What an Hour of Crew Actually Costs: Pricing a Job From Real Numbers

Updated September 2026

Most underpriced jobs are underpriced for one reason: the owner priced the crew at their wage. This guide builds the real hourly cost of a hauling crew from government figures, shows the arithmetic, and ends with a price check. Wage figures are national medians for whole occupations; your crew may sit above or below them, but the structure of the cost is the same everywhere.

What people in this work are paid

Bureau of Labor Statistics wage estimates for May 2025, national, all industries — the median hourly wage (half earn more, half less):

Refuse and recyclable material collectors — $23.89 (mean $25.39)
Hand laborers and material movers — $19.35 (mean $20.32)
Light truck drivers — $21.57 (mean $23.45)
Heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers — $28.19 (mean $28.71)
Construction laborers — $22.66 (mean $25.02)

A junk crew is usually a light-truck driver and one or two material movers; a roll-off driver is often in the heavy-truck category. These are wage rates. The rest of this guide is about the gap between the rate and the cost.

The pieces on top of the wage

Some are fixed by law and some are yours to choose. The legal ones first:

Social Security and Medicare: 7.65% of wages (6.2% + 1.45%), matched by you. The Social Security part stops at $184,500 of wages in 2026, which no crew member will reach; there is no employer match on the extra Medicare tax. (IRS Topic 751.)
Federal unemployment (FUTA): 6.0% on the first $7,000 of each employee’s wages, less a 5.4% credit in most states — so 0.6%, or $42 a year per person. Articles that say "6%" leave out the credit. (IRS Topic 759.)
State unemployment: varies by state and by your own claims history. BLS puts the all-industry average at 14 cents an hour.
Workers’ compensation — see the next section, because for this work it is the big one.
Overtime: time and a half over 40 hours in a week, for non-exempt employees. Federal law does not require a premium for weekends or holidays as such. (DOL Wage and Hour Division.)

On overtime, a caution. There is a federal exemption for drivers, helpers, loaders and mechanics of interstate motor carriers (the Motor Carrier Act exemption, DOL Fact Sheet #19) — but it falls away for anyone whose work involves vehicles of 10,000 lb GVWR or less, and most junk and hauling crews are intrastate anyway. The safe assumption for a small local crew is that overtime applies, and some states add daily overtime on top.

Then the ones you choose: paid time off, health insurance, a retirement match. Nationally, BLS says paid leave alone averages 7.5% of compensation.

Workers’ comp: the number that breaks the rule of thumb

Across all industries, BLS puts workers’ compensation at 43 cents an hour — 0.9% of compensation. That average is dominated by people at desks. Hauling is not that.

Oregon’s Department of Consumer and Business Services surveys the manual rate in every state each year — the rate per $100 of payroll before your own claims record adjusts it. As of January 2024, the national median across all classes was $1.09 per $100. For the classes this work falls under, the mid-ranked states were roughly:

Garbage, ashes or refuse collection & drivers (NCCI 9403): about $6.40 per $100, from $2.85 in Michigan to $21.23 in Hawaii — Texas $3.92, Florida $5.01, Pennsylvania $4.99, California $7.47, Illinois $8.13, New York $11.98.
Trucking, all employees & drivers (NCCI 7219): about $5.60 per $100 — Texas $2.31, Florida $2.80, California $7.94, Illinois $8.33, New York $12.80.
Drivers, chauffeurs & helpers (NCCI 7380): about $4.50 per $100 — Texas $3.05, Florida $4.17, California $7.82, New York $10.61.

Your actual premium is the manual rate times your payroll, times an experience modifier that reflects your own claims. But at $5 per $100 on a $22 wage, workers’ comp is about $1.10 an hour — two and a half times the all-industry average, and the reason generic "cost of an employee" rules undercount a hauling crew.

The arithmetic, on one laborer

Take a material mover at $20.00 an hour in a state with a $5.00 workers’ comp rate, no health insurance, one week of paid vacation and six paid holidays, working a 45-hour week.

