The mode that prices the way a builder actually staffs a job: how many people, at what wage, with what burden on top, working how many hours a day, covering how many square feet per crew-day. Tall walls stretch the days by 15%; house wrap, soffits and wainscot each add a fraction of a day; insulation and lean-tos get their own hour lines.
Also called: man hours · burdened wage · crew size and rate · labour by the hour
- 1Set crew size, hourly wage, burden %, hours per day and square feet per crew-day (defaults 4 / $28 / 35% / 8 / 550).
- 2burdenedWage() loads the wage with the burden so the number priced is what the crew actually costs.
- 3Days = sqft ÷ productivity, adjusted for tall walls and option toggles, then converted to crew-hours.
- 4Each line prints its own arithmetic — '3,300 sf · 264 hrs × $37.80/hr'.
A flat dollar-per-square-foot shop bid prices a job but never answers what it actually costs to build it, so margin was a guess wrapped in a habit. Crew-hours makes the assumptions explicit and editable: crew size, hours, burdened wage, and your own productivity rate in square feet per crew-day. A builder with a faster crew or a higher wage changes two fields instead of nudging a per-foot number that hides both.
- A single $/sf labour rate hiding crew size, wage and productivity
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