Most operators bid against a labor rate that is missing a third of its real cost, because burden is spread across accounts that never get added back up. The loaded rate is the single number that decides whether a job priced to win was ever profitable.
What labor actually costs the business: median hourly wage, and the loaded rate once burden, taxes, insurance, and non-billable time are carried back onto the billable hour.
What Gets Measured
Median Hourly Wage
Loaded Labor Rate
Each one is read against operators filtered to your size, service mix, and region, so the comparison is to businesses like yours rather than the industry averaged into mush.
Where You Land
Where It Comes From
Payroll, tax and insurance records, and the time actually charged to jobs. Verinode reads what those systems already produce. There is no form to fill in and nothing to migrate, and every connection is read-only: Verinode never writes back into a system you own.
When It Appears
A peer line on this dimension does not appear until enough distinct operators have contributed to it. That is deliberate: a benchmark built on a handful of businesses is not a benchmark, and a thin cohort cannot protect anyone’s anonymity. You will see fewer numbers early, and the ones you see are honest. Because these are competitively sensitive figures, they also publish only after a 90-day historical lag, never live.
What Verinode Will Not Do
Verinode shows you where your labor cost sits against operators like you. It never recommends, defaults to, or scripts a wage, and neither does IQ. Wage and cost figures publish only after a 90-day historical lag, never live, so the benchmark can inform your decision without ever acting as a signal to move together.
Common Questions
2 metrics: Median Hourly Wage, Loaded Labor Rate. Each is compared against operators filtered to your size, service mix, and region rather than the industry as a whole, so the peer line reflects businesses actually like yours.
Payroll, tax and insurance records, and the time actually charged to jobs. Verinode reads what those systems already produce, so there is nothing to migrate and no form to retype your business into. Every connection is read-only, including accounting: Verinode never writes back into a system you own, and every document processed returns a receipt showing exactly what was read.
Enough that it is honest, or it is not shown at all. No statistic publishes until a minimum number of distinct operators have contributed to it, one operator counts once regardless of size, and medians and interquartile ranges are used rather than averages so no single business can move a line. Early on that means you will see fewer benchmarks, which is the intended trade: a peer figure built on a handful of businesses is not a benchmark and cannot protect anyone's anonymity. The full statistical treatment is published at verinode.ai/methodology.
They are deliberately not live. These are competitively sensitive figures, so they publish only after a 90-day historical lag, which is one of the safeguards that keeps an independent benchmark on the right side of competition law. Verinode is a neutral administrator: operators contribute to Verinode rather than to each other, no operator ever sees another's raw data, only anonymized aggregates are published, and Verinode never recommends or scripts a price or a wage. The full reasoning is at verinode.ai/fair-benchmarking.
Why Operators Join
Your own figures you can already pull. What you cannot pull is where they sit against operators your size running the same work, and that is the part that tells you whether to act.