What a Solo Contractor Has to Charge to Make $100,000
Not a motivational number. A worked model: eight projects, a real overhead budget, the owner's pay classified by the work it pays for, and the markup that falls out of it.
The assumptions
This model assumes
- One solo operator, no employees, lean home-based operation
- $100,000 gross owner compensation target, before personal income taxes
- Eight projects a year averaging $40,000: bath and kitchen remodels
- A self-performing owner who uses subcontractors selectively
- About 120 owner hours per project, so 960 production hours a year, inside a 2,080 hour working year
- $56,000 of non-owner overhead, built line by line in step 2 rather than assumed as a total
- $107,692 of total modeled owner compensation cost to deliver the $100,000 target: $100,000 of covered W-2 wages plus $7,692, or 7.692%, of federal employer payroll tax under an S-corporation owner-employee assumption
- 5% net profit target
The model, step by step
Eight projects averaging $40,000 is $320,000 of gross revenue. Everything below asks whether $320,000 can carry a $100,000 owner, the overhead, and a profit at the same time.
Reaching this workload is a destination, not a starting point. The rest of the model is what the destination has to charge.
A total nobody can inspect is a total nobody believes. This model budgets $56,000 of non-owner overhead, and every line below is a stated planning assumption with a reason to exist, mapped to the categories in the 21 overhead categories guide, which covers what belongs in each one and what does not.
Owner compensation is deliberately absent here. Step 3 handles it, because it does not all belong in one place.
| Category | Amount | % of revenue | What it covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rent and utilities: home office | $6,000 | 1.9% | $500 a month for the documented share of home occupancy and utilities the business actually uses |
| Insurance and bonding | $8,000 | 2.5% | General liability, commercial auto, tools coverage, umbrella, and required bonding; no personal health coverage |
| Accounting and bookkeeping | $6,000 | 1.9% | $500 a month for outsourced bookkeeping, reconciliation, and year-end support |
| Marketing and advertising | $12,000 | 3.8% | $1,000 a month of acquisition spend, which is $1,500 per sold project across eight projects |
| Vehicles and fuel | $13,000 | 4.1% | Truck depreciation or financing cost, fuel, maintenance, tires, registration; auto insurance sits in the line above |
| Core software | $4,000 | 1.2% | About $333 a month for accounting, estimating, job management, email, and storage |
| Training and development | $1,200 | 0.4% | $100 a month for continuing education and trade or business training |
| Business licenses and compliance | $800 | 0.2% | Recurring contractor and business registrations, not job permits |
| Financing and bank fees | $1,000 | 0.3% | Ordinary bank and merchant fees that cannot be assigned to one job |
| General warranty program | $1,000 | 0.3% | Post-completion callbacks recovered across the business, not charged to an active project |
| Tools and equipment | $2,000 | 0.6% | Repair and replacement of shared small tools; job-specific rentals stay in the estimate |
| Website and digital presence | $1,000 | 0.3% | Domain, hosting, and site maintenance; paid traffic stays in marketing |
| Total non-owner overhead | $56,000 | 17.5% |
Two lines deserve a note. Rent and vehicle costs belong here even when they feel free: a home office and a paid-off truck are still costs of being in business. And the vehicle line at 4.1% runs slightly past the 2 to 4% planning default, which is the kind of exception a real ledger produces. Planning ranges do not override your ledger. Some fixed and semi-fixed costs, a work truck above all, take a larger share of revenue at solo scale because their dollar cost does not fall when sales do. The category-by-category detail, including the include and exclude boundaries that keep a cost from landing in two places, is in the overhead categories guide.
Owner compensation is not one number in one place. Labor on jobs is job cost. Compensation for selling, estimating, and running the company is overhead. That is the classification rule the overhead guide uses, and applying it honestly here changes the answer.
