What Should a Self-Employed Electrician Charge Per Hour? (Not What the Salary Sites Say)

Updated August 28, 2026

A self-employed electrician running a one-man shop typically needs to charge $85 to $150 per billable hour, and the exact number comes from three inputs: your yearly overhead, the salary you want to pay yourself, and the hours you can actually bill. For a realistic solo shop that works out to about $120 an hour. If you searched this question and saw “$38 an hour,” you were looking at what an employee earns, not what a business has to charge. Those are different numbers, and confusing them is how new shops go broke while staying busy.

The wage trap

Search “self-employed electrician hourly rate” and the top results are salary aggregators reporting $35 to $60 an hour. Those figures are compiled from pay data - what someone takes home per hour worked. They do not include the truck, the insurance, the tools, the phone, the license, the unpaid drive time, the quoting, or the self-employment tax.

Homeowner cost sites are a little closer to reality, showing electricians charging $50 to $130 an hour with a $100 to $200 service call. But those are prices customers paid to shops of every size, and they still do not tell you what your shop needs.

The only number that matters is yours, and you can get it in three steps.

Step 1: What does a year cost?

Overhead is everything you pay to exist as a business, whether or not you did a single job that week. Here is a real-world list for a solo residential electrician.

Now your pay. Pick the salary you want - $85,000 in this example - and add a burden of around 20 percent for self-employment tax, health insurance and retirement. Labor cost: $102,000.

Total cost of the year: $129,200.

Step 2: How many hours can you actually bill?

This is the step the wage number skips entirely. An employee is paid for every hour on the clock. You are paid only for hours on an invoice.

Fifty-five percent sounds low until you count the other 45: driving between jobs, supply-house runs, writing quotes, chasing invoices, the no-show customer, the callback you did not charge for. Solo shops that track it honestly land between 50 and 60 percent. If you assume 80 percent, your rate will be wrong by a third.

Step 3: Divide, add margin, round

$129,200 / 1,320 hours = $97.88 per hour. That is your break-even, your true hourly cost. Bill less than that and you are paying to work.

Now the margin. A business needs profit for the slow month, the warranty callback, the next van. Use 15 percent as a floor. The formula is cost divided by (1 minus margin):

$97.88 / 0.85 = $115.15

Round up to $120 an hour. That is your shop rate.

Three times the “wage” the salary sites showed you. That is not greed; that is the truck, the insurance and the 45 percent of your week nobody pays for.

You can run your own numbers in the free Trade Hourly Rate Finder. Change any input and watch the rate move; it is the fastest way to see which of your costs is really driving the number.

What changes the number most

Billable share. Moving from 55 to 65 percent billable drops the rate needed from $115 to about $97. Tighter service radius, fewer free estimates and batching supply runs are worth more than any price increase.

Salary target. Every $10,000 of salary adds about $9 an hour to the rate at these hours. Set it at what you should earn, not what you have been surviving on.

Overhead creep. A second phone line, a software subscription, a new tool every month - $3,000 of overhead is $2.27 an hour. Small, but it adds up, and it is the number you control most directly.

Weeks worked. If you take six weeks off instead of four, your billable hours drop to 1,265 and the rate rises about $5. Plan for it rather than discovering it in December.

Should the customer ever see the hourly rate?

Often, no. Most good small shops use the shop rate as an internal number and quote fixed prices for defined jobs, with a service call fee of $100 to $200 for diagnostics. The customer sees “$180 to replace the fan,” not “$120 an hour,” and the sticker shock conversation mostly goes away. See flat rate vs hourly for how to decide, and the price book guide for turning the rate into a book. If you want that book already built, the Flat-Rate Price Book Builder starts from exactly this calculation.

The undercharging tax

One forum story worth repeating: a new shop priced $10 an hour under the local average to win work. It hurt more than it helped. Customers assumed cheaper meant worse, and the shop worked flat out for a year with nothing left at the end. Underpricing does not just cost you the $10; it costs you the customers who pay properly and the margin that would have bought you a slow month.

Frequently asked questions

Is $120 an hour too much for a one-man shop? Not if your costs say so. Fully burdened rates for solo licensed trades run $85 to $150 depending on region. A one-man shop has lower overhead than a big company but also far fewer billable hours to spread it across, which is why the number lands where it does.

What if my market will not pay it? Then you have a cost problem or a market problem, not a pricing problem. Cut overhead, raise billable share, or accept a lower salary - but decide on purpose with the number in front of you.

Do I add the material markup on top of this? Yes. The shop rate covers labor, overhead and margin. Material is priced separately at cost plus 20 to 50 percent markup, typically 25 to 35 percent on devices and wire.

Should I charge more for after-hours or emergency calls? Yes. A 1.5x multiplier on the shop rate for after-hours and 2x for holidays is common. Put it in writing on the service call fee so it is not a surprise.