Computing your hourly rate: a Québec contractor’s cost price (2026)

Why an employee paid $45 costs you $68, how the official scales reach $117 billed, and the difference between margin and markup.

"My journeyperson is paid $45 an hour, I bill them at $75, so I make $30 of profit." It is the most expensive sentence in the trade. In Québec construction, an employee paid $45 costs more than $68 an hour to their employer before anyone mentions a truck, tools, an office or profit — and the industry's official scales bill that same journeyperson at $117.

This guide rebuilds that rate layer by layer, from two public 2026 scales, then settles the confusion that silently drains margins: markup is not margin.

First layer: the wage is not the cost

Every year, the ACRGTQ publishes the real hourly cost of labour in the civil engineering and roads sector. Here is its breakdown for a journeyperson carpenter-joiner, regular rate, as of April 26, 2026:

The ratio jumps out: $72.56 for a posted rate of $48.80, nearly 49% more. And that sum still excludes the CNESST, billed separately according to your classification unit — the average rate across all industries is $1.54 per $100 of payroll in 2026, and construction units sit above it.

The next layers: from cost to billed rate

The CMMTQ publishes reference hourly rates for plumbing and heating. Their interest is not the final amount — every business has its own costs — but the method, which is the one every contractor should follow. Here is a journeyperson pipefitter, light residential, straight time, as of January 1, 2026:

Between the wage paid and the rate billed, the factor is 2.6. A contractor who bills that journeyperson at $75 an hour is not making a small margin: they lose $30 on every hour worked, and they will find out on their income statement, six months too late.

Apprentices don't save the day

An apprentice costs less, but in a known and regulated proportion: the CMMTQ's apprentice pipefitter rates stand at 50% of the journeyperson rate in the first year, 60% in the second, 70% in the third and 85% in the fourth. The charges still apply, and the journeyperson-apprentice ratios imposed by regulation limit the composition of your crew anyway.

The trap that distorts everything: non-billable hours

Operating expenses are not spread over 2,080 hours a year. The CMMTQ computes on 1,856 hours per employee — 40 hours a week, vacation and statutory holidays deducted — i.e. 5,568 hours for a three-employee company. And 1,856 hours is still an optimistic assumption: it removes neither travel, nor lost bids, nor rain days, nor the time you spend doing estimates.

Margin and markup: the confusion worth 6% of your revenue

Two words, two formulas, a gap that is paid every day:

• Markup — what you add to the cost. Price = cost × (1 + markup).
• Margin — what stays in the selling price. Margin = (price − cost) ÷ price.

Applying a 20% markup while believing you make a 20% margin is achieving 16.7%. Here is the translation, both ways:

The CMMTQ scale illustrates exactly this point. On a before-profit rate of $105.71, it adds $11.75 — 11.1% of the cost — and not $10.57. Why? Because the objective is a margin of 10%: $11.75 divided by the final price of $117.46 does give 10.0%. The formula to remember fits on one line:

Building your rate in five steps

• 1. The loaded labour cost. Start from the collective-agreement rate, add vacation (13%), the CCQ plans, the government charges and the CNESST of your classification unit. Don't guess that percentage: your CCQ statements and your classification decision give it to you to the cent.
• 2. The equipment allocated to the hour worked. Truck, trailer, tools, fuel, maintenance, depreciation. The CMMTQ retains $16.47 an hour for a plumber with a service truck — yours may be lower, rarely zero.
• 3. Overhead, divided by the hours actually billed. It is the step everyone skips. A quarter of the direct cost is a usual order of magnitude in the industry.
• 4. The margin — not the markup. Choose the percentage you want to keep, then divide by (1 − that percentage).
• 5. Revalidate twice a year. Collective-agreement rates change every end of April, government charges and the CNESST on January 1. An hourly rate frozen for eighteen months is a rate that has become wrong.

Three mistakes that cost the most

• Billing the collective-agreement rate. It is your employee's wage, not your price. The gap, as we saw, is a factor of more than two.
• Applying the same margin to everything. Resold materials, subcontracting and your own labour do not carry the same risk or the same costs. A single margin overcharges what is simple and undercharges what is risky — and you lose the easy bids while winning the hard ones.
• Absorbing increases in silence. When the cost rises during a job, a contract without an adjustment clause turns your margin into the adjustment variable. The topic is covered in Material prices and customs tariffs in 2026.

What BatiCore does for you

BatiCore keeps cost and price separate on every estimate line: your price book stores a cost price, and the margin is applied when the line is inserted — per category or per item, with different rates for materials, labour, equipment and subcontracting. The selling price shown is computed, never typed by hand, and the margin remains internal data that appears on no document handed to the client. During the job, the Budget tab compares your real cost — timesheets × rates, purchase orders, equipment hours, subcontracting — to the planned cost, and not to the selling price: the overrun alert triggers while the margin still exists, not once it has been eaten. To build the estimate itself, see Construction estimate template for Québec.

The BatiCore team

We build BatiCore, management software for Québec construction contractors — estimates, job sites, CCQ payroll, compliance. Our articles cite dated public sources; when a fact comes from a regulator or a competitor, we say which one and when. Spotted an error? Write to us, we fix it.