is what you intended to recover.
The other half of the same problem is quoted time against clocked time. If jobs are quoted from a repair-times schedule and consistently take longer, the shortfall behaves exactly like a discount and belongs in the same box. Measuring it means knowing when a technician started and stopped a job, which is the argument for clocking on and off a job card rather than estimating afterwards.
A rate is a commercial decision and this page is general guidance rather than financial advice. Check the result against your own accounts and your accountant before you change what you charge.
Measuring this in Youzse Garage Pro
The inputs on this page are only as good as the records behind them, and the two that are hardest to guess are sellable hours and average discount. Both come off job cards rather than out of a spreadsheet.
Youzse Garage Pro puts jobs on a workshop board from booked in to collected, with the work recorded against the job card and the vehicle. Labour and parts are separated on the invoice, so the two margins can be read apart rather than netted into one number, and 9 box VAT returns come out the other end ready for your accountant.
Garage Pro starts at £59 a month with a 30 day free trial that needs no card and no minimum contract. Card payments are charged at 2.5% plus 35p, and the Youzse platform fee sits inside that rate. There is 0% commission on new customers who find you through the Youzse directory.