What to Charge for Saturday Handyman Work

Before you print a single business card, find out what your state lets you touch without a license. That one answer decides whether this is a viable Saturday business or a fast way to meet your state contractor board.

In California, the threshold is $500. Any job where labor and materials combined come to more than that requires a contractor's license from the CSLB. Texas has no statewide general contractor license at all, but electrical and plumbing are licensed at the state level and always have been. Florida runs a lot of it through county registration. Your state is its own animal, and the only reliable source is your state licensing board's website, not a guy in a Facebook group.

Then there's the second layer, and it's the same almost everywhere: electrical, plumbing, gas, HVAC, roofing and anything structural are licensed trades. Doesn't matter how small the job is. Swapping an outlet is still electrical work. Replacing a wax ring is still plumbing in a lot of jurisdictions.

That sounds restrictive until you look at what's left. Door adjustments. Drywall patches. TV mounts. Shelving and closet systems. Furniture assembly. Caulking and grout. Fence pickets. Gutter cleaning. Storm doors. Deck boards. Cabinet hardware. Weatherstripping. Screen repair. Curtain rods and blinds. There's a full day's work in that list every Saturday of the year, and none of it needs a card in your wallet in most places.

The insurance conversation you have once

Call an independent agent and ask for a general liability policy for a one-man handyman operation. Tell the truth about what you do, including the stuff you only do occasionally, because a policy that excludes the exact job you were on is worth nothing.

Expect to be asked about annual receipts, whether you go on roofs, whether you subcontract, and whether you do any work involving water lines. Roof work and water spike the price. Some carriers won't write it at all for a part-timer.

The reason you carry it isn't the $80 mirror you knocked off the wall. It's the drywall patch above a finished basement where you nicked a supply line you didn't know was there, and the homeowner comes home Sunday to two inches of standing water and a ruined floor. That's a five-figure claim on a job you billed $140 for. Out of pocket, it's a second mortgage.

Two more things while you've got the agent on the phone. Ask whether your personal auto policy covers you driving to paid job sites, because a lot of them don't, and the exclusion shows up at the worst possible moment. And ask about the cost difference between an LLC and a sole proprietorship in your state. The LLC doesn't replace insurance. It just keeps a bad day from reaching your house.

Build your rate from the bottom, not from what the other guy charges

Pick the number you want to clear on a Saturday. Work backward.

Say you want $300 in your pocket after taxes for a day. Self-employment tax plus federal income tax will take roughly a third off the top for most people, so you need about $450 in profit. Add $40 for gas, consumables, blades, screws, caulk and the portion of your insurance and tools that this day owes. Now you need to bill around $490.

The trap is the next step. A "Saturday" isn't eight billable hours. Leave at 7:30, home by 5:00, and you'll be lucky to have five and a half hours somebody's actually paying for. Drive time between jobs, the walkthrough, the hardware store run, writing the invoice, loading and unloading the truck. All unbilled unless you build it into the rate.

$490 across 5.5 billable hours is $89 an hour.

That number startles guys who were about to charge $40 because it felt neighborly. Forty dollars an hour is a wage. You're not being paid a wage. You're buying your own insurance, your own tools, your own truck, both halves of Social Security, and your own unpaid time.

Minimum charges and why the small job kills you

Set a two-hour minimum or a flat trip fee. Non-negotiable.

The twenty-minute doorknob job is the one that ruins a schedule. Twenty minutes of work, twenty-five minutes of driving, ten minutes of the homeowner walking you through the house pointing at other things. That's an hour and change for $50 if you bill by the clock.

Once you've done a job type ten or fifteen times, switch it to a flat price. A standard TV mount over drywall into studs is a known quantity. Quote the outcome, not the hours. Flat pricing rewards you for getting fast, and hourly punishes you for it. Homeowners also say yes faster to one number than to a range.

Materials: mark them up 15 to 20 percent, or pass them through at cost and bill your shopping time. Pick one and say which on the invoice. What you don't do is eat both.

And keep a stocked truck. Two hardware store runs on a Saturday will take a $500 day down to $350. Screws, anchors, caulk, shims, wood filler, common hinges, a few sizes of drywall patch. The inventory pays for itself in one avoided trip.

What a month actually looks like

Three working Saturdays a month is realistic. Something always takes the fourth: a wedding, a kid's tournament, rain, a job that runs long.

Three days at $490 billed is about $1,470 gross. After gas, materials you absorbed, tool replacement and insurance, call it $1,250. After taxes, somewhere near $850 in your pocket.

That's real money. It's also not a second income, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling a course. It's a car payment and a chunk of the grocery bill. If you want more than that, you either raise the rate, tighten your service radius so drive time collapses, or you stop doing this on Saturdays only.

Taxes, the short version

You'll file a Schedule C. You'll owe self-employment tax at 15.3 percent on net profit on top of income tax, and nobody's withholding it for you. Set aside 30 percent of every check the day it lands, in a separate account you don't touch.

Quarterly estimated payments are due four times a year, and the penalty for skipping them is small but pointless. Track mileage from the first job to the last. The IRS publishes a standard mileage rate each year, and it's usually worth more than you'd guess. Tools, insurance premiums, your phone's business share and materials are all deductible.

Get a CPA before your first tax season, not after. One hour of their time will pay for itself, and they'll tell you whether an S-corp election makes sense at your volume. That's their call to make, not mine and not a website's.

When you should skip it

If your day job pays overtime at time and a half, do the math before you commit. Eight hours of OT with no insurance, no tools and no invoicing may beat $850 a month, and you can't be sued over it.

If you've got kids under ten, Saturday is the only unstructured day you get with them, and it doesn't come back. Trading fifty of them for a car payment is a decision, not a default.

And if your state's threshold is low and the work you're actually good at sits on the licensed side of the line, go get the license. Don't work around it.

One last rule. When the homeowner says "while you're here, could you just take a quick look at the water heater," the answer is no, and the reason is that you like your insurance policy exactly the way it is.