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Pay Yourself Calculator for Woodworkers

Most woodworkers price forward: materials plus a guessed hourly rate. This calculator works backward instead — start from the income you actually want, add taxes and shop overhead, subtract the hours you can't bill, and see the rate your work has to earn.

Start from a shop like yours

One tap fills in typical numbers. Change anything after.

What do you want to take home?

Your target personal income before taxes — what the business pays you.

$
$

Sets which 2026 brackets and standard deduction the estimate uses.

Social Security & Medicare — required if you're a sole proprietor or LLC.

Shop overhead

Costs that exist whether or not you have a commission — rent, insurance, software, utilities, blades and bits.

$
$

Billable efficiency

You can't bill every hour. Design time, emails, material runs, glue-ups drying, and cleanup all eat shop time.

31.5 billable hrs/week
Heavy AdminAverage (70–80%)Pure Labor

Your required hourly rate

$50.03/hr
Revenue needed:$78,800.00/yrBillable hours:1575 hrs/yrShop overhead:$13,800.00/yrEst. federal tax:$5,068.95Est. SE tax:$9,184.21Take-home (21.9% tax):$50,746.84/yr

Tax estimate uses 2026 IRS brackets and the standard deduction for single filers. It's a planning number, not tax advice.

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Your required rate

$50.03/hr

Why woodworkers undercharge

A $50/hr rate feels honest until you do the math. If you're in the shop 40 hours a week but only 30 of those are billable — the rest going to design, quoting, emails, material runs, and cleanup — and you pay self-employment tax on top of income tax, that $50 can shrink to under $30 of real take-home pay before overhead even enters the picture.

The three costs most hobbyists-turned-professionals forget: self-employment tax (15.3% for Social Security and Medicare), shop overhead that runs whether or not you have a commission, and non-billable time. This calculator makes all three explicit.

How the math works

  1. Start with your target annual gross pay — what the business pays you.
  2. Add annual shop overhead (monthly overhead × 12, plus your tool budget) to get the revenue your shop must produce.
  3. Compute your real billable hours: (52 − vacation weeks) × hours per week × billable efficiency.
  4. Divide revenue needed by billable hours — that's your required hourly rate.
  5. Taxes are estimated separately (self-employment tax plus 2025 federal single-filer brackets) so you can see what you actually keep.

From rate to quote

Knowing your rate is half the job — applying it consistently on every commission is the other half. QuoteItRight saves this rate as your default labor rate, then builds material lists, tiered pricing, and client-ready PDF quotes on top of it. Start free — no card required, and your first quotes are on the house.

More free calculators

See all of our free pricing tools for woodworkers on the calculators page.