How To Calculate Labor Burden

When it comes to profits, labor is a crucial component. In the construction industry, construction labor costs vary between 30% to 50% of the total project cost. It’s not uncommon for a smaller construction company to have labor costs closer to 50% of total project expenditure. 

Contractors spend a lot of time estimating and pricing jobs. Ensuring these estimates factor in the true cost of your labor is a critical part of expense management in construction given how large a share of the total construction budget labor typically represents.

Without calculating a labor burden rate for your team, you’re likely not pricing your jobs correctly and putting your profits at risk.

To make sure your business is profitable, you need to consider the whole scope of costs beyond an employee’s salary. Factors like payroll taxes, health care, benefits, training, and increased administrative overhead have made labor more expensive—and you’ll need to account for these additional costs in your calculations.

What Is Labor Burden?

When it comes to profits, labor is a crucial component. In the construction industry, labor costs vary between 30% to 50% of the total project cost. It’s not uncommon for a smaller construction company to have labor costs closer to 50% of total project expenditure.

Contractors spend a lot of time estimating and pricing jobs. Ensuring these estimates factor in the true cost of your labor when it makes up such a large percentage of your budget is critical. Without calculating a labor burden rate for your team, you’re likely not pricing your jobs correctly and putting your profits at risk.

To make sure your business is profitable, you need to consider the whole scope of costs beyond an employee’s salary. Factors like payroll taxes, health care, benefits, training, and increased administrative overhead have made labor more expensive—and you’ll need to account for these additional costs in your calculations.

Today, we’re going to step through what costs you should include in your labor burden rate, show you how to calculate a labor burden rate and how to leverage the burden rate when estimating. 

What Does Labor Burden Cover?

Labor burden is related to the indirect costs of your labor—in other words, the cost of having that labor. Indirect labor costs include:

• Payroll taxes.
• Vacation pay.
• Profit-sharing arrangements.
• Liability & automotive insurance.
• Workers compensation insurance.
• Health insurance and other benefits.
• Vehicle expenses.
• Additional training or classes.
• Safety gear, employee equipment, or employee supplies.
• Administrative overhead, time spent in meetings, or time commuting.

It’s a common mistake to bid a job based solely on direct labor costs and without including your labor burden cost. While the direct labor costs could be $20 an hour, the total cost factoring in the labor burden cost could be closer to $30 or even $40 an hour. 

Its often convenient to calculate a labor burden rate to use across your company as it makes estimating easier and ensures you are always covering your complete labor burden costs. A labor burden rate is simply a percentage markup you apply to the employee pay rate to determine their total cost including labor burden.

On average, an employee’s labor burden rate ranges from 24% (which translates to $0.24 on the dollar) for private industry and civilian workers, to over 38% for state and local government workers based on the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.  

Check out our handy online Labor Burden Calculator to calculate the labor burden rate for your employees.

How To Calculate Labor Burden

Calculating your labor burden rate is simple, but you need to make you begin with accurate numbers for all of your indirect costs. Take a look at the following example:

• An employee works for 40 hours at $20 per hour on a project. Their direct cost of labor is $20 x 40 = $800. 
• If the employee’s indirect labor costs are $200 (explained further below), that employee’s total labor cost is $800 + $200 = $1,000. So when factoring in the indirect costs, the true cost is $1,000 per 40 hours of work.
• This breaks down to a labor burden rate of $25 per hour ($1,000 / 40).

In the above example, the labor burden rate is 25% or $5 per hour. The hardest part in calculating a labor burden rate is making sure you have accurate numbers for your employee’s total hours worked and also all of the indirect costs for your labor.

The reason accurate hours matter so much is illustrated by Pro Home and Sunrooms, a small sunroom and patio installation company in New York. Office Manager Brenda Tait had no way to verify whether field employees were actually on site when they clocked in, and workers took advantage of that gap. She was paying for hours that were never worked, which meant her labor cost calculations were wrong before she ever got to the burden rate.

After switching to Workyard’s GPS-verified time tracking and geofencing, every clock-in was tied to a confirmed location, and her labor data became reliable enough to build accurate cost estimates on.

One solution to take the pain out of capturing and tracking hours accurately is QuickBooks Desktop time tracking integrated with a GPS time clock app that books employee hours down to the minute, so your labor burden calculations start from verified data.”

