Job costing for electrical contractors (find out which jobs actually make money)

I talked to an electrician last month who had his busiest year ever. Eighty-hour weeks, trucks running constantly, phone ringing off the hook. When he sat down with his accountant in January, he'd barely cleared $40,000 in profit on $380,000 in revenue.

He wasn't lazy. He wasn't bad at his trade. He just had no idea which of his jobs were making money and which ones were quietly bleeding him dry.

That's what job costing solves. It's not complicated, but it does require you to track some numbers you're probably not tracking right now.

What job costing actually is

Job costing means tracking every dollar that goes into a specific job, then comparing that to what the customer paid you. That's it. You're asking one question per job: did I make money on this, and how much?

For electrical work, the costs fall into three buckets:

1. Labor: The hours you and your crew put into the job, valued at your real cost per hour (not your billing rate, your actual cost including wages, taxes, benefits, workers' comp).
2. Materials: Wire, panels, breakers, boxes, connectors, tape, everything that went into or onto that job site.
3. Overhead allocation: Your share of the monthly costs that keep the business running, split across the jobs you did that month.

Most electricians track labor and materials (loosely). Almost nobody allocates overhead to individual jobs. And that's where the surprises hide.

A real example: panel upgrade job

Let's walk through a 200-amp panel upgrade. You quoted the customer $3,800. Here's what the job actually cost you:

Labor

Person	Hours	Loaded cost/hr	Total
You (master electrician)	5	$55	$275
Journeyman	5	$38	$190
Drive time (combined)	1.5	$46	$69
Labor total			$534

Note: "loaded cost" means the real cost to your business, not what you pay yourself. It includes employer-side payroll taxes (about 7.65%), workers' comp insurance (which is steep for electricians, often 8-12% of payroll), and any benefits. If you pay a journeyman $28/hour, their loaded cost to you is probably $35-40.

Materials

Item	Your cost
200A main panel (Square D)	$285
200A main breaker	$68
Branch breakers (18 circuits)	$216
Wire (various gauges, ~150 ft total)	$190
Conduit, connectors, grounding	$85
Misc (staples, tape, wire nuts, labels)	$30
Materials total	$874

Overhead allocation

Your monthly overhead is $6,200 (truck, insurance, tools, phone, marketing, software, license renewals). You complete about 22 jobs per month. So each job carries roughly $282 in overhead.

Job cost summary

Category	Amount
Labor	$534
Materials	$874
Overhead	$282
Permit	$125
Total cost	$1,815
Customer paid	$3,800
Gross profit	$1,985 (52%)

That's a good job. 52% gross margin. You want to do more of these.

Now here's the problem. Without job costing, this job looks exactly the same as the troubleshooting call you did last Tuesday where you spent 3 hours chasing a intermittent fault, used $40 in materials, and charged $450. That troubleshooting call, when you run the same math, probably netted you $20-30 after overhead. Both felt like "work." Only one was profitable work.

The simple tracking method

You don't need software for this. A spreadsheet with one row per job and these columns works fine:

Job #	Customer	Type	Revenue	Labor hrs	Labor $	Materials $	Other $	Overhead	Total cost	Profit	Margin %
E-0041	Williams	Panel upgrade	$3,800	11.5	$534	$874	$125	$282	$1,815	$1,985	52%
E-0042	Park	Troubleshoot	$450	3.5	$175	$38	$0	$282	$495	-$45	-10%
E-0043	Davis	Outlet install (6)	$1,100	4	$220	$95	$0	$282	$597	$503	46%

Look at job E-0042. You lost $45 on that call. You worked for three and a half hours and paid for the privilege. That's the kind of thing you can't see without job costing.

What the data tells you after a month

Track every job for 30 days and patterns will appear fast:

• Which job types are most profitable? Panel upgrades, sub-panel installs, and EV charger installations usually win. Troubleshooting and small repairs often don't, unless you price them accordingly.
• Where are you losing money? Usually it's the small jobs where overhead is the same but revenue is a fraction of a bigger job.
• Are your estimates accurate? Compare estimated hours to actual hours. If you're consistently going over, your estimates need adjusting.
• Should you raise prices on specific services? If troubleshooting calls are consistently unprofitable, your diagnostic rate is too low.

The overhead problem nobody talks about

Here's something that trips up a lot of electrical contractors. Say you're slow one month and only complete 12 jobs instead of your usual 22. Your overhead doesn't change. It's still $6,200. But now each job carries $517 in overhead instead of $282.

That means the panel upgrade job that was nicely profitable at 22 jobs/month becomes less profitable at 12 jobs/month, even though nothing about the job itself changed. Your fixed costs eat more when volume drops.

This is why busy months feel great and slow months feel terrible even if the jobs themselves are identical. Job costing makes this visible. You can see that you need a minimum number of jobs per month just to keep your head above water, and plan accordingly.

Getting started this week

Here's a realistic starting point:

1. Calculate your loaded labor cost. What do you actually cost your business per hour? What does each employee cost? Include taxes, WC, and benefits.
2. Know your monthly overhead. Add up every fixed cost for last month. Insurance, truck payments, tools, phone, software, everything that's not labor or job materials.
3. Start logging. For every job this month, write down: hours worked (per person), materials purchased, and what the customer paid.
4. Run the math at month end. Divide overhead by number of jobs. Calculate profit per job. Sort by margin.

The free ProTradeOps toolkit has a job costing spreadsheet that does the math for you. Plug in your numbers, fill in each job as you complete it, and it spits out profit and margin automatically. Beats building a spreadsheet from scratch when you'd rather be on a job site.

The uncomfortable question

Once you have a month of job costing data, you'll face a question most contractors avoid: should you stop doing certain types of work?

If small residential service calls consistently lose money, you have three options. Raise your rates on those calls. Bundle them with upsell opportunities (service call plus whole-home inspection). Or stop taking them and fill that time with higher-margin work.

None of those options feel great in the moment. But they're all better than working hard on jobs that cost you money. At least now you know which jobs those are.

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