How Much to Charge Per Day for a Crew: $704/Man

The short answer

Charge burdened crew labor for the paid day, plus the truck and equipment that arrive with the crew, plus that crew's share of your overhead, then divide the total by one minus your target margin.

Crew day rate = (burdened crew labor + rolling stock + allocated overhead) ÷ (1 - target margin)

For a benchmark while you build that number: working contractors report a median of about $704 per man per day. A two-person crew lands near $1,400 and a three-person crew near $2,100. But the benchmark is the least useful part of this article, because the reason you are asking is almost certainly that someone told you that you were too expensive, and the benchmark will not tell you whether they were right.

What contractors actually bill per crew day

This is evidence the ranking calculators do not have. In February 2026 a contractor asked r/Contractor, in a thread titled Race to the bottom?, the exact question in the title of this article: what do you charge per day for a crew of two or three people. Between that thread, How do you guys charge labor? from March 2026, and a July 2023 r/Construction thread called Subcontracting companies how much are you charging for your employees, fifteen operators posted a real number.

Hourly figures below are converted to an eight-hour day so everything is comparable.

The median is $704 per man per day. The range is three times wide from bottom to top.

The reason two quotes differ by 2x

Here is the most useful thing in any of those threads, and no competing article covers it.

One contractor in the Race to the bottom thread laid out both of his numbers. His three-person field crew, a highly skilled foreman plus an apprentice plus an entry-level worker, costs $900 a day. Then he added: "my profit, overhead, sales and service is around $1,350 so $2,200ish is my total non-materials rate."

Same crew. Same day. Two numbers that differ by a factor of 2.4.

That is the whole mystery of the half-price competitor, and it is usually not dishonesty. "Day rate" is an ambiguous unit used for at least three different things:

1. Burdened labor cost for the bodies on site. What the crew costs you.
2. Labor plus overhead. Break-even for the day.
3. All-in price including overhead, sales cost and profit. What you invoice.

Quote number three against a competitor quoting number one and you appear twice as expensive while being the only one of you who will still be trading in five years. Customers collecting three quotes routinely compare across these categories without knowing the categories exist.

The fix is not a lower price. It is saying which of the three you mean, and asking what a competitor's number includes before you react to it.

Build your crew day rate in four numbers

1. Burdened labor for the paid day

Not wages. Wages plus payroll taxes, workers compensation, benefits, paid time off and per-employee costs. For construction, roughly 44% on top of wages is the defensible starting point, which we work through in detail in what should my labor burden rate be.

A two-person crew of a $34 lead and a $22 helper:

• Lead: $34 x 1.44 = $48.96/hr
• Helper: $22 x 1.44 = $31.68/hr
• Crew: $80.64/hr, or $645 per paid eight-hour day

2. The rolling stock that shows up with them

The crew does not arrive by itself. A truck, fuel, trailer, small tools and whatever production equipment the work needs all travel with it, and all of it is a daily cost whether or not you itemize it.

A contractor in the Greater Toronto Area priced this beautifully by holding the crew constant and varying only the equipment: $190 for two crew and a pickup, $250 for two crew in a camera truck, $275 for two crew in a vac truck. Same two people, three different rates. The crew is the constant. The iron is the variable.

For our two-person crew, call it $110 for truck and fuel and $60 for equipment allocation, so $170 a day.

3. That crew's share of overhead

Rent, office wages, insurance, software, advertising, accounting, phones, your own salary if you are off the tools. Total it monthly, divide by working days, divide by the number of crews producing revenue.

At $18,000 a month of overhead, 21 working days and two crews: $18,000 ÷ 21 ÷ 2 = $428 per crew-day.

4. Divide by the margin. Do not add it

Total daily cost: $645 + $170 + $428 = $1,243.

At a 35% target margin:

$1,243 ÷ 0.65 = $1,912 per crew day, or $956 per man.

Adding 35% instead gives $1,678, and $1,678 with $1,243 of cost inside it is a 25.9% margin. That error costs $234 every single crew-day, which over 400 crew-days a year is $93,600. We cover the same trap from the estimating side in how to price a job as a contractor.

The eight-hour day that is really closer to five and a half

Here is the assumption buried inside almost every day rate, and it is usually wrong.

You pay for eight hours. You do not sell eight hours. Standard construction cost estimating builds composite crew rates at an assumed productivity level, and the figure used for a concrete placing crew is 70%, on the reasoning that crew members spend part of every day on material receiving and handling, site movement, breaks and cleanup. Estimators then adjust it per project: drop the assumption from 70% to 60% and the crew rate gets multiplied by 110% to compensate.

Practitioners describe the same thing in plainer language. A contractor of 27 years in the r/Contractor labor thread listed what eats the day: "set-up time, shopping time, chit chat time, and clean up time. Some of these extra tasks can double the amount of time the work actually takes."

The consequence is specific. If you build your day rate as eight hours multiplied by your hourly crew price, you have implicitly assumed 100% productivity. At a realistic 70%, your paid eight-hour day yields about 5.6 productive hours, and your day rate has to recover eight hours of cost from 5.6 hours of output. Skipping that adjustment understates your correct rate by roughly 30%.

This is the same error as dividing overhead by hours worked instead of billable hours, which we take apart in how to calculate your hourly shop rate. It shows up in day-rate math too, just better hidden, because a "day" feels like a unit of production when it is actually a unit of payroll.

A blended crew rate is a bet on your crew mix

Most guidance tells you to price a blended crew rate: total the crew's wages, burden them, mark them up, divide by heads. It is genuinely good advice, because a lead carpenter plus an apprentice runs a job more efficiently than a lead alone, and the blended number is easier to sell than the lead's true rate.

But look at what the published examples actually produce when you follow the math to the end.

