Blended rate calculator
- Blended rate, dollars an hour
- $158.95
- Total hours on the engagement
- 95
- Fee at standard rates
- $15,100
- Fee to quote at your realization
- $12,835
Every figure on this site comes out of the numbers you type and the method printed beside them: your standard rates, your hours, your salaries, burden and overhead, your billable hours and your margin. There is no tax rate here, no wage law, no filing deadline and no benchmark fee. What your firm charges is your figure, not ours.
The figures above start from a worked example ($158.95). Change any input and the fee updates as you type, the way it will on the client record.
Download the Blended rate calculator worked example (CSV)
This worksheet works the blended rate on an engagement from your own figures: the partner, manager and staff hours you expect the job to take, each level's standard rate, and the realization the firm actually achieves on work like this. It gives you the total hours, the fee at standard rates, the blended rate an hour across every level, the fee to quote at your realization and the rate that fee really comes to an hour, which is the figure to hold a fixed fee against.
What a partner asks before running the Blended rate calculator
What is a blended rate?
The fee at standard rates divided by every hour on the engagement, whoever worked it. On the worked example 95 hours at $15,100 blends to $158.95 an hour, well below the partner rate and above the staff rate, because staff hours are most of the job.
Why put realization in?
Because almost no firm bills every hour at standard. Realization is the share of standard value that reaches an invoice, and a fixed fee quoted at standard is a fee the firm will write down later. Enter the realization you really achieve and the fee on the page is the one you can quote.
Which hours change the answer most?
Staff hours, nearly always. They are the largest block and the easiest to under-estimate, so a fee that assumed 60 staff hours and took 80 has lost its margin before the partner review begins. Time one real engagement and use that figure.
Yearendo Pro
Keeping the client behind the fee
The worksheets cost nothing. Pro begins where the client says yes: the fee turns into a client record, the client gets a payroll calendar and a year end, and next January the firm can still read what it agreed, what it ran and what was filed.
- Save a priced engagement and open it again next week
- Put two ways of pricing the same engagement side by side
- Your fee quotes and invoices without our name on them
- Send the fee quote from inside the client record rather than from your inbox
- Take the retainer without leaving the client record
- Connect QuickBooks or Xero to your account
$79per month, whole team
Start Yearendo Pro PricingYearendo Pro costs $79 a month for the whole firm. It is billed monthly and renews at that price each month until you cancel; the price and the renewal terms appear once more on the checkout page.
Where the constants in this tool come from
U.S. Small Business Administration, Business Guide: manage your business.