Two ways to write a production rate, and why they get mixed up
Unit rates come in two shapes. Units per crew hour describes what a whole crew produces in an hour: a three-person crew hanging 120 square feet of board per hour. Man hours per unit describes one worker on one unit: 0.025 man hours per square foot. They convert into each other through the crew size, and mixing them is a factor-of-three error on a three-person crew, which is exactly the kind of mistake that survives a review because both numbers look plausible.
The selector at the top of the calculator exists to keep them apart. Whichever form your own records are in, use that one, and note which it is in your estimating file. A rate with no basis written next to it is worse than no rate, because it will eventually be used the wrong way round.
Where the efficiency factor actually goes
A production rate measured on a good day, on an easy section, with the material already staged, is not the rate for the job. The efficiency factor is the honest discount for everything that is not the task: waiting on another trade, working around an obstruction, a partial day, the last ten percent of a room that takes as long as the first half.
| Conditions | Rough efficiency |
|---|---|
| Open new construction, staged material, repetitive | 90-100% |
| Typical occupied residential, some obstruction | 80-90% |
| Renovation, restricted access, multiple trades | 65-80% |
| Occupied commercial after hours, heavy protection | 55-70% |
Those bands are orientation, not authority. The only rate that predicts your jobs is the one derived from your own timesheets on your own work, and the calculation is simple: quantity installed divided by crew hours actually spent. Do it on five completed jobs and you will have a better estimating basis than any published table, because it already contains your crew, your travel, your setup habits and your typical site conditions.
Crew size is not a free variable
The arithmetic will happily tell you that six workers finish in half the time of three. The work often disagrees. Many tasks have a natural crew size set by the physical job — how many people can reach the wall, how many can be productive around one mixer, how many the access allows — and beyond it the additional bodies mainly generate coordination. On small quantities the crew size can also be dominated by mobilization, since a larger crew multiplies the travel and setup hours without shortening them.
The practical use of this calculator is comparing options rather than trusting one. Run the same quantity at two crew sizes with the mobilization hours set correctly for each, and see whether the schedule saving justifies the man hours. Frequently on small work it does not, and the smaller crew is both faster to organize and cheaper.
Crew days, calendar days and the gap between them
Crew days are rounded up because you cannot send a crew for a third of a day and get a third of a day of value. Calendar days are a different number again, and always larger: material lead times, inspections, weather, the day the other trade needs the space, and the fact that crews rarely move from one job to the next with no gap. Estimating labor cost from crew hours is reliable. Estimating a completion date from crew days is not, and promising one to a customer without a calendar buffer is how a well-estimated job becomes a late job.
The cost per unit at the bottom of the output is the number worth keeping. Tracked over time it tells you whether you are getting faster, whether a particular type of job is a loser, and whether your bid rates have drifted away from reality. Feed it into the job cost and markup calculator as the labor component rather than estimating the hours twice.
Questions people ask
Where do I get production rates if I have never tracked them?
Start tracking. On the next three jobs, record the quantity installed and the crew hours spent on that task alone, excluding setup and travel, and divide. Three data points is not statistics but it beats a guess, and by ten jobs you have something you can bid from with confidence. Published rates from estimating references are a starting point for a task you have genuinely never done, but they describe an average crew on an average site and yours is neither. Treat any borrowed rate as provisional until your own timesheets confirm or correct it.
Should mobilization be per day or per job?
It depends on whether the crew leaves. A job that runs continuously has one real mobilization at the start and one demobilization at the end, plus a smaller daily setup that is usually already inside the productive-hours-per-day figure. A job the crew visits three separate times has three mobilizations, and that is the case where small jobs get expensive. If the work will be split across trips, enter the total across all trips rather than one.
What counts as productive hours per day?
Tools in hand on the work. Not the length of the shift. An eight-hour day contains breaks, a morning setup, an end-of-day cleanup, and usually some material handling, so productive hours are commonly six to seven on a well-run site and less on a difficult one. You can either enter the shift length and let the efficiency factor absorb the losses, or enter genuine productive hours and set efficiency higher. Doing both applies the discount twice, so pick one convention and stay with it.
How do I handle a crew with mixed skill levels?
The man hour figure treats all crew members as equivalent, which they are not. For scheduling that is usually fine, because the crew moves as a unit. For cost it is not, and the fix is to use a blended burdened rate weighted by the actual composition: two at the journeyman rate and one at the helper rate gives a blended figure you can enter directly. If the mix changes between jobs, keep a couple of standard blended rates rather than recalculating each time.
Does the calculator account for overtime?
No. It gives you man hours, and what those hours cost depends on how they are scheduled and on the wage and hour rules that apply to your workers, which vary by state and by classification. Extended overtime also reduces productivity, so a schedule recovered by working longer days does not recover proportionally. If you are modelling a compressed schedule, lower the efficiency factor as well as adding the hours, and take the pay calculation to the overtime pay calculator and to someone who knows the rules where you employ people.