Handyman Business FAQ
Straight answers to the questions handymen actually ask
Twenty-five questions I get asked constantly, answered the way I would answer them on a phone call. No fluff, no sales pitch, and real numbers where real numbers exist.
Pricing and Money
How much should a handyman charge per hour?
There is no single right number, and anyone who hands you one is guessing. Most established handymen in the US bill somewhere between $75 and $150 an hour, but that range is close to useless on its own. A man with a truck payment and employees in Sacramento and a man in a paid-off van in rural Tennessee need completely different numbers to come out the same. Your rate comes from three things: what your business costs you to run, what you need to take home, and how many hours you can genuinely bill. Work yours out rather than copying the guy down the street, who is probably guessing too.
Should a handyman charge by the hour or by the job?
Charge by the job. When you quote by the hour you get punished for being good at your trade, because the faster you work the less you earn. Quote the job and your speed stays in your pocket. Customers prefer it too, because they know the number before you start and nobody is watching the clock. The catch is that you cannot price a job until you know how long it takes you, which is why the time benchmark matters more than the price list.
How do I figure out what to charge for a specific job?
Take how long the job actually takes you, multiply it by your hourly rate, and that is your price. A kitchen faucet is about an hour, so at an $80 rate it is an $80 job and at $150 it is a $150 job. The time does not change between businesses; the rate does. Start from a real benchmark, then time yourself on the next ten jobs and adjust to your own numbers, because a job you have never done takes longer than one you have done hundreds of times.
What is a minimum charge and do I need one?
Yes, you need one. A minimum charge is the least you will leave the shop for, and without it you will spend your Tuesday driving forty minutes to hang a towel bar for $40. A sensible rule is one hour of your rate inside your service area and two hours outside it. That covers the drive, the setup and the paperwork that a ten-minute job still generates. Tell people your minimum when they call, not when you hand them the invoice.
How much should I mark up materials?
Somewhere between 20% and 50% is normal, and the reason is not greed. You are the one driving to the supply house, fronting the money, carrying the warranty and going back when the part is wrong. That is work, and it is worth paying for. Where handymen get caught is buying materials at retail prices the customer could have matched, then marking those up as well. Either build a supplier relationship that gets you trade pricing, or have the customer buy the materials and charge purely for your labor.
What is a good profit margin for a handyman business?
Aim to keep at least 20 to 30 cents of every dollar you invoice, after materials, overhead and paying yourself properly. Below 20% there is no cushion in the business, and one truck repair or two weeks of rain puts you in trouble. The number most handymen never calculate is the one that matters: track it per job and you find out quickly that the work you enjoy and the work that pays are not always the same jobs.
Why am I busy all the time but still broke?
Almost always because you are underpriced, not because you are slow. Being busy at the wrong price just means you reach the end of the year exhausted with nothing to show for it, and working more hours makes it worse rather than better. The test is simple: work out what you need to charge to cover your real costs and pay yourself properly, then compare it to what you actually billed last month. Most handymen who run that comparison find a gap of $20 to $40 an hour they never knew was there.
How many hours a year can a handyman actually bill?
About 1,600, and that surprises people. Forty hours a week times fifty weeks is 2,000, but you do not bill for driving, quoting, buying materials, chasing invoices, or the Tuesday nobody booked. Thirty to thirty-two billable hours in a forty-hour week is realistic for someone organised. If you set your rate by dividing what you need by 2,000 hours, you have just underpriced yourself by about 20% before you start.
What is the difference between markup and margin?
Markup is what you add on top of your cost. Margin is what you keep out of the final price. They sound the same and they are not. Add 30% markup to a $100 cost and you charge $130, keeping $30, which is 23% margin, not 30%. To actually keep 30% you divide by 0.70 and charge $142.86. Over a year of billable hours that difference runs to five figures, and it is the single most common piece of arithmetic that quietly costs handymen money.
What do I say when a customer tells me I am too expensive?
Do not drop your price. Explain what is in it. Most people saying you are too expensive are really saying they do not understand what they are paying for, and the fix is describing the work, the warranty, the insurance and the fact that you will actually turn up. If they still say no, that is fine. A customer who only picks the cheapest number will do the same thing to the next guy, and chasing them to the bottom is how you end up busy and broke. Discount once and that is your new price with that customer forever.
Starting Out
Do I need a license to be a handyman?
It depends entirely on your state, and the amounts vary more than people expect. Some states let you work up to $40,000 a job with no license. Others, like Maryland and Massachusetts, require one for a $200 repair. Fifteen states do not license general contractors at all and leave it to cities. One thing is near-universal: electrical, plumbing and HVAC need separate trade licenses no matter how small the job, and no handyman exemption covers them.
How much does it cost to start a handyman business?
Less than most trades, which is both the appeal and the trap. If you already own tools and a vehicle, you can be legally operating for a few hundred dollars in registration and insurance. Realistically budget $2,000 to $10,000 once you add liability insurance, a license where you need one, a phone, basic software and the tools you discover you are missing. The bigger cost is the one nobody budgets: three to six months of thin income while you build enough customers to fill a calendar.
Do I need insurance to be a handyman?
