Independent methodology

Pricing math you can inspect.

Service Rate Lab exists to help small service businesses reason from their own costs—not borrowed benchmarks.

Our approach

Each calculator separates compensation, employer-paid labor costs, productive capacity, billable capacity, overhead, contingency, and profit. Inputs are never populated from wage, tax, insurance, or regional feeds. Calculations happen entirely in your browser.

Core definitions

Cost is what the business must spend. Price is what the customer is charged before any separately collected sales tax. Revenue is earned sales. Profit is revenue remaining after the modeled costs. Owner compensation is treated as cost, not profit.

Markup is profit divided by cost. Margin is profit divided by revenue. A target-margin price is cost ÷ (1 − margin). A 100% target margin is impossible when cost is positive.

Sources and boundaries

Terminology follows standard definitions used by the U.S. Small Business Administration’s guidance on managing business finances and the U.S. Department of Labor’s descriptions of employer compensation and benefits. Formulas are arithmetic identities; jurisdiction-specific rates must come from your current records or professional advisers.

Maintenance

The site is reviewed twice yearly for dependency updates, broken links, accessibility, browser compatibility, and clarity. Formula behavior is protected by automated tests.