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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.
What do you want to take home?
Your target personal income before taxes — what the business pays you.
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.
Your required hourly rate
Tax estimate uses 2025 IRS single-filer brackets and the standard deduction. It's a planning number, not tax advice.
Don't let this number die in a browser tab.
Save $40.00/hr as your default labor rate and turn it into professional quotes — free account, no card required.
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
- Start with your target annual gross pay — what the business pays you.
- Add annual shop overhead (monthly overhead × 12, plus your tool budget) to get the revenue your shop must produce.
- Compute your real billable hours: (52 − vacation weeks) × hours per week × billable efficiency.
- Divide revenue needed by billable hours — that's your required hourly rate.
- 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.