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On-Call Pay Cost Calculator

The rotation looks cheap on paper: one flat figure per week. Then the phone rings at two in the morning, a technician drives out, and dispatch spends the next half hour reshuffling the board. Put in your flat pay, call-out counts, response pay, and office time. You see what one on-call week really costs, per response hour and per year.

Before you start

about two minutes, your own figures. Nothing is stored and no sign up is needed.

What you will need. Flat on-call pay per week, After-hours call-outs in a typical week, Response hours per call-out, Response pay per hour

The rotation week

$
What one on-call week pays before any call-out, averaged across your rotation. Fifty dollars is a starter figure, not a benchmark. Some shops pay per day, some pay nothing flat. Enter yours.
Your average on-call week, not the worst one. Counts swing hard by season, so if summer and winter look nothing alike, run the page twice.
Door to door: the drive out, the work, the drive back, the write-up. Two hours is a starter figure. Your call-out log has the real one.

What a response hour pays

$
The BLS median for HVAC mechanics and installers works out to about $28.75 per hour. Replace it with what the technicians on your rotation earn.
What your payroll pays on response hours, as a multiple of the technician regular rate. 1.0 means response hours pay at the normal rate. 1.5 means half again. Set it to what your payroll actually does. It varies by policy and state, so confirm with whoever runs your payroll.
Advanced options
The answered phone, the reshuffled board, the customer callback in the morning. Time one for real. Most owners are surprised.
$
What an hour of the owner or dispatcher is worth. Use loaded cost or your own judgment.

What one on-call week costs

$0
the flat pay is a share of it. The rest rides along
Cost per response hour, all-in
$0
A year of the rotation
$0
Your rotation costs about $0 a week all-in. Across 52 weeks that is $0, and each response hour costs about $0 once the flat pay and the office time ride along.

Where the weekly cost goes

Email yourself this breakdown We send the figures you just produced, with your inputs beside them.

The method

What the rotation really costs

Most shops budget on-call as the flat weekly figure and stop there. The week does not stop there. Every call-out adds response hours at whatever your payroll pays for them, and every after-hours phone call adds dispatch and office time the next morning. This calculator adds the three lines up and states the week, the year, and the all-in cost of a single response hour.

How this is calculated

What one on-call week costs

The flat weekly pay. Then call-outs times response hours times the response rate times your multiplier. Then call-outs times the office minutes at your office rate. At the starter figures that is $50 plus $116 plus $30, about $196 a week.

Cost per response hour, all-in

The weekly cost divided by the response hours in it. At the starter figures each response hour costs about $49 once the flat pay and the office time ride along. That is well above the hourly rate on its own. Set that figure next to what an after-hours call bills and the rotation stops being a rounding error.

Flat pay versus the real cost

At the starter figures the flat weekly figure is about a quarter of the true weekly cost. The other three quarters live in response hours and office time. A rotation priced only on the flat line looks cheap right up until the season turns.

Carry this into the decision

On-call is one line in the pay plan. Price the whole plan.

The Tech Pay Plan and Margin Workbook models base, spiffs, commission, and on-call pay side by side across up to three plans, prices each one against billed-hour economics, and shows the raise breakeven, in one license.

See the Tech Pay Plan and Margin Workbook

$49. 30 days. Reply to your receipt or email support@truestephr.com for a full refund. No form or explanation is required, and you keep the files.

Related

More free tools and the notes behind them

This tool estimates from the figures you enter. It is general information rather than legal, tax, or accounting advice, so check the result against your own records before you rely on it.

Use the number

The calculation is the start of the decision.

Keep the result, move the live assumptions into an editable workbook, and put the number to work inside the matched kit.

01 · Calculate

Run the free analysis

Change the inputs until the result reflects the business you actually operate.

02 · Keep and model

Email the breakdown

Use the result form on this page, then carry the assumptions into the editable version.

See the Tech Pay Plan and Margin Workbook →
03 · Decide

Apply it to the live issue

Apply the number inside the matched kit, and add a Setup Session if you want it running on your numbers.

Add a $149 Setup Session →