Allocating the modeled $107,692 across a 2,080 hour year gives a rate for splitting one budgeted number:
| Portion | Hours | Amount | Classified as |
|---|---|---|---|
| Production work on jobs | 960 | $51,230.77 | Job cost |
| Sales, estimating, management | 1,120 | $59,769.23 | Overhead |
| Total modeled owner compensation | 2,080 | $107,692 |
Splitting the owner's pay is also what turns the $56,000 non-owner budget into the total overhead the model has to recover. Both numbers appear below, so it is worth being precise about which is which:
| Component | Amount |
|---|---|
| Non-owner overhead, built line by line in step 2 | $56,000.00 |
| Owner non-field compensation, from the split above | $59,769.23 |
| Total overhead | $115,769.23 |
With revenue set at $320,000, profit at 5%, and both overhead pieces known, what remains is what the business can spend on everything else it buys:
Check that against the work. If materials run about a third of revenue, roughly $107,000, about $30,000 is left for subcontractors across eight projects, or about $3,800 a project. That is a real subcontractor budget for an owner who self-performs most of the work and subs the rest.
If your production mix needs more than that, one of three things has to move: materials come down, the owner takes less, or revenue goes up. The model does not get to skip that choice, and neither does the business.
Every dollar classified exactly once, in the estimate or in the markup, never omitted and never counted twice:
| Line | Amount | Share of revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Owner production labor | $51,230.77 | 16.0% |
| Materials and subcontractors, combined | $137,000.00 | 42.8% |
| Job costs | $188,230.77 | 58.8% |
| Non-owner overhead | $56,000.00 | 17.5% |
| Owner non-field compensation | $59,769.23 | 18.7% |
| Total overhead | $115,769.23 | 36.2% |
| Net profit | $16,000.00 | 5.0% |
| Revenue | $320,000.00 | 100% |
Nothing here is chosen. Once overhead and profit are set as shares of revenue, the multiplier is arithmetic:
Which is the same as revenue over job costs: $320,000 / $188,230.77 = 1.70. The markup vs margin guide walks the same conversion on a published estimate.
A multiplier only works against the job cost it was built from. In this model that base includes the owner's own production labor, the $51,230.77 from step 3.
The most common solo mistake is to estimate the materials and the subs, mark that up, and leave your own time out of the estimate entirely, because it does not feel like a cost when it is your own hands. The multiplier is right. The base is missing a line:
Put your own production labor in the estimate and the same multiplier lands where it should: 1.70 times $188,230.77 is $320,000. Nothing about the pricing changed. The estimate just told the truth about what the job costs.
Marking up 1.70 on materials and subs only
| Estimated base: materials and subcontractors | $137,000.00 |
| Priced at the correct 1.70 multiplier | $232,900.00 |
| Less actual job costs, including your own labor | -$188,230.77 |
| Less total overhead | -$115,769.23 |
| Result | -$71,100.00 |
A $71,100 loss across the year, and the year still looks busy. Eight projects sell for $29,112 instead of $40,000, about $10,900 short on every one, because the largest line in the estimate was the one that never got written down.
At 5% of $320,000, planned annual profit is $16,000. An aggregate $16,000 of unplanned cost overruns across the year consumes all of it, and a solo operator absorbs overruns personally.
That is a thin cushion for the risk of ownership. The good news is that the model prices the alternative for you: raise the profit share and the multiplier moves with it.
| Profit target | Multiplier | Revenue needed | Per project |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5% | 1.70 | $320,000 | $40,000 |
| 8% | 1.755 | $330,435 | $41,304 |
| 10% | 1.794 | $337,778 | $42,222 |
Going from 5% to 8% net profit costs about $1,300 more per project on the same work, and takes annual profit from $16,000 to about $26,400. That is the whole trade, priced. Which row you choose is a business decision, not an arithmetic one.
What it means
Build this model with your own numbers
Clamp's overhead tracker ships all 21 categories with planning ranges, totals your overhead against an annual revenue goal, and turns it into the multiplier you price with.
Total your own overhead by category, split your own compensation by the work it pays for, set the profit the risk deserves, and let the multiplier fall out. Then price a real job against it: describe one in the free estimator to get a direct job cost, and apply your multiplier to that. If you bill by the hour instead of by the project, the hourly companion runs the same method to a rate.
Sources & provenance
- Clamp overhead planning defaults Clamp (owner-supplied)
- Publication 15, Employer's Tax Guide Internal Revenue Service (official)