How much should a tradie charge per hour in Australia?

This is the mistake that catches most people. If you want $40 an hour in your pocket, charging the customer $40 an hour leaves you with a fraction of that once everything else comes out. Your charge-out rate has to carry the whole business, not just the hour you spent on the tools.

Think of it as two different numbers. Your wage is what you pay yourself for the work. Your rate is what the customer pays so that the wage, and everything behind it, gets covered. Blur the two together and you end up busy and broke.

Start with your own time at a wage you are happy with. Then add the costs that never show up on a single job but are real all the same: super, tools and their upkeep, the ute and fuel, your phone, software, and insurance like public liability and tools cover. None of that pays for itself out of thin air.

On top of that sits your admin time, the quoting, chasing invoices and buying materials, plus a margin so the business can absorb a quiet week or a job that goes sideways. If you are registered for GST you add 10% on top for the ATO, and that part is not yours to keep. It is a lot to fold into one number, which is exactly why so many rates come out too low.

Here is the part that surprises people. You do not get paid for a 40-hour week. Between quoting, travel, picking up materials, paperwork and the gaps between jobs, a big chunk of your week is not billable. Plenty of tradies bill closer to 25 or 30 hours out of a nominal 40.

That matters because all your costs still have to be recovered across the hours you actually bill, not the hours you work. Price as though every hour is billable and you fall short every week without ever knowing why. The fewer hours you can bill, the higher your rate has to be to cover the same costs.

There is no single correct rate, and anyone who hands you one flat figure is guessing. What a tradie charges per hour varies widely by trade, by state, by how specialised the work is, and by whether it is domestic or commercial. A rate that is fair in one town looks high or low in the next.

You will hear ranges thrown around, often anywhere from around $70 to $150 an hour or more depending on the trade and the region, but treat those as background noise, not a target. Ranges only tell you if you are wildly off. They do not tell you what you need. The only rate that matters is the one that covers your costs and pays you properly.

Work it backwards. Start with the income you want in a year. Add up your yearly business costs, the tools, vehicle, insurance, super and software, all of it. Divide the total by the number of hours you can realistically bill in a year, not the hours you work. That gives you the rate you need before GST. It is worth doing on paper at least once, because the number is usually higher than the one in your head.

We built a free tradie hourly rate calculator that runs this for you in a couple of minutes, so you see your real number instead of guessing. Once you have a rate you trust, ONARA Ops helps you put it to work: quotes and invoices with your rate and GST built in, jobs and hours tracked, and card payments straight to your account with no cut taken. Add ONARA Books and it works out profit per job, so you can see whether your rate is actually holding up on real work.