Free tool
Will tonight reports actually go out tonight
Set your start time, your job count and your honest per report writing time, and see the hour your day really ends against the cutoff you promised.
Free tool, no sign up
What one home inspection actually leaves you
Enter your fee, your real monthly volume and the hours a job honestly costs, and see the profit and hourly rate behind the number on your invoice.
A 425 dollar inspection fee is not 425 dollars of income. Before anything reaches you, the fee pays for the round trip across the metro, the errors and omissions premium, the state license renewal, the association dues, the software, the phone, the ladder that finally cracked, and the two hours you spend writing a report nobody sees you write. What is left is the real number, and it is usually smaller than inspectors guess.
This calculator returns that figure per job, and then divides it by the hours the job really takes so you can see your effective hourly rate. Run it at your true monthly volume, not your best month. Overhead per inspection is a shared cost, so a slow February makes every inspection in February more expensive than the same inspection in June.
Your result
Vehicle cost per inspection
$32.20
What the drive to this address and back costs before you unlock the door.
Overhead carried by each inspection
$84.09
Your monthly fixed costs divided across the inspections you actually perform.
Profit left per inspection
$308.71
What one inspection contributes before income tax and before you pay yourself.
Effective hourly rate
$56.13
That profit spread across every hour the job takes, including the report.
These figures are pre tax and assume you complete the volume you entered, so rerun it after a slow month.
The hours inspectors forget to count
Ask an inspector how long a job takes and you usually hear the time on site: two and a half hours for a typical three bedroom. The invoice is priced against that number, and the price is wrong. The real job starts with the scheduling call and the agreement, continues through the drive, the inspection, the photo sort, the writing, the summary, and the twenty minute call where a nervous first time buyer asks whether the polybutylene supply line means the house is a bad buy.
Add those honestly and most full inspections land between four and seven hours all in. That is the number to put in the hours field. If it feels high, track one week with a timer and check. Inspectors who do this almost always find the report and the follow up together match or beat the time on site.
What to do when the hourly rate disappoints you
There are only four levers. Raise the fee, which is easiest in a market where your reports get forwarded and remembered. Cut drive time, which usually means saying no to the far county on a day you already have a job across town. Reduce overhead, which is mostly a matter of dropping the subscriptions you stopped using. Or shorten the desk hours, which is the lever most inspectors ignore because it feels like the cost of doing careful work.
It is not. Careful work is the photographs, the wording and the systems you actually operated. Sorting a camera roll at nine at night is not careful work, it is unpaid clerical labor. If the calculator says the desk hours are eating your rate, fix the desk hours before you raise your price and risk the referral relationships that feed you.
Questions about this calculator
Should ancillary services like radon go in the fee field?
Not in the main fee. Run the calculator on your standard inspection first so you can see the base job clearly. Then run it again with the combined fee and the extra time a radon placement and retrieval trip adds, and compare the two hourly rates.
What cost per mile should I use?
Use your own if you track it, since an older truck with high maintenance costs runs well above a newer one. If you do not track it, the federal business mileage rate is a reasonable starting figure and is published annually. Whatever you pick, keep it consistent across months so the trend stays readable.
Does this replace my accountant?
No. It is a management number, not a tax filing, and it deliberately ignores depreciation schedules and the tax treatment of your equipment. Use it to price jobs and to decide which work to accept, then let your accountant handle the return.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The same day inspection report checklist
A field tested sequence that takes a full inspection from the signed agreement to a delivered report before the buyer goes to bed.
Carry that figure into Thursday inspection
A result on this page is only a number until it changes what you do on the next job. Book a demo and bring the inspection behind it, whether that was the fee, the round trip mileage or the report hours you just typed in. We will run the same job through photo annotation, wording check and branded delivery so you can judge the difference against the figure on your screen.