All-In Rate

All-In Rate

All-In Rate is the comprehensive cost per unit of work in construction, including labor, materials, equipment, overhead, and profit margins.

What Goes Into an All-In Rate

When you pay a carpenter $35/hour, that’s just the base wage. The all-in rate includes everything it actually costs to have that person on the job:

  • Base wage: $35.00/hr
  • Payroll taxes (FICA, FUTA, SUTA): ~$4.20/hr
  • Workers’ comp insurance: ~$5.25/hr (varies widely by trade and state)
  • Health insurance and benefits: ~$6.00/hr
  • Vacation, holiday, and sick pay: ~$2.50/hr
  • Overhead allocation (office, trucks, tools, admin): ~$8.00/hr
  • Profit margin: ~$5.00/hr

All-in rate: ~$65.95/hr — nearly double the base wage.

Why It Matters for Bidding

Contractors who bid using base wages instead of all-in rates consistently underprice their work. If you estimate 400 labor hours at $35/hr ($14,000) but your real cost is $66/hr ($26,400), you’ve just given away $12,400 in margin.

How to Calculate Your All-In Rate

  1. Start with the base hourly wage
  2. Add payroll burden (taxes + insurance + benefits) — typically 30-45% of base wage
  3. Add overhead allocation — divide total annual overhead by total annual billable hours
  4. Add your profit margin

Practical Example

An electrical contractor bidding a commercial tenant improvement needs 600 hours of journeyman electrician labor. Using the base wage of $42/hr, the bid would show $25,200. But the all-in rate with burden, workers’ comp (high for electrical), overhead, and 10% profit is $78/hr — making the real number $46,800. Bidding at the base wage means losing $21,600.

Projul’s budgeting tools help you track labor costs against your all-in rates so you know whether each job is actually making money. For more on keeping projects profitable, see our construction cost codes guide.