I wrote about what to charge for a side job and gave you numbers. This is the post where I show the work behind them.

Where these numbers come from

Straight up front, so you know what you are reading.

I worked the tinner trade for about four years. I have not taken a side job in fifteen. What I do now is manage projects for a general contractor in Salt Lake, which means I look at real bid numbers most weeks of the year.

The numbers are Salt Lake in 2026. The arithmetic works anywhere — swap your own supply house prices and your own rate into it. The rates for material apply to residential add ons. Commercial is a completely different animal.

So this is not my price sheet. It is what this work goes for here in 2026, checked against what it felt like when I was the one in the attic.

I knew these numbers by gut before I ever put them on paper. Then I did the arithmetic to write this. They came out the same.

What does an hour actually cost you?

More than your hourly rate. A burdened rate around $85 an hour is realistic here, and a job carries about $340 in fixed cost before anything gets installed — three hours of preconstruction and a truck charge. That fixed cost is why a one-register job has a floor and a ten-register job has margin.

Burdened rate is not what you take home

When I say $85 an hour, that is a burdened rate. It is not somebody’s paycheck. It is what an hour costs the job once everything that rides along with an hour is loaded into it.

If you are working out your own number, these are the things that ride along:

• Self-employment tax
• Insurance
• Truck payment
• Fuel
• Tool replacement
• Consumables
• Phone
• Estimating time and meeting the owner

That last one is preconstruction, and I am going to spend most of this article on it, because it is the one that gets left out and it is the one that costs the most.

The tax and insurance side is real and it varies by state and by how you are set up. Talk to somebody who does taxes for a living. I came up in sheet metal and I manage construction, and I am not going to guess at your situation.

The most expensive thing you do all day is the part where you are not holding a tool

Here is what a job costs before a single piece of pipe goes up:

• Two hours meeting the owner and walking the job
• One hour of paperwork
• Three trips in the truck — out to the owner, to the supply house, back to the owner

Three hours at $85 is $255. Truck charge is $75. Call it $340 before anything is installed.

That is more than the material on a small job. It is more than the install labor on most jobs. And every bit of it happens whether the job is one register or twelve.

Every job gets it, too. Even a repeat customer. You still go out, you still walk it, you still write it up.

Tool wear is not the problem you think it is

This is the one I used to think about too much. Here is what tools actually cost per job.

• Snips, $80 for the right and left pair, worn out every 100 jobs
• Dikes, $30, done after about 250 flex cuts — that wire in flex duct eats them
• A six foot ladder, $110, every 100 jobs
• A drill, $110, about a year and a half
• A battery, $110, refreshed every nine or ten months

All of it together comes to about $11 a job.

Eleven dollars, against $340 of preconstruction and truck. Three percent.

So buy good snips. Every dollar saved buying cheap ones is noise next to one extra hour sitting at somebody’s kitchen table.

Billable hours is a trick question

People ask how many hours in a week you can actually bill. If you price by the job instead of the hour, that question stops mattering, and that is the whole point.

Say you have ten jobs at $200 a register. Jobs one through nine have six registers each. Job ten has twelve.

If jobs one through nine took forty hours, you still have to go do job ten.

If jobs one through nine took twenty hours, job ten just paid for you to go do something that is not work.

Same money either way. The difference is how good you got. On an hourly bid, getting faster costs you money. On a unit rate, getting faster is the whole reward.

Working it backwards to a unit rate

Here is a basement register, itemized, at Salt Lake supply house prices in 2026.

• Spin-in, $30
• Pipe, $8 for a five foot piece — a run is usually no more than fifteen feet from the trunk, so three pieces, $24
• Elbows, $16 each, minimum two per run, $32
• Boot, $25
• Register, about $10 for a standard one — up to $35 for a decent decorative

That is $121 in material. Then the labor. Cutting in a spin-in takes three minutes on the side of a duct and ten minutes on the top, and the rest is running pipe and hanging it. On an open basement with good access that is about seventeen minutes a register, which is $24 at $85 an hour.

So a basement register costs about $145 all in.

An attic register is a different animal. Flex duct instead of hard pipe, and the runs come off the plenum in the middle of the house rather than off a trunk line, so some are ten feet and some are fifty. A 25 foot box of flex is $60 and covers two short runs, but a long one eats a box by itself. Add a collar at $15 and clamps at $8 apiece.

Material lands around $142, and an attic run takes about an hour instead of seventeen minutes. That is $227 a register.

Why there is a floor

Now put the two together.

One basement register: $340 fixed plus $145 for the run. That is $485. The going floor for a single-register job is $500.

Fifteen dollars.

Nobody works that out on paper. That number comes from years of jobs where anything below it felt wrong. Then you run the arithmetic and find out $500 is almost exactly the point where a one-register job stops costing you money.

That is what a floor is. Not the price you want. The place where you stop paying to show up.

After the first one, every added register carries its own material and its own labor and nothing else, because the $340 is already paid. That is why the second register is worth more than the first, and the twelfth is worth more than the second. Same $200, better margin every time.

The attic floor is higher, and not just because of the math

A single attic run is $650, not $500.

Part of that is straight arithmetic — more material, and an hour instead of seventeen minutes. But part of it is hassle, and there is no point pretending otherwise.

In a basement, the owner is standing there watching you. He talks to you while you work. It slows you down some, but it is a buddy buddy thing and it is a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

In an attic you are alone, hunched over in a tight space, and it is miserable. The owner is not up there with you. You work as fast as you can to get the heck out of there, and when you come down he does not know what you did. He knows he has more air than he had before.

Some of a rate is what the work costs. Some of it is what the work takes out of you. Both are real and only one of them shows up on a spreadsheet.

What I got wrong when I started

My first side job I charged forty dollars an hour. I did not know any better.

What I did not understand then is that the hour you spend cutting in a spin-in is not the expensive hour. The expensive hours are the ones before you got there.

Fifteen years of looking at other people’s bids has not changed that. It has only made it more obvious. The contractors who are still around price the drive, the meeting and the paperwork. The ones who do not, do not last.

Once you have a number, you still have to hand it to somebody. I built a free estimate and invoice tool for tradespeople — no signup, no subscription: quickdrawinvoice.com

Common Questions

What is a burdened rate?

It is what an hour of time costs once you load in everything that rides along with it — taxes, insurance, the truck, the tools, the phone. It is not take-home pay. Around $85 an hour is realistic in Salt Lake right now.

How do I figure out my own rate?

Start with what a job costs before you install anything — your preconstruction hours and your truck. Then price one unit of work: material plus the time it actually takes. Add them and you have your floor. Everything above the floor is margin.

Should I include tool wear in my price?

Include it, but do not agonize over it. All the tool replacement together comes to about $11 a job. It is three percent. An extra hour of meeting costs eight times that.

Why is a one-register job so expensive per register?

Because the $340 of preconstruction and truck is the same whether you install one register or twelve. On a one-register job, one register carries all of it. On a twelve-register job it is spread twelve ways.

Why is attic work priced higher than basement work?

More material, longer runs, and about four times the labor per register. And attic work is miserable in a way basement work is not. Some of a rate is what the job costs and some of it is what the job takes out of you.

Just starting out? Here are the hand tools worth buying first.