Crew-Day Cost Calculator

Why crew day cost is the estimator's north star

The fastest estimating shortcut in the trades is to estimate by crew days. Instead of counting every screw and board, you estimate how many days the crew will be on-site and multiply by your crew day rate. This works because labor + equipment + vehicle + consumables + overhead make up the majority of most job costs — and if you know what one day of your crew costs, you can size a job in minutes.

The catch: most contractors have never actually calculated their crew day cost. They guess. Then they wonder why the job that was supposed to take four days took six, and why they lost money despite the customer paying every invoice.

What goes into the number

Four direct buckets plus overhead:

1. Burdened labor — Every person on the truck, multiplied by their true hourly cost (wage + taxes + insurance + benefits + PTO allocation). Run each role through the labor burden calculator first.
2. Equipment — Daily rental rate or internal allocation for any task-specific gear: skid steers, mini-ex, boom lifts, gensets, compressors, laser levels, etc. If you own it, use your true per-day ownership cost (depreciation + maintenance + fuel + insurance / days of use per year).
3. Vehicles — The truck(s) and trailer(s) that show up and go home. Typical $40-$100/day loaded, depending on age and miles. Don't forget fuel.
4. Consumables — Screws, nails, blades, caulk, tape, glue, drop cloths — the stuff that walks off every job and gets charged to “shop supplies.” $30-$75/day per crew for most trades.

Then overhead — office rent, admin salaries, software, marketing, your own time as owner — is applied as a percentage markup on the direct cost.

The productivity-loss multiplier

An 8-hour paid day almost never produces 8 hours of installed work. Travel to and from the jobsite, unloading, staging tools, morning coffee, break, unload new material at 2pm, clean up at 4:30pm, load out — these eat into productive time.

Tight-run crews with short haul and good staging lose 10-15% to non-production. Average crews lose 20%. Loose crews with long drives, poor staging, and a lot of “material” runs lose 30-40%. This matters because your cost per productive man-hour — the number that actually drives your unit pricing — climbs fast as productivity falls.

A worked example

Three-person crew: lead ($45 burdened), journeyman ($38), laborer ($28). 8-hour day. Labor: 8 × (45 + 38 + 28) = $888. Skid steer rental: $275. Truck: $65. Consumables: $40. Direct day cost: $1,268. Overhead at 15%: $190. Total crew day cost: $1,458.

With 15% productivity loss, the crew produced 20.4 productive man-hours. Cost per productive hour: $71.50. Now when you estimate a job that needs 80 productive man-hours, you know the labor-and-direct portion is about $5,720 before you apply profit margin.

Where most contractors blow it

Three common mistakes: (1) using raw wages instead of burdened rates, which understates labor by 30-50%; (2) forgetting overhead, which makes you bid against shops who are already eating theirs; (3) ignoring productivity loss, which makes you think an 8-hour day produces 8 billable hours. Getting any one of these right puts you ahead of most competitors. Getting all three right is the difference between a contractor who scales and one who works more hours each year for less money.