Calcatrice cockatrice logoCalcatrice.
Est. 2026
The ledger for
expensive decisions
Calculate the cost before you commit

Local Service Pricing · Startup costs

How much does an electrician charge an hour?

An electrical contractor bills about $111.55 for one hour of one electrician's time. The electrician costs the firm $48.20 of that, once you count his benefits and not just his wages. Materials are already out of the rate, so the rest is not parts.

More
The number most people get wrong is not the rate, it is the HOURS. The Census counts WORKER-hours, so two electricians for two hours is four billed hours. Send a mate and the bill doubles while the clock on the wall looks identical. That single fact explains more surprising invoices than the rate ever will, and it is the second box below.

You are billed per WORKER-hour, not per hour. Two electricians for two hours is four billed hours. A firm can send a mate, finish in the same time, and hand you a bill twice the size, and nothing about that is irregular: it is how the trade is counted, right down to the Census field, which is literally "construction workers annual hours".
More
Where the $111.55 an hour actually goes, and every line is published by the Census. $37.03 is the electrician's wages and $11.17 is his benefits, which are his and not the firm's overhead, so what the worker actually costs is $48.20. Then $13.08 is office and supervisor wages, $3.95 their benefits, $9.85 other operating expenses, $3.79 power and fuel, $2.67 rent and leases, and $2.45 depreciation. What is left after every one of those is $27.56, a quarter of the bill. That $27.56 is an upper bound on margin, not margin. It still has to cover things the Census does not itemise here, including the hours nobody pays for: driving to you, quoting you, the customer who was not in. Profit is somewhere at or below $27.56 an hour, and we are not going to guess where, and you should distrust a page that does. We got this wrong first, and the error is instructive. Our first draft said the firm bills 3.67x what the electrician gets. It bills 2.31x. We had compared a mean billed rate against a median wage AND counted the man's own benefits as the firm's overhead. Two separate choices, both of which happened to make the gap look bigger. When every arbitrary decision lands the same way, the decisions were not arbitrary. And it is a class mean, so it does not bound your quote. The middle 80% of state means run $92.47 to $121.55. That is a spread of AVERAGES, and real firms spread wider. If you were quoted double this, that is information, not proof.

§ 01 Your numbers

Sets the billed rate and the worker's total compensation from the 2022 Economic Census, carried to 2025 dollars. Both boxes below move with it, and both are editable.
More
It is a state MEAN, not a bound on the firm in your driveway. The middle 80% of state means run $92.47 to $121.55, a 1.31x spread. We quote p10 to p90 and not the raw minimum and maximum, because the extremes of 39 cells are a report on the two flakiest cells: our first version published a range of $62.73 to $165.10 whose low end was a state whose hours cell claims a 57-hour week every week of the year.
THIS IS THE BOX THAT SURPRISES PEOPLE. You are billed per WORKER-hour, so two electricians for two hours is four billed hours.
More
The Census field is literally 'construction workers annual hours', which is why the rate is per worker-hour and not per hour of your afternoon. A firm that sends a licensed electrician plus an apprentice bills for both, and the job may not finish any sooner. Ask how many people are coming, and ask before they arrive.
Clock time on your job. Multiply by the box above to get the hours you are actually billed for.
More
Most firms have a minimum. Half an hour of work on a one-hour minimum is billed as an hour, and that is normal rather than sharp practice: the drive, the van and the paperwork happened whether the job took ten minutes or fifty.
Set by your state above. This is TOTAL COMPENSATION: wages plus fringe benefits, because the benefits are the worker's, not the firm's overhead.
More
We got this wrong first time and it is worth knowing why. The Census field is 'construction workers annual WAGES', and fringe benefits are a SEPARATE field that sits outside payroll altogether. So our first draft counted the electrician's health cover and pension as part of the firm's overhead, and reported a bigger gap than really exists. Wages alone are $37.03; benefits add $11.17. BLS, measuring the OCCUPATION rather than the class, puts an electrician's median wage at $30.38 and the mean at $34.37.
What they charge to turn up, before any work. It sits at zero until you type what you were quoted.
More
The Economic Census prices the WORK, not the terms of business, so a minimum charge is not a thing it measures. It is real and it is common and we are not going to invent a figure for it and then let the calculator present our invention with the authority of the Census.
Add your own. The rate above has materials REMOVED from it, so nothing here is double-counted.
More
This is what makes the billed-versus-cost comparison on this page honest. We take receipts for construction work, subtract the cost of materials and the cost of subcontracted work, and only then divide by worker-hours. So $111.55 is what the firm charges for LABOUR, and your parts sit on top of it.
Your job, at your state's rate
$223

Typical range $185 – $243

  • Labour (2 worker-hours at $111.55)$223
  • Call-out or minimum$0
  • Materials and parts$0
  • Total$223
See next steps →

§ 02 The return

Billed per worker-hour, your state$111.55
Worker-hours you are billed for2
Of your labour bill, what the workers cost$96
Billed rate over what the worker costs2.31

The rate, the compensation and every line of the breakdown are the Census's. The call-out and the materials are yours, and they start at zero because no federal source publishes either. Nothing on this page is a model of ours.

