How To Estimate Labour Hours On An Electrical Job (The Number That Sinks Most Quotes)

Ask a sparky where a job lost money and nine times out of ten it’s not the materials. It’s the hours. The job that “should’ve been a day” turned into two and a half, and the quote only had a day in it.

Labour is the single biggest profit killer in electrical estimating. Get the hours wrong and no margin in the world saves you. Here’s how to estimate them properly.

Break the job into tasks, not a vibe

“It’s about a day” is not an estimate. It’s a guess wearing a hat.

Real labour estimates come from breaking the job into the actual stages of work, then putting a time against each one:

• Rough-in — running cable, conduit, mounting boxes
• Fit-off — fitting points, switches, fittings
• Terminations — boards, connections, making good
• Test and certify — the bit everyone forgets is labour too

Add the tasks up. A job built from named tasks is always more honest than a number you pulled out of the air, because you can see exactly where the time goes.

The hours nobody puts in the quote

Here’s where the bleed happens. The work everyone forgets to count:

• Travel to and from site
• Loading and unloading the van
• Setup and pack-down
• Site cleanup
• Troubleshooting and “while I’m here” diagnostics

None of that swings a screwdriver, but every minute of it is paid time. Travel and setup are the most commonly forgotten line in the whole estimate. Leave them out and you’ve donated them.

38 paid hours is not 38 billable hours

This is the one that catches people. You pay a tradesman for a 38-hour week. You do not get 38 billable hours out of that week.

Between travel, smoko, quoting, picking up materials, admin and the general friction of a working day, real billable time is well short of paid time. If your rate assumes every paid hour is billed, your rate is too low and your job hours are too optimistic.

Be realistic about how many hours actually land on the job. Then make sure your hourly rate is built to recover the non-billable time across the hours you do bill. That’s the whole game in labour cost recovery.

Old buildings will eat you alive

A double brick house from the 50s is not the same labour as a new build, even if the job description reads the same.

Heritage and older builds blow out because:

• Cable runs are harder and slower
• Access is woeful
• You find surprises behind every wall
• Nothing is where the plans say it is

If the site is old, load your hours. The job will find a way to use them.

Bill in 15-minute increments

Once you’re tracking time properly, track it in 15-minute blocks, not rough half-days. Small jobs especially get under-quoted when you round time loosely. A “quick” service call that’s really 45 minutes of work plus 30 minutes travel is over an hour of paid time, not “half an hour, near enough”.

Tighten it over time

Your first estimates won’t be perfect. That’s fine. The fix is to compare what you estimated against what the job actually took, every time, and adjust your task times accordingly. After a dozen jobs you stop guessing and start knowing.

The full method, building task times, loading the right jobs, and turning it into a repeatable standard, is what we teach in the Electrical Estimating Course.

Materials are easy to count. Hours are easy to underestimate. That’s why the hours are where the money goes missing.