Base wage: $20.00.
Paid time off: 11 paid days off out of about 260 working days ≈ 4.2% → $0.85.
Overtime premium: 5 of 45 hours paid at half again = 5 × $10 = $50 a week, ÷ 45 hours ≈ $1.11 spread over every hour.
Payroll taxes: 7.65% Social Security and Medicare plus about 1% state unemployment on the $21.96 actually paid per hour worked, plus FUTA’s $42 a year spread over about 2,240 hours → $1.92.
Workers’ comp: $5.00 per $100 on the $20.85 of wage and paid time off (most states leave the overtime premium out of the payroll the rate applies to) → $1.04.
Cost per hour worked: about $24.92 — 1.25 times the wage — before a dollar of health insurance, training, uniforms, tools or the time spent hiring.

Add a $400-a-month health contribution and it is about $27.06, or 1.35 times. That is one person. A two-person crew for a four-hour job costs you roughly $199–$216 in labor before the truck moves — not the $160 the wages suggest.

Sanity check against BLS: at establishments with 1–49 workers, total compensation is $37.64 an hour on wages of $27.88 — 1.35 times. For transportation and material-moving occupations nationally it is 1.46 times; for service occupations 1.30. (ECEC, June 2026. Note BLS counts overtime premium and paid leave inside that figure, per hour actually worked — which is exactly the basis you price on.)

Corrected 26 September 2026: an earlier version counted the overtime premium at half its size and applied federal unemployment tax to every dollar of wages instead of the first $7,000, and gave $24.25. The crew-hour calculator linked below runs the same arithmetic on your own numbers.

The "1.25 to 1.4 times salary" rule

It comes from a newspaper column by an MIT Sloan lecturer, Joe Hadzima, reprinted on an MIT site: "typically in the 1.25 to 1.4 times base salary range." It cites no survey; the SBA’s blog repeats it, also without one. It happens to bracket the BLS ratios above, so it is not wrong — but it was written around salaried office hires with health insurance, and a hauling crew is the opposite mix: little or no insurance, high workers’ comp, and overtime. Build the number from the pieces instead of borrowing the rule.

The truck

AAA’s 2026 study of new-vehicle ownership puts a half-ton pickup at $1.10 a mile over five years and 75,000 miles — depreciation, fuel, maintenance, tires, registration, finance and insurance. That is a personal-use pickup with personal insurance: the floor. The American Transportation Research Institute’s figure for a commercial truck in 2025 was $2.34 a mile, mostly long-haul tractor-trailers: not your truck either, but a ceiling. A box truck on commercial insurance doing stop-and-go local work with a lot of idling sits somewhere between, and only your own receipts will tell you where.

What the big companies keep

For scale, NYU Stern’s industry dataset (US public companies, January 2026): environmental and waste services companies — the Waste Managements and Republics — run a net margin of 8.2% on a gross margin of 36%. Trucking companies net 3.8%. Those firms own landfills, run dense routes and borrow cheaply. An owner-operated hauler has none of that and has to recover the owner’s own labor and a truck’s fixed cost from far fewer jobs, so it needs a much higher gross margin per job to end up anywhere near those net figures.

The price check

Loaded labor for the job: crew hours × the real hourly cost from above, including the drive and the dump run — not just time on site.
Disposal: the actual ticket for this load, or this job’s share of a shared load.
Truck: miles × your per-mile figure, or hours × an hourly one.
Overhead: insurance, phone, software, the yard, the owner’s time — divided across the jobs you actually do in a month.
Then margin. If the price does not clear all four with something left, the job is paying you to work.

None of this needs software. It needs the hours, the ticket and the miles for each job, written down the day they happened, so that a few times a year you can look at price against cost by job type and move the prices that don’t cover themselves.

Work it out on your own numbers: What an hour of your crew actually costs

RelayPoint, in your trade’s words: Movers · Junk removal & hauling · Roll-off & dumpsters · Landscaping & tree service · Portable sanitation & septic

Sources

This is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice, and RelayPoint is not a law firm, an accountant or a compliance consultant. The figures are other organisations’ published findings, read in September 2026 at the addresses listed under Sources; they describe the businesses those organisations studied, not yours, and none of them is a result of using RelayPoint.