How to price electrical work

To price electrical work, build one billable-hour rate and price every job from it. The rate is what an electrician costs you for each hour you can invoice, plus your overhead per billable hour, divided by one minus the net profit you want. In the example below that's $124 of cost and a $146 rate at a 15% profit. Troubleshooting runs on that rate by the hour, and panel upgrades, EV chargers and other repeat work get flat prices built from book hours, marked-up materials, and the permit and inspection time that's easy to leave out.

Every input comes off your payroll reports and your P&L, as long as the books are set up for the trade. Bookkeeping for electrical contractors covers that setup.

What does an electrician cost per hour?

Start with the wage, then load it. The median electrician earned $30.38 an hour in May 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Payroll taxes, workers' comp, benefits and paid time off sit on top of that. In our labor burden example they added about a third, so a $30 electrician costs you about $40 for every hour on the clock.

Then divide by the hours you can bill, because that's what your price has to cover. Electrical work has its own unbilled hours: the supply house run for the breaker you didn't stock, pulling the permit, waiting on the inspector, the trip back for the final, the callback on a GFCI that keeps tripping. Add drive time and the Monday meeting.

In the example, an electrician is paid for 2,000 hours a year and 1,250 of them end up on an invoice. That's $80,000 of loaded pay divided by 1,250 hours, or $64 for every hour you bill.

Add overhead per billable hour

Overhead is what you'd still pay if nobody worked tomorrow: the office, the trucks and their insurance, your license and liability policy, software, marketing, and your own salary if you're not in the field. Divide last year's total by the billable hours your crew turned in.

Say a shop with 4 electricians spends $300,000 a year on overhead and bills 5,000 hours (4 × 1,250). Overhead comes to $60 per billable hour. Add the $64 of labor, and every hour you bill costs $124 before you make a dime.

What should you charge for electrical work?

Divide your cost per billable hour by one minus the net profit you want. For a 15% profit, divide by 0.85. Here's the whole build, with example numbers:

Multiplying $124 by 1.15 instead gets you $143 and a 13% profit. The guide on how to price HVAC jobs runs that markup-versus-margin gap on a full repair.

That $146 is your time-and-materials rate. Every flat price below is built from it too, so when the rate changes, the whole price book moves with it.

Flat rate or time and materials?

Use flat rate for anything you can scope before you start: panel upgrades, EV chargers, dedicated circuits, devices and fixtures. Use time and materials for troubleshooting, where nobody knows yet whether the dead circuit is a loose backstab or a nicked cable inside a wall.

Don't price based off of time. You can use it as like a checkpoint at the end of it. … You can use it to kind of check yourself. But yeah, I never teach any of my sales guys to quote based upon hours. Because they don't know.

That's how Brandon Vaughn, who coaches home service owners, answered an owner whose team bid every job by the hour and kept missing the time estimate. Troubleshooting is the exception, because you don't know either. Run the clock at your hourly rate until you find the fault, then price the repair from the book.

Keep the book short. Brandon once did a ride-along with a large electrical contractor whose salespeople, called field supervisors, weren't electricians and never had been; some were car salesmen. They still sold $40,000 packages of electrical design and HVAC work, and Brandon put that down to one change: the company had cut its price book from 4,000 items to 200.

Build yours around the jobs you sell every week, each one a package with book hours, materials and trips: the 200-amp panel swap, the Level 2 charger, the dedicated circuit for a mini-split, the whole-home surge protector.

A worked panel upgrade price

The job: a 200-amp panel replacement that needs a permit, a call to the utility and one inspection. Every figure is an example.

The two time lines in the middle are the easiest to forget. Pulling the permit, getting the utility scheduled and driving back to meet the inspector are all paid hours. Leave them out and the job prices at $2,735, and the shop eats $365 on every panel.

The 25% markup on materials is a 20% margin on them. Overhead is already in the hourly rate, so the markup pays for the supply house run, the returns and the breaker that fails under warranty. Supply house prices move, so price materials from your latest invoice and put an expiration date on the quote.

How do you price an EV charger install?

Same build, but check the panel first. The Department of Energy's home charging guide notes that Level 2 chargers run on 240 volts, that some homes don't have the electrical capacity for one, and that permits may be required. So do the load calculation before you quote. If the panel can't take the load, the panel upgrade is its own line, priced as above.

An example base package, for a charger mounted within 25 feet of the panel with breaker space available:

• Labor: 4 hours × $146 = $584
• Load calculation and permit pull: half an hour = $73
• Inspection trip: 1.5 hours = $219
• Materials: $200 at cost, plus 25% = $250
• Permit fee at cost: $100

That's $1,226, so it might go in the book at $1,250. Each extra 10 feet of run adds half an hour ($73) and $40 of wire and conduit at cost ($50 marked up), or $123. Your electrician measures the run, and the price comes from the book, not from a guess in the customer's garage.

Do trip charges double-count drive time?

They can. Drive time has to be paid for once, either inside the hourly rate or through a trip charge. In the example, driving is part of the 750 unbilled hours each electrician has in a year, so the $146 rate already covers it. Add a trip charge on top and you're charging for the drive twice, which is how you lose service calls you should win.

If you'd rather bill the drive, take it out of the rate. Say 250 of those 750 hours are driving. With a trip charge paying for them, each electrician bills 1,500 hours, labor drops to $53 per billable hour, overhead drops to $50, and the rate comes to about $122. At an average of 30 minutes of driving per call, the trip charge is $61.

Either setup works. A $146 rate plus a trip charge overcharges, and a $122 rate with no trip charge leaves the drive unpaid.

What if you lose bids at the new rate?

You'll lose some. Brandon's test before you cut a price:

…well go out and bid five more jobs. And then if you strike out on five jobs in a row then maybe we'll consider dropping your prices. But if you get one job or two jobs out of those five, you're just fine. Get four nos for every one.

That's his answer to owners who want to cut their prices after losing a single bid to a cheaper competitor.

The bigger risk is a book time that's wrong. Once a month, compare estimated and actual hours on your last 10 panel jobs and charger installs. If panels run 12 hours against a 10-hour book time, fix the book before you touch the rate. The guide to job costing shows how to track it.

If your P&L can't tell you overhead per billable hour, bring it to a free profit call. With YetiBooks you get one US-based profit specialist, the same person every time, who keeps the books behind your rate current. Here's how it works.

Questions owners ask

What's a fair hourly rate for an electrician?

The one your own numbers produce. The BLS median of $30.38 an hour is what an electrician earns. In the example, a $30 wage turns into a $146 rate once burden, unbilled hours, overhead and a 15% profit are counted.

Should permits be a separate line on the quote?

The fee, yes, at cost, so the customer can see it's the city's charge. The time to pull the permit and meet the inspector goes into your price at the hourly rate, because you pay for those hours whether the customer sees them or not.

How often should I redo the rate?

Every January, after any raise, and when your insurance renews. Rerun the overhead number from last year's P&L at the same time, since a new truck or an office hire changes it too.