Where the money goes

Labour (2 worker-hours at $111.55)$223

Recommended next steps

Some links below are affiliate links. If you buy through them, Calcatrice may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only suggest tools that fit your result, and a company can't pay to show up here.

A small job. The thing worth asking before they arrive is how many people are coming: at this size a second electrician on the van doubles the labour line, and the job does not necessarily finish any sooner.

By the numbers

  • You are billed per WORKER-hour. Two electricians for two hours is four billed hours, and your invoice will not explain that.
    More
    The Census field is 'construction workers annual hours', so every rate on this page is per person per hour. A firm sending a licensed electrician plus an apprentice bills for both, and the job does not necessarily finish sooner. Ask how many people are coming BEFORE they arrive, not after the invoice.
  • The firm bills $111.55 an hour. The electrician costs it $48.20 an hour: $37.03 in wages and $11.17 in benefits. The bill is 2.31x what the worker costs, and materials are already out of it.
    More
    The benefits matter and we nearly gave them away. The Census field is 'construction workers annual WAGES' and fringe benefits are a separate field entirely, so it is easy to count a man's health cover as his boss's overhead. We did, in the first draft of this page, and reported 3.67x instead of 2.31x.
  • The Census can tell you where almost all of the rest goes, and it takes about $27.56 an hour, a quarter of the bill, before you reach anything that could be profit.
    More
    Published, per worker-hour: office and supervisor wages $13.08, their benefits $3.95, other operating expenses $9.85, power and fuel $3.79, rent and leases $2.67, depreciation $2.45. The residual after all of it is $27.56, and that is the MOST margin could be, because it still has to cover the unbilled hours: the driving, the quoting, the customer who was not in.
  • The middle 80% of state means run $92.47 to $121.55 per worker-hour, a 1.31x spread. That is a spread of averages, and it does not bound your quote.
    More
    We publish p10 to p90 rather than the minimum and maximum on purpose. The extremes of 39 state cells are a report on the two flakiest cells: our first draft printed a $62.73 low that came from a state whose hours cell implies a 57-hour week every week of the year, and a $165.10 high that came from 31 establishments. The spread between real firms is wider than the spread between state averages, always, because averaging pulls the extremes in.
  • There is no plumber's hourly rate in the federal statistics, and that is a narrower claim than it sounds.
    More
    BLS knows exactly what a plumber EARNS: occupation 47-2152, 465,840 of them, median $30.67 an hour. What does not exist is a plumbing-specific BILLED rate, because no industry class is mostly plumbing: the one that holds plumbers is 40.9% HVAC and 25.2% plumbing. So a 'plumber's hourly rate' computed the way this page computes an electrician's would be mostly an HVAC rate. The electrical class is 69.3% electrical work, which is why the arithmetic holds here and not there.

Sourced: the rate, the compensation and every line of the breakdown, all from the 2022 Economic Census (NAICS 238210) in 2025 dollars. Ours: nothing in the rate. The call-out and the materials are boxes that start at zero, because no federal source publishes either and we will not invent them.

More
How the rate is built. Receipts for construction work, minus the cost of materials, minus the cost of subcontracted work, divided by construction-worker hours. Subtracting subcontracts is the Census's own definition, not our invention: do it and you reproduce their published "net value of construction work" to the dollar. Rule 18. Materials are out, so this is a labour-and-overhead quantity rather than a whole-project one, and it takes the ECI construction-compensation index (1.1129 from 2022 to 2025) rather than a project deflator. It is not PURE labour, and we should not have said it was: only $37.03 of the $111.55 is the electrician's wages. Two agencies, and we made them argue. The Census says an electrical contractor's wage bill works out at $37.03 per worker-hour. BLS surveys a named OCCUPATION, electricians (47-2111, 757,220 of them), and puts the mean at $34.37 and the median at $30.38. The Census figure sits 7.7% above the BLS mean, and our first explanation for that was backwards: we said the Census "pools apprentices and helpers", which could only pull it DOWN (BLS puts electricians' helpers at $21.19). What actually pushes it up is that the Census's construction workers include working foremen, that its wage figure includes overtime premium which BLS hourly wages exclude, and that BLS counts electricians in every industry, including lower-paying ones outside contracting. The puller refuses to build the file if the two drift outside a -20%/+25% band. Who this trade is actually billing. A third of this class's construction work (33.1%) is subcontracted IN from other contractors, so those hours are billed to a general contractor and not to a homeowner. The rate is a class average across both, and we would rather tell you that than let "your job" imply the whole class is doing kitchens. What is in the class (Rule 22). NAICS 238210 is 69.3% electric power installation and service work, 7.6% telecommunications, 7.0% fire and security systems.

