Formula Reference
One rate, four ways of saying it
A production rate arrives in whatever unit the person who quoted it happened to use. The foreman says four hundred a day. The historical cost report says 0.04 hours a foot. The subcontractor's proposal says fifteen days. They can all describe the same crew, and they can all describe wildly different crews, because two of the numbers are useless without the crew size and the shift length.
Take the values this page opens with: 400 units per crew-day, two workers, eight hours. That is sixteen labor-hours a day, so 200 units per man-day, 25 units per labor-hour, and 0.04 labor-hours per unit. A thousand units is 2.5 crew-days and 40 labor-hours; at a burdened rate of $48 an hour that is $1,920, or $1.92 a unit, with the crew costing $768 a day. Change the crew to four workers and "400 a day" now means 0.08 labor-hours per unit — twice the labor cost for the same daily output. That is the whole reason this tool exists.
Crew-day, man-day, labor-hour
A labor-hour — man-hour, the same thing — is one worker for one hour. A man-day is one worker for one shift, so eight labor-hours on a standard day and ten on a ten-hour day. A crew-day is the whole crew for one shift, so it scales with headcount. Cost lives in labor-hours; schedule lives in crew-days; and a rate written down without saying which one it is will eventually be read as the wrong one.
Why no production rates are published here
This page holds no library of rates. There is nothing in it that says how many square feet of board a crew hangs in a day, and that is deliberate. The published rate books that do carry those figures are commercial products, and the trade-association labor manuals are members-only, so we cannot quote them to you. More to the point, a rate from a book is a stranger's crew on a stranger's job.
Your own rates are better and you already own them. Take a completed job of the same type, divide the units installed by the labor-hours charged to it, and you have a rate calibrated to your crews, your supervision and the kind of work you win. Do it for three or four jobs and the spread between them tells you more than any single figure: a tight spread means you can bid on the average, a wide one means the driver is something you have not isolated yet — access, floor height, tolerance, or how much of the work was cut-up.
Match the rate to the quantity it multiplies
The commonest way this arithmetic goes wrong is the quantity, not the rate. Painting production is usually per coat, so a two-coat room is twice the quantity a per-coat rate applies to. Drywall finishing rates run against board area, not net wall area. Ceiling grid installs at a rate per square foot of ceiling but is bought as pieces. Whatever you take out of a takeoff, feed the rate the same unit it was measured in, and label the unit in the dropdown so the outputs carry it through.
The burdened rate field wants the full cost of an hour of field labour, not the wage. If you have not calculated one, the crew burden calculator builds it up from payroll taxes, insurance and benefits. For scale, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put total employer compensation cost in the construction industry at $51.23 per hour worked in March 2026, of which $35.54 was wages — an industry-wide average across all occupations, not a rate for your crew.
What this output must not be used for
Crew-days are a duration, not a schedule. The figure assumes the crew shows up complete, has the area available, and works at the rate you entered from the first day to the last. It carries no allowance for mobilisation, weather, inspections, punch, waiting on another trade, or the productivity loss that comes with sustained overtime and stacked crews. It is arithmetic on the numbers you gave it: if the rate is optimistic, the answer is optimistic to exactly the same degree. Take the rate from your own completed jobs and check the result against a real schedule before it goes into a bid.
Frequently asked questions
Multiply the number of workers by the hours each of them works. A crew of two on an eight-hour shift is 16 man-hours, also called labor-hours. For a quantity of work, divide the quantity by the units one worker completes in an hour: 1,000 square feet at 25 square feet per labor-hour is 40 labor-hours. Count only hours charged to the work, and remember the number is only as good as the production rate behind it — take that rate from your own completed jobs rather than a published average.
Two hours of one worker's time, or one hour of two workers' time. It is a measure of effort, not of elapsed time, which is why it does not tell you how long a task takes on site — two workers on a task that cannot be shared do not halve the duration. Cost is calculated on man-hours and schedule is calculated on crew-days, and confusing the two is how a job that priced correctly still runs late.
Take each quantity from the takeoff, multiply it by the labor-hours per unit for that activity, and add the results. Keep activities separate rather than blending them into one rate, because a single average hides the item that is actually driving the hours. Then sanity-check the total against a completed job of similar scope. The arithmetic is exact; the production rates are not, so the answer is an estimate and should be checked against a real schedule and your own cost history before it is committed to.
Measure it rather than look it up. Take a finished job, divide the quantity installed by the labor-hours charged against it, and you have a rate calibrated to your crews and the kind of work you do. Repeat it for several jobs: the spread between them matters as much as the average, because a wide spread means something you have not isolated is driving the hours, such as access, ceiling height, finish tolerance or how cut-up the work was. Published rate books and trade-association manuals exist but describe someone else's crew, so use them as a cross-check and not as your bid rate.
Every conversion on this page is arithmetic on the values you enter; no production rate is stored or assumed anywhere in the tool. The construction compensation figures cited for scale are from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation — March 2026, Table 4, private industry. Published unit-productivity data for the trades sits behind commercial rate books and members-only association manuals that we cannot read or reproduce, which is why none is quoted here.