Setting your labour rate and margin
Labour is usually the biggest cost on any paint job. Getting your rate and margin right is the single biggest lever you have on profitability.
Cost rate
Your cost rate is what you actually pay your painters per hour — including super, leave loading, and any on-costs. Enter the real number, not a marked-up figure. A common mistake: adding margin into the cost rate. Don't. Surfacely's margin field handles that.
Margin
Margin % is applied to cost to produce the sell rate:
sell rate = cost rate ÷ (1 − margin ÷ 100)
Some examples at a 60 $/hr cost rate:
- 35% margin → 92 $/hr sell
- 45% margin (default) → 109 $/hr sell
- 55% margin → 133 $/hr sell
Wash rate
Below the main rate is a separate wash rate in m²/hr — the speed your painters wash down exterior surfaces. Surfacely uses this on every exterior job automatically, so you don't have to manually cost a wash-down line every time.
After-hours multiplier
If you sometimes work weekends or late nights, set the after-hours multiplier (default 1.5×). On a quote, you can flag a job as "after hours" and Surfacely scales both the cost and sell of labour by that multiplier, preserving your margin.
Not sure what your cost rate should be?
Most painters underestimate what a painter actually costs per hour — they enter the wage and forget the on-costs. The labour cost calculator works it out for you. Enter your real crew — painters, leading hands, apprentices, casuals, subbies — with what each is paid, and it builds one true loaded hourly rate including the on-costs you'd otherwise miss. There's also an owner-operator section so you can cost your own time properly. Use that figure as your cost rate above.
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.
Why it matters: margin is the first thing that gets eroded when you're quoting in a hurry. By baking it into the rate card, you make it impossible to accidentally quote under-margin — every quote is protected, even when you're tired or rushed.
Changing these numbers only affects future quotes. Every existing quote keeps the rates it was built on. You can tune your pricing freely without breaking already-sent work.
→ Go to Business Settings → Labour