Yes, and get it before your first paid job. General liability is the baseline and typically runs $500 to $1,500 a year for a solo operator. It covers you when you put a screw through a pipe or a ladder through a window, and both of those happen to careful people. Many customers, property managers and licensing boards will ask for proof before they let you on site, so it also wins you work. If you hire anyone, workers compensation becomes a separate legal requirement in most states.
Should I set up an LLC?
For most handymen, yes, and it is not expensive or complicated. An LLC separates your business from your personal assets, which matters in a trade where you work inside other people's homes. It also makes you look established to the customers who care about that. It is not a substitute for insurance, and it does not protect you from your own bad workmanship, so do both. Rules and fees vary by state, so check yours or spend an hour with an accountant before you file.
What tools do I actually need to start?
Fewer than you think, and the mistake is buying for jobs you have not booked yet. Start with what covers the work you already know you can sell: a good drill and impact driver, a solid hand tool set, a decent ladder, a shop vac, and whatever your trade specialty needs. Then buy tools out of the jobs that require them, not before. A $400 tool bought for a $600 job pays for itself; the same tool bought in advance is money sitting in a van.
Getting Customers
How do handymen get customers?
In roughly this order of value: repeat customers, referrals from those customers, Google, then paid leads. The ones at the top cost you nothing and convert best, which is why doing excellent work and following up is cheaper than any advertising. For new work, a properly set up Google Business Profile is the single highest-return thing most handymen can do, and it is free. Paid lead services should be the last money you spend, not the first.
Is a Google Business Profile worth it for a handyman?
It is the most valuable free thing you can do for your business. When somebody searches "handyman near me," the first thing on the screen is a map with three businesses on it, and those three get the calls. Getting into that map costs nothing but about half an hour of setup and a steady habit of asking for reviews. The catch for handymen is that you are a service area business with no storefront, which changes how you set it up and how you verify.
Should I pay for leads from Angi or Thumbtack?
Be careful, and measure it. Paid lead services can fill a calendar quickly when you are starting out, but you are usually buying a lead that was sold to three other people, and you compete on price from the first phone call. That pushes you toward exactly the customers you want least. If you use them, track revenue and profit by lead source so you know what you are actually paying per booked job. Plenty of handymen find their paid leads have half the margin of their referrals.
How do I get more Google reviews?
Ask within 24 hours of finishing, while they are still happy and still remember your name, and send a direct review link rather than telling them to look you up. A steady few a month beats twenty in one week, because a sudden burst looks bought to Google and to customers. Reply to every review including the bad ones, in two sentences, without arguing. People read the one-star reviews specifically to see how you handle a complaint.
Does a handyman need a website?
Eventually, but it is not first. A complete Google Business Profile with real photos and real reviews will out-earn a website for most handymen in their first year, because that is where people are actually looking. A website earns its keep once you want to control the story, rank for the services you want more of, and stop sending prospects to a profile you do not own. When you build one, one page per service beats one page listing everything.
Growing the Business
When should a handyman hire their first employee?
When you are consistently turning work away at a price that works, and you have cash in the bank to carry payroll through a slow month. Not when you are drowning. Hiring because you are overwhelmed means hiring in a hurry, and a bad first hire costs you more than the work you turned down would have. Run the numbers before you run the ad, because a tech who bills thirty hours a week looks very different from one who bills twenty.
How much does a handyman employee really cost?
Far more than their wage. At $25 an hour, payroll taxes, workers comp and liability add roughly 30%, which makes them $32.50 before they pick up a tool. Then add the truck, the gas, the tools, the phone. But the real number is cost per billable hour: you pay for forty hours and bill maybe thirty, so that $25 an hour employee can easily cost you $50 or more for every hour you can actually sell. That gap is where most first hires quietly lose money.
How do I stop working every weekend?
Raise your prices before you cut your hours, or you will just earn less. Most handymen work weekends because they need the volume to make the money, which is a pricing problem wearing a scheduling costume. Fix the rate first, then protect the calendar: set a minimum charge, batch your quoting into one window instead of answering the phone from a ladder, and write down how you do things so somebody else eventually can.
What is a handyman business worth when you sell it?
Usually one to three times what it earns the owner in a year, and where you land in that range is decided almost entirely by how much of it is you. A business that stops earning the day you stop working is a job, not an asset, and what changes hands is a customer list, a van and some tools. Clean books, people who can finish jobs without you, written processes and repeat revenue are what move you up the range. So does avoiding a loss year, which can cost you the bank financing your buyer needs.
How do I get customers to pay on time?
Take a deposit, invoice the same day, and say your terms out loud before you start. Most late payment is not people refusing to pay, it is an invoice sitting in a pile because nobody told them when it was due. A deposit on anything with materials in it protects your cash and filters out the customers who were never going to pay anyway. For bigger jobs, bill in stages rather than carrying the whole thing to the end.
Didn't find your question?
These are the ones that come up most, but they are not the only ones. If you are stuck on something that isn't here, book a free 15 minute call and ask me directly. There is no pitch on that call unless you ask for one.
Most of what is on this page is also built into free tools you can use right now — the rate calculator, the price list, the hiring calculator and the rest are all at handymanjourney.com/resources.
Knowing the answer and doing something about it are different jobs.
Most handymen already half-know what they should charge. What they need is someone to check the number with them, and to hold the line the first time a customer pushes back. That is the part we do.