A plumbing tradesperson level 1 on the award is paid $31.63 an hour from 1 July 2026 ($32.80 registered), but costs about $36.85 for every hour paid once annual leave loading, 12% super and workers compensation are counted.
The number that decides your rate is the billable share. At 65% of attended hours billable, that same employee costs $67.31 per billable hour before any overhead or profit at all.
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Pricing from the cost per hour PAID rather than per hour BILLED leaves you 45% short, and the gap does not show up until the year ends.
Moving from 60% billable to 70% billable takes $10.42 an hour off your break-even. Held against the 60% price, that is $12,136 a year from the same person doing the same work.
You pay for 1,976 hours a year, of which 1,664 are attended, and invoice roughly 1,082 of those: 312 hours go to leave and public holidays, and about 582 to travel, quoting, materials runs, callbacks and admin.
Award wages rose 4.75% and the National Minimum Wage rose 6% to $26.44 an hour on 1 July 2026, so any rate built before then is now understated.
Workers compensation has no national rate. Each state and territory scheme sets it from your industry, wages and claims history, so take it off your own policy schedule rather than a rule of thumb.
A qualified plumber on the award costs you $31.63 an hour. Charge $80 an hour for their time and it feels like you are making $48. You are not. On a normal year, with a normal amount of travel and quoting and warranty work, that tradesperson costs you about $67 for every hour you can actually put on an invoice, before you have paid for the van, the insurance, the phone, or yourself.
That gap is where most trade businesses quietly lose money. Not on the jobs they price badly, on the rate they never worked out properly in the first place.
A call-out fee should be priced against the cost of an ATTENDED hour, $43.75 in the worked example, not against the $67.31 billable-hour rate, which already has the unbillable time spread through it. The real risk is jobs whose travel ratio is worse than the billable share your rate assumes.
This is the arithmetic, with the current numbers, and the rate build-up at the end.
From the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026, the Plumbing and Fire Sprinklers Award pays a tradesperson level 1 $31.63 an hour if they are not registered, or $32.80 if they are. The $31.63 already folds in the industry, plumbing trade and special fixed allowances, which is why it looks higher than the "base" figure people quote at each other. The registration allowance is the gap between the two rates, about $1.18 an hour, and like the others it is an all-purpose allowance, so it flows through overtime, penalties, leave and termination pay as well.
Award rates rose 4.75% on 1 July 2026 and the National Minimum Wage rose 6%, to $26.44 an hour.
The award is a floor, not a market rate. Most decent tradespeople are paid above it. But the floor is the right place to start the sum, because everything else is a multiple of whatever you actually pay.
The worked example below uses plumbing because its pay guide is unambiguous. Nothing about the method is specific to plumbing: for electrical, carpentry, cleaning, landscaping or anything else, swap in the wage you actually pay and your own workers compensation rate, and every step after that is identical.
Leave you pay for but do not get worked. The National Employment Standards give a full-time employee four weeks of paid annual leave and ten days of paid personal or carer's leave a year, plus public holidays. You pay for all of it. On a 38-hour week that is 1,976 paid hours a year, of which around 312 are not worked.
Annual leave loading. Most trade awards add 17.5% on top of the wage for annual leave. Four weeks at $31.63 with loading is another $841 a year.
Superannuation. The Super Guarantee is 12.00% for 2026-27. Note what changed underneath that rate: from 1 July 2026, Payday Super replaced ordinary time earnings with qualifying earnings as the base you calculate it on, and super is now due every payday rather than quarterly. Annual leave loading is generally included in qualifying earnings, so it is included below.
Workers compensation. This one has no national number. Every state and territory runs its own scheme and sets your premium from your industry classification, your wages and your claims history, so a plumbing business in Perth and one in Brisbane can pay materially different rates for identical work. The example below assumes 3% of wages. Put your own figure in. It is on your policy schedule.
Run those together on a $31.63 tradesperson:
Line
Amount
Wages, 1,976 paid hours
$62,501
Annual leave loading, 17.5% on four weeks
$841
Superannuation, 12.00%
$7,601
Workers compensation, assumed 3%
$1,875
Annual cost
$72,818
So the employee whose rate is $31.63 costs about $36.85 for every hour you pay them, once leave, loading, super and cover are counted. That is a 16.5% uplift and it is the easy half of the problem.
