Working out your true crew cost per hour
The single number your whole rate card hangs off is what a painter actually costs you per hour. Not the wage — the wage plus all the on-costs. The labour cost calculator works that out for you. It's in-app at Settings → Business Settings → Labour, and there's a public version at the labour cost calculator you can use any time.
Enter your real crew
It's one simple form — no modes or tabs. You enter the crew you actually run:
- Painters
- Leading hands or foremen
- Apprentices
- Casuals
- Subbies
For each, put in how many you have and what each is paid. Surfacely weights them by headcount into a single loaded hourly rate — the blended cost of putting your crew on a job — including the on-costs most painters leave out when they guess.
The on-costs it accounts for
On-costs are the real cost of employing someone on top of their wage. The exact items depend on where you are — superannuation in Australia, KiwiSaver in New Zealand, employer NI in the UK, FICA in the US, CPP and EI in Canada — along with leave and the usual loadings. The calculator uses the right vocabulary and rates for your country automatically, so you're not doing that maths in your head.
Owner-operators: cost your own time too
If you're on the tools yourself, there's a section for owner-operators — the people most likely to undercharge for their own time. Enter what you pay yourself and how many of your hours are actually billable versus total. Surfacely shows your true cost per billable hour as its own callout, and folds it into the blended crew rate as one weighted head. It accounts for the on-costs you fund yourself and the quoting and admin time you don't bill anyone for.
Using the result
The loaded rate the calculator gives you is what goes into your cost rate in company pricing — the number your margin is then applied to. Get this right once and every quote you send is built on a cost that reflects reality, not a hopeful guess.
Why it matters: the most common reason a busy painter isn't making money is a cost rate that's really just the wage with the on-costs forgotten. This calculator closes that gap in a couple of minutes.