Free Tool

Trade Business Profit Margin Calculator — Australia

Calculate margin for a single job or your whole business. See how you compare to industry benchmarks for Australian plumbing businesses.

Job details

Job revenue (what you charge)

Labour cost

Staff wages or your own time at cost rate

Material cost

Other direct costs (subcontractors, equipment hire)

Job profit margin

54%

Excellent margin ✓

0%20% target28% excellent50%+

Breakdown

Revenue

100%$5,000

Labour

30%$1,500

Materials

16%$800

Other costs

0%$0

Total cost

46%$2,300

Profit

54%$2,700

What you'd need to charge for this job

Break even (0% margin)$2,300

20% profit margin$2,875

25% profit margin$3,067

What profit margin should a trade business target?

There's no single right answer, but here are the benchmarks most trade business advisers and accountants use for Australian businesses:

Trade	Healthy margin	Excellent margin
Plumbing	20%+	28%+
Electrical	22%+	30%+
HVAC	20%+	28%+
Building	15%+	22%+
Painting	18%+	26%+
IT Services	25%+	40%+
Cleaning	15%+	25%+

Why most tradies don't hit their target margin

Labour running over on estimate — the #1 cause of margin erosion
Material costs rising faster than pricing (especially post-2022)
Quoting on feel rather than historical job data
Not accounting for overheads properly when setting rates
High quote acceptance rate (above 70%) suggesting pricing is too low

See your real margin — job by job

This calculator gives you estimates. ProfitLens uses your actual job data from Xero, simPRO or ServiceM8 to show you the real margin on every job you've completed.

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