Nobody bills 38 hours a week. Between travel between jobs, quoting work you do not win, picking up materials, warranty callbacks, toolbox talks, paperwork and the job that finishes at 2pm because the part did not arrive, most trade businesses land somewhere between 60% and 75% of attended hours. No Australian source publishes a billable share for trade businesses, so treat that range as a starting point rather than a statistic, and measure your own.
That is the number that decides your rate, and it is the one almost nobody measures.
If this share of hours is billable
Billable hours a year
Break-even labour cost
55%
915
$79.55/hr
60%
999
$72.92/hr
65%
1,082
$67.31/hr
70%
1,165
$62.50/hr
75%
1,248
$58.33/hr
80%
1,332
$54.69/hr
Read the spread. Moving from 60% billable to 70% billable takes $10.42 an hour off your break-even, without touching anyone's wage. Keep charging the 60% rate while running at 70% and that is $12,136 a year of margin, from the same person doing the same work with less time lost between jobs.
That is usually a bigger and faster win than a price rise, and it is entirely within your control.
Everything above is the cost of the person. It does not include:
the ute, its fuel, its rego, its insurance and its depreciation
public liability and professional indemnity
tools, consumables and replacements
phone, software, accounting fees, bank and card fees
advertising, the website, quoting time you already counted
your own wage, if you are on the tools
and whatever you keep at the end, which is the point of owning the thing
Overhead varies far too much by trade and size for a single honest number, so do not let anyone sell you a rule of thumb. Add your last twelve months of business expenses, take out wages and materials so you do not double count, and divide by the same billable hours figure you used above. That gives you overhead per billable hour. Add it.
Here is the whole thing in one place. Fill in your own figures.
Wage per hour paid. What the person actually earns, not the award floor, unless you pay the floor.
Add leave, loading, super and workers comp. In the example that took $31.63 to about $36.85, a 16.5% uplift. Yours will differ mainly on workers comp.
Divide by your billable share. Not by 38 hours. By the hours you can put on an invoice. This is the step that gets skipped.
Add overhead per billable hour. Your annual overhead divided by the same billable hours.
Add your margin. Whatever the business needs to be worth running. This is the only line that is genuinely a choice.
Then add GST if you are registered, on top, not out of.
Miss step three and you will be 45% short and will not know why until the year ends. That is the difference between $36.85 and $67.31 on the same employee.
A call-out fee is meant to cover the unbillable time a job creates: the drive there, the drive back, the write-up. Most are set once, years ago, by copying whoever was nearest.
Price it against the right number, and be careful here, because it is easy to double-count. The $67.31 is a cost per billable hour, and it already has the unbillable time spread through it: $43.75 of it is the attended hour itself and $23.56 is the loading that recovers the hours you cannot invoice. So you cannot also charge $67.31 against an unbillable hour. That would be billing the same travel twice.
An hour of a tradesperson's attended time costs $43.75 in this example, which is the $72,818 spread over 1,664 attended hours. A call-out that burns 45 minutes of travel and 15 minutes of admin costs about that, and a $60 fee covers it with roughly $16 over.
The real trap is not the fee. It is the job whose travel ratio is worse than the one you priced on. A one-hour job with an hour of travel runs at 50% billable, not 65%, and a rate built for 65% does not cover it. That is what the call-out fee is for: pulling short, travel-heavy jobs back up to the utilisation your rate already assumes.
The same logic applies to quoting. If you quote five jobs to win two, the cost of the three you lost belongs in the price of the two you won.
Work out your real billable share. Take last month: hours actually attended, which is hours paid less any leave and public holidays, and hours that appeared on an invoice. Divide the second by the first. That is the denominator the table above uses, and the number will be lower than you think. It is the single most valuable figure in your business.
Recalculate one rate properly using the build-up above, and compare it to what you currently charge.
Reprice your call-out fee against the cost of an attended hour, and against the jobs whose travel ratio is worse than the billable share you priced on. Not against the competitor down the road.
Check your workers comp rate on the policy schedule rather than guessing it.
Start tracking hours against jobs, not against days. You cannot improve a billable percentage you do not measure.
That last one is where most people stall, because the hours live in a notebook and the invoice gets written from memory a fortnight later. By then nobody can say which hours were billable.