Sources: Census, 2022 Economic Census (EC2223BASIC): receipts, materials, subcontracts, wages, fringe benefits, operating expenses and construction-worker HOURS for NAICS 238210 · Census, 2022 Economic Census, Kind of Business (EC2223KOB): 69.3% of NAICS 238210 is electrical work; 25.2% of NAICS 238220 is plumbing · BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025: 47-2111 Electricians (and 47-2152 Plumbers). An occupation, not an industry class · BLS, Employment Cost Index, construction compensation (CIU2012300000000I): carries the 2022 rate to 2025 dollars

How this estimate is calculated

  • The rate is per WORKER-hour, and that is the Census's definition rather than our interpretation.
    More
    The field is 'construction workers annual hours'. Receipts over it gives dollars per worker-hour. Two people for two hours is four of them.
  • Fringe benefits are the WORKER'S compensation, not the firm's overhead, and we had that wrong at first.
    More
    The Census reports 'construction workers annual WAGES' and reports fringe benefits in a separate field outside payroll (annual payroll equals construction-worker wages plus other-employee wages, exactly). We allocate benefits pro-rata by wage share, giving the electrician $11.17 an hour on top of $37.03 in wages.
  • The residual is an upper bound on margin. We do not call it profit, and we do not know what the profit is.
    More
    After wages, benefits, office pay, other operating expenses, fuel, rent and depreciation, $27.56 an hour is left. It still has to cover the hours nobody pays for: driving, quoting, no-shows. Profit is at or below that, and anyone telling you exactly where is guessing.
  • 2022 dollars are carried to 2025 with a LABOUR index (Rule 18), and the rate is not pure labour.
    More
    ECI construction compensation, 1.1129. Materials are removed from the rate, but overhead is not, so it is a labour-and-overhead quantity rather than a wage. Our first draft called it a labour quantity, which is too flattering to our own method.
  • The class is 69.3% electrical work, and we would not have built this page if it were not.
    More
    A NAICS code is a bucket, not a job, and the bucket has to be mostly the job before its average means anything. The plumbing class is 25.2% plumbing, which is why there is no plumber page yet.
  • A third of this class's work is subcontracted in from other contractors, so a third of these hours are not householders' jobs.
    More
    33.1% of the class's construction work comes in from other contractors and is billed to a general contractor rather than to you. The rate is an average across both markets, and we say so rather than let 'your job' imply otherwise.

Frequently asked questions

How much does an electrician charge an hour?
An electrical contractor bills about $111.55 per worker-hour in 2025 dollars, which is what the 2022 Economic Census works out to once you take materials and subcontracted work out of receipts and divide by construction-worker hours. Pick your state above for your own figure: the middle 80% of state means run $92.47 to $121.55. But the rate is only half of your bill. You are charged per WORKER-hour, so if they send two people you pay two rates for the same afternoon.
Why is the bill so much more than the electrician earns?
Because the rate is what the BUSINESS charges, not what the person earns, and because the person costs more than his wage. Out of $111.55: $37.03 is his wages and $11.17 is his benefits, so he costs $48.20. Office and supervisor pay takes $13.08 plus $3.95 of benefits. Other operating expenses, fuel, rent and depreciation take $18.76 between them. That leaves $27.56, which still has to cover the hours nobody bills you for: driving to you, quoting you, the customer who was not in. Profit is somewhere at or below that number, and we are not going to pretend to know where.
Should I be suspicious of a quote well above this?
No, and we would rather say so plainly than sell you a grievance. $111.55 is the mean of a CLASS. The middle 80% of state means alone run $92.47 to $121.55, and the spread between individual firms is wider than the spread between state averages, always. An emergency call-out on a Sunday is a different product from a booked morning. What this page gives you is a defensible starting point and the right question to ask, which is: how many people are you sending, and for how long?
What about a plumber?
We can tell you what a plumber earns and not what a plumber charges, and the difference matters. BLS surveys the occupation directly: 465,840 plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters, median $30.67 an hour. But a BILLED rate has to come from an industry class, and no class is mostly plumbing: the one that contains plumbers is 40.9% HVAC and only 25.2% plumbing, so the rate you would compute from it is mostly an HVAC rate wearing a plumber's name. The electrical class is 69.3% electrical work, which is why this page exists and that one does not yet. We build the page the data supports rather than the page the search volume asks for.

Related calculators

Whole-house generator cost
Calculator
HVAC replacement cost
Calculator