Once you have the right numbers in hand, you can start calculating your labor burden rate.

1. Begin with the total hours worked.

Any time your employee is “on the clock” and getting paid will factor into calculating a labor burden rate—even if these aren’t part of the employee’s on-site hours.

2. Calculate your direct labor costs.

Next, calculate your direct labor costs by multiplying the total hours paid by the employee’s hourly wage.

For a more detailed breakdown of everything that goes into this calculation across different employee types and pay structures, our guide on how to calculate labor cost in construction walks through each scenario.

3. Add your indirect costs.

Next, add up all of the indirect costs associated with supporting your labor. They will vary depending on the type of benefits you provide.

If any of these indirect costs are client-reimbursable, understanding how to handle billable expenses in QuickBooks ensures they are correctly passed through to the client invoice rather than absorbed as a cost to your business

4. Total your actual labor costs.

Now, you should have your total Labor Costs: Direct Costs + Indirect Costs.

$10,040.00 + $3,410.00 = $13,450.00

In QuickBooks, recording these totals accurately typically requires a QuickBooks journal entry to allocate the indirect labor costs to the correct expense accounts, keeping your financial records aligned with your labor burden calculations.

5. Finally, calculate your labor burden rate.

Divide your total Labor Costs by your On-Site Hours (not your Total Hours) to calculate the amount each on-site hour actually costs you.

$13,450.00 / 480 = $28.02

Next, deduct your Hourly Wages from your total Hourly Labor to get your total Indirect Costs.

$28.02 – $20.00 = $8.02

Your Labor Burden Rate is your Indirect Costs divided by your Direct Costs, expressed as a percentage:

Labor Burden Rate = $8.02 / $20.00 x 100 = 40.11%$8.02 / $20.00 x 100 = 40.11%

 

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How Often You Need to Recalculate Your Labor Burden Rate

Indirect costs can change over time so it’s a good idea to regularly recalculate your labor burden rate at least once a year or when you know there have been major changes to your indirect costs that are likely to affect it.

And don’t forget—to calculate the true cost of your labor, you also need to have an accurate accounting of your hours. Use construction time tracking software to:

• Ensure the accuracy of employee hours captured
• Understand how many hours are being on projects vs non-billable work
• Track and improve construction crew productivity.
• Make the process of calculating your labor burden a whole lot easier. You’re more likely to do it if it’s easy!

All of this data feeds directly into construction expense management at the project level, giving you the accurate labor cost inputs you need to price future jobs confidently.

Labor Burden Rate FAQs

How do you calculate the fully burdened labor rate?

The fully burdened labor rate is essentially the gross payroll labor cost + the labor burden cost. It is the same thing as what we have been referring to in this article as the total hourly cost of an employee.

What is labor burden in construction?

Calculating the labor burden rate in construction is no different to the method we have outlined here in this article. it applies to all businesses. However, using a labor burden rate when estimating work is particularly critical to construction companies given the tight margins in the industry.

The indirect costs for a construction business can be particularly high and difficult to track, making it even have a bigger impact on the bottom line. For example, in states such as California worker’s compensation rates alone can be as high as 15% of gross wages alone.

If you are a construction business that doesn’t have a good understanding of your true labor burden costs you are risking underestimating jobs and this will eat into your profits.

For a full picture of everything that goes into a project estimate beyond labor burden, our guide on how to calculate job costs covers the complete framework for totaling direct and indirect costs before you submit a bid

Is labor burden part of overhead?

Overhead expenses are the fixed or indirect expenses associated with operating your business. This includes expenses such as rent, legal, office supplies, marketing costs, etc. The key difference is that labor burden encompasses the overhead costs directly associated with labor, whereas overhead expenses are not directly tied to your cost of labor. In other words, your labor burden is a component of your total overhead expenses.

Understanding that relationship matters when setting up your construction finance and accounting system, since labor burden and general overhead need to be tracked separately to give you an accurate read on both your true labor costs and your overall project profitability.

What are the lead causes of changes in labor burden rate?

Changing the benefits you offer employees is often a major driver for changes in the labor burden rate. For example, offering health benefits. Changes in your worker’s compensation insurance mod rate and the rates you pay for different professions can also have a significant impact on your burden rate, especially in states such as California that have high premiums.