How much to charge as a handyman

In this article

This is the broadest trade in these guides and the easiest one to be busy and broke in. Nobody underprices a bathroom refit. Everybody underprices the “could you just pop round and tighten this”, and a week of those is a week you worked for nothing.

What people are actually charging

Item	Range	Notes
Hourly, self‑employed	$50–$80	One person, one van, low overhead.
Hourly, company or franchise	$75–$125	Insured, employed staff, dispatch, warranty. The gap is overhead, not greed.
Minimum charge	$125–$200	Some quote $75–$200, some bill a one‑to‑two‑hour minimum instead. Either way, have one.
Half day / full day	$200–$300 / $400–$600	The easiest thing to sell to a customer with a list. Push for the list.
Flat‑rate jobs	$150–$600	Most common jobs land $150–$350.
Whole job, typical	$65–$1,200	About $390 on average, plus materials when quoted hourly.

Build your hourly rate in three lines

Almost every handyman sets their rate by asking what the last guy charged. Do this instead; it takes ten minutes.

• Overhead per hour = monthly overhead ÷ monthly billable hours. Van, insurance, tools, phone, software, the evening spent quoting. Billable hours, not hours worked — and for this trade the two are very far apart.
• Add the wage you actually want to earn. Not what is left over. The wage is a cost, the same as fuel.
• Multiply the total by 1.15 to 1.20. That margin is what funds a slow February and a replacement van. Without it you are covering costs, which is not the same as running a business.

Worked through: $20 of overhead an hour plus a $55 wage is $75, times 1.15 is $86 an hour. Notice that lands above the middle of the market — and that the market average includes plenty of people who have never done this sum.

The minimum charge is not rude

Every job costs you money before you pick up a tool: the phone call, the diary slot, the drive, the parking, the invoice, the follow‑up. That cost is identical whether the task takes ten minutes or two hours.

A minimum of $125–$200 is normal and customers accept it immediately when it is stated up front and never when it appears on the bill. Build it from your real floor: average travel, set‑up, admin, and one hour of labour.

Two things it fixes at once. It stops tiny jobs losing money, and it makes customers batch their list — which is better for them and much better for you. “My minimum is $150, so it’s worth saving up a few things” is a sentence that turns a $60 call‑out into a $400 morning.

Flat rate for the top fifteen, hourly for the rest

Model	Use it for	Why
Flat rate	The jobs you do every week — TV mounts, ceiling fans, faucets, locks, blinds, doors.	You already know how long they take. The customer gets certainty and you get paid for being fast.
Hourly	Troubleshooting, old houses, anything behind a wall, and multi‑step repairs.	Nobody can quote a fault they have not found yet, and pretending otherwise is how you eat a day.
Hybrid	Everyone, in practice.	A price list for your fifteen most common jobs, hourly for everything else. This is what the profitable ones do.

To turn an hourly rate into a flat one: estimated hours × your rate, plus overhead, plus materials and mark‑up, plus your profit target. Then track how long it actually took and fix the ones you got wrong.

The handyman price calculator runs both halves of that: it builds the hourly rate from your overhead and the wage you actually want, then shows you the point where your minimum charge takes over from the clock — which on a short job is most of what you get paid.

Materials, trips and buffers

• Mark materials up 20–50%. You sourced it, you fetched it, you warranty it. If the customer supplies the part, you do not — and your price should reflect that difference, not ignore it.
• Itemise materials separately on every estimate. It makes the labour figure make sense.
• Charge a trip fee of $30–$80 for out‑of‑area work or a dedicated materials run, and mileage beyond your normal area.
• Add 20–30% to anything with bad access, safety risk or an unclear scope. Decide that at the quote, not halfway through the loft.

Scope creep is this trade’s specific disease

“While you’re here, could you just…” is how a profitable morning becomes a free afternoon. It is not the customer being difficult — you are standing in their house holding a drill, and to them it looks like two minutes.

• Write down what is included before you start. Two lines is enough.
• Say the sentence out loud: “Happy to do that — it’s about another hour, so it’ll be $X. Want me to?” Almost everyone says yes.
• Never do the extra first and mention it later. Work already done cannot be priced; it can only be argued about.
• Get a yes in writing for anything that adds real time.
• Review your rate every year. Tools, fuel and insurance all move; a rate that has not is a pay cut you gave yourself.

If you are booked three weeks out, you are too cheap

Constant demand feels like success and is usually a pricing signal. If your diary is full three weeks ahead, month after month, the market is telling you it would pay more. Raise the rate on new customers first, watch the close rate, and keep going until it moves.

The mistakes that cost the most in this trade, in order: no minimum charge; forgetting overhead when setting the hourly rate; charging the same whether you supplied the materials or not; and accepting changes verbally.

Sources

Every figure above comes from one of these, checked in August 2026.

• HomeAdvisor, handyman price list — hourly ranges, average job cost and the flat‑rate spread. Built from homeowner‑reported project costs.
• HomeGuide, handyman prices and Angi — rates by business type, minimum charges, half‑ and full‑day rates.
• Thumbtack, handyman hourly rates — an independent cross‑check on the hourly range.
• PayScale — what a handyman earns, as distinct from what a handyman bills.
• The rate formula, the minimum‑charge logic, material mark‑up and the scope‑creep rules are drawn from how the trade’s own pricing guides teach it, cross‑checked across several independent ones. They are working benchmarks, not survey data.

Ranges move. Re‑check HomeAdvisor and Angi first — they are updated yearly and built from what homeowners actually paid rather than from what anybody is selling.