Most painters who go out on their own don't know their real hourly rate. Not a rough guess. Not what the next bloke charges. The actual number their business has to earn to survive.
$49 USD one-time payment. Instant access. Yours to keep.
Works in any country — UK, USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand. No currency symbols. Enter your own figures in whatever currency you use.
You finish a job, bank the money, and it looks fine on the surface. But by the end of the month, after fuel, insurance, tools, your accountant, your phone bill, tax — you're left wondering where it all went.
Here's the reason: most painters set their rate by looking at what someone else charges, or by gut feel, or by what the customer seems willing to pay. None of those methods account for what you actually cost per hour to run.
The result is a rate that looks reasonable but is quietly working against you.
That's what a £5/hour shortfall costs you over a full working year — roughly 1,950 chargeable hours. Not a dramatic mistake. Five pounds. Gone before you notice it.
The problem isn't that you're bad at painting. The problem is that nobody ever showed you how to work out what you actually need to charge.
Think about what's happened in the last few years. Your fuel costs more. Your insurance has gone up. Your tools, your phone, your materials — all up. But your hourly rate? Probably much the same as it was.
That gap between what things cost you and what you're charging widens every year. It doesn't show up as a dramatic crisis. It shows up as a low-grade pressure: always grafting, never quite getting ahead, never quite confident that your price is right.
There are two types of painters who don't know their real rate. The first type finds out gradually — a bad year, a tax bill they can't cover, a few months where the van needs work and the money just isn't there. The second type sits down, works it out properly, adjusts their rate, and never has that conversation with themselves again. Find Your Real Hourly Rate exists for the second type.
Find Your Real Hourly Rate is a desktop business calculator built for painters who are starting out or have been going a while and never done this properly. You put in your real figures — what you want to earn, what your business actually costs to run — and it tells you what you have to charge per hour for the business to work.
Not a rough guide. Your number. Based on your costs, your life, your situation.
Once you know it, everything else gets easier. You quote with more confidence. You stop second-guessing yourself. You have a reference point to come back to every time your costs change or you're thinking about putting your rate up.
The calculator walks you through your business from the ground up. No spreadsheet skills needed. Fill in the yellow boxes. Everything else calculates automatically.
Enter what you want to take home, your business costs, your tax rate, your working weeks — and get your minimum charge-out rate per hour, day, and week.
Work out your full day rate including travel and expenses. If you take someone on, see the real all-in cost of a hired painter before you price the job.
Price a specific job from scratch — labour hours, materials with mark-up, hired equipment. Know your cost before you open your mouth to the customer.
See what other painters in your region are charging. Sense-check your rate against the market. Know where you sit — and whether you have room to move.
Save your numbers, download a backup, and restore them any time. Update every year when your costs change. It takes ten minutes to revisit.
Generate a clean, black-and-white summary of all your inputs and results — formatted for sending to your accountant or keeping for your own records.
You don't need a business background. You don't need to understand accounting. You need to be honest about your numbers and willing to spend an hour doing this properly.
Came up as a labourer or worked for someone else, now out on your own. Nobody's told you what to charge. You're pricing by feel and hoping it adds up. This is the first thing you should do before you quote another job.
You've got the skills — from retraining or a previous career — but you've never run a tools business before. You know the work. The pricing and the costs are the part nobody prepared you for. This fixes that.
Works in the UK, USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. All figures in your own currency. No country-specific jargon.
Find Your Real Hourly Rate is a desktop web app — it runs in your browser on any Windows or Mac computer. No downloads, no software to install, no subscription.
Instant access. Works on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.
Most experienced painters have a rate that was right once — when they first set it, or when a mate told them what he was charging. The problem is that costs move and rates don't keep up. Fuel, insurance, tools, accountants — all more expensive than five years ago. A feel built on old numbers is still an outdated number. This takes an hour. It either confirms you're in the right place or shows you where the leak is.
You don't need to be. There are no formulas to write, no cells to format. You fill in the yellow boxes with your figures — your rent or mortgage, your fuel spend, your insurance cost — and the white boxes calculate everything else automatically. If you can read a bank statement, you can use this.
That's fine. Go through your bank statements for the last three months, add up what you're spending on fuel, insurance, your phone, your accountant. Divide by three. That's your monthly figure — multiply by 12 and you've got your annual cost. It takes an hour of digging. Most people find something they'd forgotten about. That's the point.
That's a real concern and it's worth taking seriously. But here's what actually happens when painters find out their real rate: most of them discover they're only a few pounds off, not twenty. A small increase, communicated confidently, rarely loses good customers. What you learn is whether the customers you're worried about losing are the ones worth keeping. This calculator gives you the number. What you do with it is still your call.
No. The calculator works in any English-speaking country. There are no currency symbols — you enter your own figures in whatever currency you use. The market rates section covers the UK, USA, Canada, and Ireland. The insurance and tax guidance sections cover all four countries. If you're in Australia or New Zealand, the rate and cost sections work exactly the same way.
A freelance bookkeeper charges £50–£80 an hour to sit with you and work through exactly this kind of exercise. A one-hour consultation with a business advisor costs more. Find Your Real Hourly Rate costs $49 USD and you can use it as many times as you need for the rest of your career — every time your costs change, every time you're thinking about a rate increase, every year when you're doing your tax. One extra £1 on your hourly rate, held for a year, is roughly £2,000 in additional revenue. The maths isn't complicated.
No subscription. No annual renewal. No account to manage. Pay once and it's yours.
Approximate equivalents: Approx. £39 GBP / $65 CAD / $75 AUD
🔒 Secure payment via Stripe. Instant access after purchase.
If you go through the calculator, enter your real figures, and don't find it useful — contact us within 30 days and we'll refund you in full. No forms to fill in, no questions asked.
Traction Stream was started by a retired painter and decorator. Not a business coach. Not a software developer with a side hustle. Someone who spent decades on the tools and watched good painters quietly undercharge their way through an entire career.
The origin of Find Your Real Hourly Rate was a conversation with a Scottish painter and an Irish painter on a job, both asking the same question: what should I actually be charging? There was no straight answer that made sense for their specific situation. So a spreadsheet got built. Then it became a proper tool. Then it became this.
The business tools built here are not for decorators who want to build an empire. They're for decorators who want to get the business side right, know their numbers, and stop leaving money on the table without realising it.
An hour with this calculator tells you more about your business than most painters learn in ten years of guessing. It's $49 USD. You'll use it more than once.
Yes — Find My Real Hourly Rate ($49 USD)Instant access. 30-day money-back guarantee. No subscription ever.
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