In a widely cited three-person example, a $40 lead, a $25 journeyman and a $15 apprentice at 20% burden and 50% markup produce a $48 per hour blended base rate. The lead's burdened cost is $40 x 1.2, which is exactly $48. The lead generates zero gross profit at the blended rate. All of the margin on that crew comes from the journeyman and the apprentice. A second source running the same structure reaches the same conclusion and warns explicitly to keep it in mind when quoting crews with more than one lead.

So the blended rate is not a property of your company. It is a property of one specific crew composition. Sell a day at the blended rate, then staff it with two leads because that is who was available, and you lose money on a job you priced correctly.

There is a credible counter-argument from the field. One subcontractor charges a single identical rate for everyone, for a reason that has nothing to do with efficiency: "I learned to charge the same rate for all your employees because you might end up being the one having to do it. Then you're stuck working at the helpers rate." If the owner backfills gaps, a rate that assumes a helper on site penalizes you for covering.

The workable position for most small crews: blend, but define the crew you blended, write the assumed composition into the estimate, and reprice if you have to staff it differently.

The minimum day, and the half day that quietly loses money

A half day is not half a day's cost.

Mobilization, drive time, setup and cleanup are largely fixed. They happen once whether the productive work runs four hours or eight. So a four-hour job might consume 65% of the day's cost while billing 50% of the day's price, and the gap comes out of margin on every short job you accept.

This is why experienced contractors set minimums, and the reported ones vary by job type:

That last one is worth reading in full, because it is a template. Facing a job with undefined scope, one commercial sub structured it as: "My minimum charge is $3,500 for a single mobilization and 1 day of labor. Because the scope is undefined, subsequent work will be billed on a Time and materials basis at $75/hr per laborer plus any material required."

That sentence does three things at once. It prices the mobilization separately from the labor, it caps your downside on a scope nobody has defined, and it makes the customer aware that undefined scope is expensive, which is often enough to get them to define it.

Another contractor in the labor thread makes the contractual version of the point: put a clause in your contract specifying work outside the standard allowance, with a dollar amount per day and a minimum half-day charge.

When a day rate is the wrong instrument

A day rate has one structural weakness. It pays you for duration.

Contractors on both sides of that are right. In favor: "day rate protects you from taking a hit for delays that aren't necessarily fault of your own," which matters on jobs where a GC controls the schedule. Against: getting faster reduces your income on the same work, and a visible daily number invites the customer to manage your speed.

Most established contractors settle into a split. Defined, repeatable work gets priced flat, because you own the efficiency gains. Genuinely unknown work gets priced on time, because you should not carry risk you cannot scope. We work through where that line sits in flat rate vs hourly pricing for contractors.

Which points at the most important distinction here: your crew day rate is a costing tool, not necessarily a quoting tool. You calculate in crew-days to know whether a job is worth the capacity it consumes, then present a lump sum. A job you expect to take four crew-days at a $1,912 target needs to sell for about $7,650 in non-material revenue. If it will not, you decline it, and the customer never sees a daily figure.

When they tell you the other guy is half your price

This is the situation that sends most people to this search, so it deserves a direct answer.

First, the low quote may be a structurally different business. As one contractor put it to the original poster: "You are mostly off the tools. Your competitor may be on the tools and figure he can do it himself with one helper. Different approach. Different economics, different risks." An owner swinging a hammer with one helper has no lead wage to recover, no project manager in overhead, and often no workers compensation on himself. That business can be arithmetically half your price and still profitable. It is also capacity-limited to whatever two hands can produce, which is why it is not actually your competitor for long.

Second, some of those quotes do not exist. From the same thread: "some clients will absolutely lie about other quotes to try to cut your number down. Don't take the bait." A useful test, offered by another contractor, is to ask politely to see the competing quote, framed as wanting to confirm you are pricing the same scope and materials. Nine out of ten decline with an excuse, and the excuse is the answer.

Third, and this is new, your customer may be anchored to a machine. A California demolition sub described clients pricing jobs with AI and arriving at numbers built on labor cost alone with no overhead. He also described arguing with an AI about saw cutting speed and finding it "doesn't get speed vs production," producing an estimate close to four times more cutting than is realistic. That is the productivity gap from earlier in this article, showing up on the customer's side of the table. Expect more of it, and expect to have to explain the difference between how fast a tool cuts and how much a crew produces in a day.

Build your number in thirty minutes

1. Pick your standard crew. Write down each person and their wage. This is the crew you will price against by default.
2. Burden it. Multiply wages by your burden factor, roughly 1.44 if you have not calculated your own, and multiply by paid hours in a day.
3. Add the iron. Truck payment, insurance, fuel, maintenance and equipment, all divided into a daily figure. Build a second and third tier if some jobs require heavier equipment.
4. Allocate overhead. Monthly overhead, divided by working days, divided by revenue-producing crews.
5. Apply your productivity assumption. If you get roughly 70% productive time out of a paid day, your cost has to be recovered from 5.6 hours, not eight.
6. Divide by one minus your margin. Do not add. Label whether that margin sits above or below overhead.
7. Set a minimum. A half-day minimum and a mobilization charge, written into the contract.
8. Check it against the table above. If you land far outside $400 to $1,200 per man, find out why before you quote it.

The bottom line

The median contractor charges about $704 per man per day, and knowing that is worth very little on its own. What matters is that a three-times range exists among competent operators, and most of it is explained by three things: whether the owner is on the tools, whether the number includes overhead, and whether the arithmetic assumed a productive day or a paid one.

Build your number from your own costs. Then hold it. If your honest calculation lands above what your market seems willing to pay, resist the instinct to fix that with a discount, because a discount does not reduce the cost you just calculated. It only moves the loss somewhere you cannot see it. The fix for a correct price that keeps losing is more people asking, not a smaller number.