What to Charge per Hour with Employees (2-Person Crew Math)

The hire that lowers your income

Here's the trap that catches cleaners who grow: as a solo operator you charged, say, $40/hour, and all of it was yours. Then you hire — and keep charging like a solo cleaner while paying like an employer. The wage comes out, the payroll taxes come out, the workers' comp comes out… and suddenly the owner of a two-person company takes home less than the solo cleaner did.

Nothing went wrong with the business. The rate just never got promoted along with you. An employee-based company needs every billable hour to carry three loads: the wage, the burden on top of the wage, and the business itself — overhead plus margin. Solo pricing carries one. That's the whole problem, and it's fixed with math, not hustle.

From wage to loaded cost to billable rate

Three numbers, in order:

1. The wage — what you agreed to pay per hour.

2. The loaded cost — wage × 1.30. Payroll taxes, workers' comp and unemployment insurance add roughly 30% on top; a $20/hour cleaner really costs about $26/hour. This is your true cost of putting that person in a house for an hour.

3. The billable rate — what the client pays. The team rule of thumb: (wage × number of cleaners) × 1.5. The extra half covers the burden plus a contribution to overhead and profit.

For context, the market ranges: solo cleaners bill $25–$50/hour, and a two-person crew bills $50–$100/hour combined. If your rule-of-thumb result lands below those ranges, the market will bear more than your floor — take it.

The crew rate table

Here's the full chain by wage — true cost per cleaner, then the rule-of-thumb billable rate for solo and for a 2-person crew:

Notice the low-wage rows: the rule of thumb can land below the $25–$50 solo market range. That's the reminder that × 1.5 is a floor, not a target — it keeps you from billing at a loss, but the market rate is what you should actually charge.

Check the rate against your real overhead and margin

The × 1.5 rule is a fast sanity check, but it assumes typical overhead. Your company isn't typical — it has a specific insurance bill, vehicle cost, fuel, phone and software spend. The precise version prices the whole job:

Bid = (Labor × 1.30 + Supplies + Overhead) ÷ (1 − target margin)

Worked example: a 2-person crew at $25/hour for a 3-hour job. Labor is 2 × 3 × $25 = $150; loaded, $195. Add overhead at about 15% of labor plus supplies and the cost basis is roughly $225. At a 25% target margin (÷ 0.75), the job bids around $300 — an effective $100/hour for the crew, right at the top of the market range and with your margin actually inside it.

If the rule of thumb says $75/hour but the full formula says $100, the formula is right — it knows your costs, the shortcut doesn't.

Let the calculator carry the crew math

Every quote with employees runs this same chain — wage, burden, crew size, hours, overhead, margin — and doing it on a notepad while the client waits is how steps get skipped. BidCalc holds your crew setup: enter each wage once, and every job is priced with the 1.30 burden and your target margin built in, whether it's one cleaner or a full crew.

You see the true cost and the margin in a private owner panel; the client sees one clean, flat price on a branded quote. Free to start — run your crew's real numbers and see what your hour actually has to bill.