This is the practical case for job management software. In OneBookPlus, time is logged against the job rather than against the day, with the hours, the worker and the rate on each entry. The job's profitability card sets that labour and the materials against what you actually charged, and the invoice is raised from the job's own lines, so the quote, the hours and the invoice stay one set of records. Hours against jobs stop being something you reconstruct in June from memory.
From the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026, the Plumbing and Fire Sprinklers Award (MA000036) pays an adult plumbing and mechanical services tradesperson level 1 $31.63 an hour if not registered, or $32.80 if registered. The $31.63 includes the industry, plumbing trade and special fixed allowances; the registration allowance is the difference between the two rates, about $1.18 an hour. Award rates rose 4.75% at the 2026 Annual Wage Review.
More than their wage by roughly 15% to 25%, depending mostly on your workers compensation rate. On a $31.63 award plumber, leave loading, 12% super and an assumed 3% workers comp take the cost to about $36.85 per hour paid. That is still not the number to price from, because it counts every paid hour rather than only the ones you can invoice.
Wage, plus on-costs, divided by your billable share, plus overhead per billable hour, plus margin, plus GST if registered. The example in this article reaches a break-even of $67.31 per billable hour from a $31.63 wage at 65% billable, before any overhead or profit at all. Your figure depends on your own wages, workers comp, billable percentage and overhead.
For most Australian trade businesses, 60% to 75% of attended hours. Travel, quoting, materials runs, warranty callbacks and admin take the rest. The exact number is worth measuring rather than assuming, because moving from 60% to 70% takes about $10 an hour off your break-even without changing anyone's pay.
Enough to cover the attended time the call-out consumes, plus overhead and margin. In the worked example an hour of attended time costs $43.75, so a $60 fee covers it with about $16 over. Do not benchmark it against the $67.31 billable-hour rate: that figure already has the unbillable time spread through it, so charging it against travel bills the same hour twice. The bigger issue is jobs whose travel ratio is worse than the billable share your rate assumes. A one-hour job with an hour of travel runs at 50% billable, and a rate built for 65% will not cover it.
Yes. The Super Guarantee is 12.00% for 2026-27 and it is a real cost of employing someone, so it belongs in the rate. From 1 July 2026 it is calculated on qualifying earnings, which replaced ordinary time earnings when Payday Super started, and it is due every payday rather than quarterly. Annual leave loading is generally included.
Modern award minimum wages rose 4.75% and the National Minimum Wage rose 6%, to $1,004.90 a week or $26.44 an hour, from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026. Any charge-out rate built before that increase is understated by at least the wage rise.
There is no national rate. Workers compensation is run by each state and territory scheme, and your premium is set from your industry classification, your wages and your claims history, so identical businesses in different states can pay materially different rates. Take the figure from your own policy schedule rather than a rule of thumb.
Award rates: Fair Work Ombudsman Pay Guide, Plumbing and Fire Sprinklers Award MA000036, published 24 June 2026, effective from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026. Read directly from the published pay guide.
Wage increase: Fair Work Commission Annual Wage Review 2026, announced 2 June 2026: modern award wages up 4.75%, National Minimum Wage up 6% to $1,004.90 a week or $26.44 an hour.
Superannuation: Australian Taxation Office, Super guarantee rates, 12.00% for 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027. From 1 July 2026 the base is qualifying earnings, which replaced ordinary time earnings under Payday Super, and contributions are due each payday.
Leave: National Employment Standards, four weeks paid annual leave and ten days paid personal or carer's leave for full-time employees, plus public holidays.
Assumptions, stated so you can replace them. The worked example uses a 38-hour week, 52 weeks, 11 public holidays, 17.5% annual leave loading on four weeks, workers compensation at 3% of wages, and a billable share of 65% of attended hours. Those last two are assumptions, not published figures.
Workers compensation premiums are set by each state and territory scheme from your industry classification, wages and claims history, so there is no national number to quote. Use the figure on your own policy schedule.
The 60% to 75% billable range is an industry rule of thumb rather than a measured statistic. No Australian source publishes billable share for trade businesses, which is exactly why the table runs from 55% to 80% instead of asserting one number, and why the first thing this article asks you to do is measure your own. Overhead is deliberately not modelled either, because it varies too widely by trade and size for any single figure to be honest.
What this is not. General information, not financial or industrial-relations advice. Award classifications, allowances and penalty rates turn on facts specific to your employees and the work they do. Check your obligations with the Fair Work Ombudsman or a registered adviser, and confirm current rates before relying on them.
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