Money · Free tool · 5 min read

What is your real day rate?

Page updated 7 September 2026 · About the author

Your quoted rate covers tools-down time. It does not cover the quoting, invoicing, chasing and van admin stacked around it. This calculator shows the number your bank account already knows.

By Connor McKay, founder of Trade PA · 25 August 2026

Why the two numbers differ so much

Assume eight hours on the tools per billable day. A £280 day rate reads as £35 an hour. Add a typical eight hours of weekly admin and five of unbillable running around, subtract real business costs, and most sole traders find the true figure lands somewhere between half and two-thirds of the quoted one. Nobody stole the difference; it evaporated into hours that produce no invoice, chief among them the laptop hours after tea. We wrote the longer argument in Tradies don't get paid for evenings: admin is the largest unpriced cost in a trade business.

Three honest ways to move the number

• Raise the rate. Your call entirely, and this calculator is the evidence for the conversation with yourself. (Worth saying plainly: Trade PA never suggests prices. Your rates are your business judgement; Eve just does the paperwork at whatever numbers you set.)
• Convert unbillable structure. Supplier runs consolidated, callbacks priced into quotes, travel zones tightened. Small percentages, every week, forever.
• Collapse the admin hours. This is the biggest lever for most people because it is nearly pure recovery: the quote dictated on the drive home, the invoice raised in a sentence, the chasing running on schedule without you. Take admin from eight hours to two and the calculator above shows you exactly what that is worth at your numbers.

Run your own figures, then run the version of you that got the evenings back. The gap between those two results is the number to hold in mind when any software, ours included, asks for £39 a month.