Your equipment is eating the margin
The machine is paid for, so the jobs use it at no charge. Then the transmission goes and the year is gone.
Ownership, maintenance, fuel, and transport cost money whether or not anybody charges them to a job. When equipment isn't charged out, the jobs that used it look profitable and the jobs that didn't look worse than they are. You then bid the next one off numbers that were never right, so every decision downstream of that carries the same error.
Three moves, in order
Step 02: Equipment cost basis
A true internal rate per machine covering ownership, maintenance, fuel, and transport, charged to the projects that used it.
Other things that go wrong
What owners ask
How to charge equipment to construction jobs?
The machine is paid for, so the jobs use it at no charge. Then the transmission goes and the year is gone. Ownership, maintenance, fuel, and transport cost money whether or not anybody charges them to a job. When equipment isn't charged out, the jobs that used it look profitable and the jobs that didn't look worse than they are. You then bid the next one off numbers that were never right, so every decision downstream of that carries the same error.
Which part of the system fixes this?
The step is number 02, equipment cost basis. A true internal rate per machine covering ownership, maintenance, fuel, and transport, charged to the projects that used it. It's drawn from chapter 2 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.
Is this normal for my trade?
Across the 48 trades in the benchmark reference, net profit at $1M–$5M averages 7% before taxes. If you're well under that and this page describes your month, the two are usually the same story. The published average tells you where the pack sits, and your own job costing tells you where you sit, which is the number that pays payroll.
Where do I start?
Build one internal hourly rate per machine covering ownership, maintenance, fuel, and transport.
Can I fix this without touching anything else?
You can try, and it doesn't hold. Step 02 depends on step 01, job cost structure. Install it ahead of that and it produces numbers nobody trusts, which is worse than the problem you started with.
Josh Luebker ran commercial construction projects before he ran the numbers behind them, on data centres, military bases, hospitals, and high-rises. He wrote CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System, which is an eight-step framework for commercial subcontractors, and it publishes on October 1, 2026. He is a master electrician who moved into the office and kept the field vocabulary.
Sulphur Prairie Operations LLC maintains the benchmark reference behind these figures. Every edition is reconciled against the newest CFMA survey release before it publishes here. Where a figure changes between editions, the older edition keeps its year in the title so a citation to it stays correct.