The ranking is usually upside down
Run the opening list and the best paying task on it is changing the furnace filters: half an hour a time and two hours across the year, $88 of filters against $480 of quotes, which works out at $196 an hour. The worst is spreading mulch — eight hours for $240 saved, or $30 an hour. Most households do the mulch themselves and think about a service contract for the filters.
The reason is not complicated once it is written down. A short job carries a trip charge, and the trip is most of what the quote covers. A long job is mostly labour, so what you save is roughly a labour rate, and a labour rate is what you are paying yourself. Anything with a call-out attached and twenty minutes of work inside it is the best hourly deal on any maintenance list.
What number belongs in the rate field
This is the only input here you get to set by preference rather than by looking it up, and it is worth being honest about. Your salary divided by two thousand hours is the wrong figure unless you can actually sell the marginal hour, which most salaried people cannot. What is left is a preference: what an hour of a Saturday is worth to you, which is a different number in April than in November, and different again if there are small children in the house.
Set it low and everything stays on your side of the line. Set it high and the list empties out. The useful exercise is to move it until the ordering stops feeling wrong, then look at what the number is — that is a more honest estimate of what your time is worth than any calculation would have produced.
Fractions, and jobs that are not yearly
The last column is times a year, and fractions are the point. A deck resealed every three years goes in as 0.33, an interior room repainted every four as 0.25. Everything is then annualised, which is the only way tasks on different cycles can be compared at all. On the opening figures the deck comes to 3 hours and $320.10 a year, which is a fair description of a job that lands as nine hours and $970 once every three years.
What this does not do is tell you when. Annualising deliberately throws the calendar away, and the calendar is a real constraint — the seasonal hours calculator is the other half of this, because forty hours a year is easy and twenty of them falling in October is not.
Related pages
For comparing actual bids on one job rather than ranking a whole list, the bid comparison calculator strips exclusions and allowances out so the totals describe the same work, and the guide to hiring a contractor covers what to ask before any of that. If a task needs equipment you would have to hire, own or rent works out where buying it starts to pay.
The reserve side of maintenance — the replacements rather than the upkeep — sits in the capital reserve timing calculator, and the maintenance payback calculator asks how much extra service life an item of upkeep has to buy before it pays for itself at all.
Questions people ask
Should the quote include materials?
Yes, as it normally does. The comparison is a quote for the finished job on one side, and your materials plus your hours on the other. If the quote you have is labour only and you would be supplying the materials either way, put the same materials figure in both places by adding it to the quote as well, so that the difference stays a difference in labour.
Why does one line show no hours?
Because the hours column is zero, which usually means it was left out. A task that takes no time and still saves money has no meaningful hourly rate, so it sorts to the top of the table and is labelled rather than given a figure. If the task really does take you no time at all, it is on your side of the line regardless of what your rate is.
Does this account for doing the job badly?
No, and that omission favours doing it yourself in every line. A caulk joint that fails in a year, a reseal that lifts, a filter fitted the wrong way round: the cost of redoing it is not in this table, nor is the cost of the damage a job done wrong can let through. Read the per-hour figures as the best case for the do-it-yourself side.
Can I use this to decide about electrical or gas work?
No. Whether a job may lawfully be done by the person who owns the house, whether it needs a permit, and whether it needs a licensed trade are decided by the authority that inspects work where you live, not by an hourly rate. Gas appliances, the electrical panel, anything structural, and anything disturbed in a house old enough to contain materials that need testing first are not tasks a table like this can price.
What is the gear field for?
For the one-off purchases the do-it-yourself side needs and the quotes do not: a ladder, a pressure washer, a sprayer. It is spread over the years you would keep it and charged against the total rather than any single task, because most of it serves several jobs. If a tool exists only for one task, it is more honest to add it to that task's materials instead.