Know exactly whatto charge to be profitable.

Sixteen-hundred hours per installer per year is the working figure the calculator uses because it accounts for holidays, sick days, training, travel between sites, and the non-billable admin that every integrator absorbs in the course of a year. A full calendar year has closer to 2,080 scheduled hours, but no field-based trade ever bills all of them. Sixteen-hundred is the figure most integrators land on once they are honest about where the week actually goes, and it is the industry standard used by trade bodies when they benchmark labour recovery rates.

Everything it takes to keep the business open for another month: rent, wages, insurance, vehicles, fuel, tools, software, training, marketing, accountancy, subscriptions, and the owner's own salary. If you pay for it out of the business bank account, it belongs in the operating-cost total. The calculator deliberately asks for the whole number rather than breaking it apart. The point is to expose the rate you need to clear every cost, not to model each line independently.

Fifteen percent is the healthy floor for a field-based AV business. Under ten percent leaves no room for bad weather, bad debt, or a single mis-estimated job. Between ten and fifteen percent keeps the lights on but does not build the reserves you need to buy vehicles, hire ahead of growth, or survive a slow quarter. Over twenty percent is a strong signal that pricing and utilisation are both working in your favour. Most well-run integrators we work with aim for eighteen to twenty-two percent on labour after all overhead is recovered.

It gives you a solid baseline: the rate at which your team's fully-loaded cost is recovered at the margin you choose, assuming 1,600 billable hours per installer. It is not a job-costing engine. Treat this tool as the headline number that tells you whether your current quoting rate is leaving profit on the table.

The calculator still works. It just tells you the internal rate you need to recover through whatever pricing model you use. On a fixed-price project, divide the total labour portion of the quote by the hours you expect to spend on it; if that figure is below the rate the calculator returns, you are eating margin on the job. Integrators who run mostly fixed-price work tend to use this rate as a guardrail for estimating, not as an invoice line.

Add their salaries into your annual operating costs, but do not add them to the installer count. The installer count is the number of people whose time is billed on customer projects. Everyone else (admin, estimators, owners, service managers) is overhead, and their cost is already recovered inside the rate the calculator produces. This is why the answer can feel high the first time you run it honestly: it is recovering the whole organisation, not just the person with the cable cutters.