What Should a Concrete Pro Charge Per Hour?

Ask ten concrete pros what they charge per hour and you will get ten different answers, and most of them are guesses. Somebody heard a competitor says $75 an hour, so they say $75 too. The problem is that number tells you nothing about whether you actually make money. Your concrete hourly rate should come from your own costs, your own income goals, and the real number of hours you can bill in a week. Let's build that number from the ground up, the same way you build a slab: foundation first.

Start With the Income You Actually Want

Work backwards, not forwards. Decide what you want to take home in a year, then reverse-engineer the rate that gets you there. Say you want $85,000 in personal income before taxes. That is your target, and your rate has to cover it after every business cost is paid. If you set your rate first and hope the income follows, you are flying blind.

Be honest about the number. Account for the slow season, the rained-out weeks, and the jobs that go sideways. A target that looks great on paper falls apart if you assumed 52 perfect weeks a year. Nobody in concrete gets 52 perfect weeks.

Billable Hours Are Not the Same as Working Hours

Here is the trap that sinks most rates. You might work 50 hours a week, but you do not bill all 50. You bill the hours your hands or your crew's hands are on a job. The rest goes to estimating, driving between sites, chasing material, answering the phone, invoicing, and cleaning the truck. That time is real, but a customer never pays for it directly.

For a lot of small concrete operations, billable hours land somewhere in the 50 to 65 percent range of total working hours. If you work 45 hours a week and only 27 of those are billable, your rate has to cover your whole business on those 27 hours. That math changes everything.

Add Up Your Overhead Honestly

Overhead is everything you pay to stay in business whether you pour concrete that day or not. Most pros underestimate this badly, which is why their rate feels fine until the year-end numbers come in short.

For a solo or small concrete business, typical overhead buckets include:

• Liability and workers comp insurance
• Truck payment, fuel, and maintenance
• Tools, forms, mixers, and replacement wear items
• Licensing, permits, and bonding
• Phone, software, and bookkeeping
• Marketing and your website
• Equipment repair and the occasional rental

Add it all for a year. Even a lean solo operation can run $25,000 to $45,000 in annual overhead once you count the truck and insurance. A crew with more equipment runs a lot higher. This number has to be recovered across your billable hours, on top of your target income and your labor cost.

A Worked Example You Can Steal

Let's build a rate for a solo concrete pro with occasional help. The goal is to show the method, so adjust every number to your own reality.

1. Target personal income: $85,000 for the year.
2. Annual overhead: $35,000 (insurance, truck, fuel, tools, software, marketing).
3. Total you need the business to generate before profit: $120,000.
4. Working weeks per year: 46 (accounting for slow season, weather, and time off).
5. Working hours per week: 45. That is 2,070 working hours.
6. Billable ratio: 55 percent. That is roughly 1,138 billable hours.
7. Required rate: $120,000 divided by 1,138 equals about $105 per hour.

That $105 is your break-even-plus-income rate, and it still has no cushion for profit margin or surprise costs. Many pros add 10 to 20 percent on top as real profit, which pushes the rate toward $115 to $125. Now compare that to the competitor charging $75. If you matched them, you would be roughly $30 an hour short of your own goal, every single billable hour, all year. That gap is why copying a rate quietly loses money.

Why Ranges Beat a Single Rate

No serious concrete pro charges one flat rate for everything. A straightforward flatwork pour is not the same job as a stamped, colored patio with tricky access or a structural footing on a slope. Your calculated rate is your floor. From there, you flex up for:

• Higher skill or finish work like stamping, staining, or exposed aggregate
• Jobs with more risk, callback exposure, or difficult access
• Tight timelines that disrupt your schedule
• Materials and conditions that eat more labor than they look like

Think of your rate as a range, not a promise. The low end is for clean, repeatable work. The high end is for anything that carries extra skill, risk, or hassle. Quoting this way protects your margin instead of hoping the easy jobs cover the hard ones.

Turn Your Rate Into Quotes and Paychecks

A rate only matters if it survives contact with the customer. Most concrete jobs are bid as a total price, not an hourly line item, so you need to estimate the hours honestly, apply your rate, add materials with markup, and present it clean. If your estimate underprices the hours, your perfect rate still loses money on that job.

The other half is getting paid for what you quoted. A sharp bid followed by slow invoicing, a lost deposit, or a payment you had to chase for three weeks quietly cuts into the rate you worked so hard to calculate. Tight quoting and fast collection are part of the rate, not separate from it.

Review and Adjust, Then Do It Again

Your rate is not a tattoo. Insurance goes up, fuel swings, your skill improves, and your target income grows. Recalculate at least once a year, and anytime a big cost changes. The pros who stay profitable treat their rate like a living number, not a sign they hung up once in year one and never looked at again.

Build it from your own numbers, quote in ranges, collect fast, and revisit it regularly. Do that, and you will know exactly why you charge what you charge, which is more than most of your competitors can say.