Learning goals

Explain labor burden and why base wage alone understates crew cost
Compute a fully loaded hourly rate with one formula
Keep the crew file current so timesheets can price themselves

Concepts

An hour costs more than the wage

Marcus Reed earns $36.00 an hour, but Ridgeline pays more than that for every hour he works: employer payroll taxes (FICA, federal and state unemployment), workers compensation premiums - high in construction - plus benefits and paid time off. That stack is the labor burden.

Pricing jobs on base wage is the classic way remodelers lose money: bid $36 an hour for labor, actually pay $45 once burden lands, and every crew hour quietly costs you $9 more than planned.

Ridgeline models burden as one percentage per employee in column F. Twenty-five percent is a realistic blended figure for a small Oregon residential crew; a sheet like this is also where you record the real number your bookkeeper computes after each quarter.

💡 Tips:

Office and field staff carry different real burdens (workers comp is priced by risk class), so review the percentages at least once a year.

Consultants: the same column structure holds bill rate versus cost rate - keep them in separate columns and never confuse the two.

The loaded rate formula

Column G multiplies each base rate by one plus the burden percentage. That single number is what every timesheet row will use in Lesson 8, so the whole crew's cost discipline starts in this one column.

=ROUND($E5*(1+$F5),2)

E5 is the base hourly rate and F5 the burden as a percentage (0.25 = 25%). Multiplying by (1+F5) grosses the wage up; ROUND keeps the result to whole cents so payroll ties to the penny. For Dana: $48.00 x 1.25 = $60.00.

What the crew file is for

The Employees sheet is master data, not a journal - you touch it when someone is hired, gets a raise, or when the insurer re-rates the comp policy. Timesheets will look up names and loaded rates from here with VLOOKUP, and Utilization will summarize hours per person in Lesson 16.

Because the loaded rate is computed, a comp re-rate is a one-cell edit: change the burden percentage and every historical labor cost in the workbook reprices instantly. That is deliberate - this is a teaching model. A production system would freeze historical rates so old jobs keep the cost they actually had.

Practice

Fixed case (Mar 1 – Jun 30, 2026). Pale-green cells are formulas. Cell G5 on Employees has been cleared - you will retype it.

Meet the crew — The exercise opens on Employees. Rows 5 through 10 hold the six people; note E05 Priya Patel in the office role - her time will never touch a job.
Retype the loaded rate in G5 — Cell G5 is blank. Type =ROUND($E5*(1+$F5),2) and press Enter. Dana Whitfield's loaded rate comes back as $60.00 ($48.00 base at 25% burden).
Check the rest of the column — G6 through G10 should read $45.00, $40.00, $25.00, $30.00, and $35.00. Every rate is a whole dollar because the base rates and the 25% burden were chosen to land cleanly - your real numbers will have cents, which is exactly why the formula rounds.
Sanity-check against payroll — Ask what one week of Marcus costs: 40 hours at the G6 loaded rate of $45.00 is $1,800.00 of job cost - not the $1,440.00 his base wage suggests.

Online exercise

The spreadsheet below is editable — follow the practice steps right on this page. Steps that need ribbon menus should be done in your own Excel with the downloadable practice file.

表格加载中…

Checklist

Work through each item; when every box passes, this lesson is done:

☐ Typed the loaded-rate formula into G5 and got $60.00 for Dana Whitfield
☐ Confirmed Marcus Reed (G6) loads to $45.00 and the apprentice (G8) to $25.00
☐ Understood why job costing must use loaded rates, not base wages

🏗️ Lesson 03 · The crew file: base pay, burden, and loaded rates