What we charge, why we charge it, and what you get for it.

Hourly labor

Role	Day rate (Mon–Fri 06:30–17:00)	After hours	Sunday / holiday
Master electrician	$132 / hr	$198 / hr	$264 / hr
Journeyman	$108 / hr	$162 / hr	$216 / hr
Apprentice (3+ yr)	$74 / hr	$111 / hr	$148 / hr
Apprentice (under 3 yr)	$58 / hr	$87 / hr	$116 / hr

Hours are tracked in 15-minute increments after the first hour. Crew composition is whichever crew the job needs — a J-04 heritage rewire is usually one master plus a journeyman; a J-05 microhydro is a journeyman plus an apprentice plus an off-day master.

Service-call minimums

Standard service call

1 hr minimum at the relevant hourly rate. The clock starts when we arrive, not when we leave the shop.

Emergency call (existing customer)

2 hr minimum at after-hours rate, plus the truck-roll fee below.

Truck-roll fee

$48 per service van per day. Covers fuel, wear, and inventory restocking. Waived for jobs > 8 hr on site.

Long-distance mileage

Beyond the 40-mile radius, $0.86 / mile from the shop, billed both ways. Inside the radius is included.

Materials

Materials are billed at supplier cost plus a 12% handling fee. We buy from CED Newport, Graybar (St. Johnsbury), and Platt. The 12% covers the time someone spent picking the order up, the inventory we hold for next time, and the warranty support if something fails. Receipts are itemized on the invoice; you can ask to see the supplier ticket on any line.

Specialty items — Outback inverters, Victron MPPT controllers, microhydro turbines — get a one-time 4% sourcing fee added on top of the 12%, because procurement on those takes more than a phone call.

Quotes

Anything over $1,200 estimated gets a written quote before we start. Anything that exceeds the quote by more than 8% gets a written change order before we exceed it. The two times in twelve years we have not done that are mistakes we still hear about at the shop's December meeting.

How a worker co-op sets prices

The annual rate review happens in late November. We add up the year's labor hours, the year's materials throughput, the year's truck miles, the year's inventory carrying cost, and the year's outside-counsel and accountant fees. We divide by the labor hours we sold. We compare it to the prior year. If it went up, the rates go up.

What we do not do is bake an "owner's pull" into the rate. There is no owner. The five worker-owners are paid the journeyman or master rate as wages, and any year-end surplus is distributed as patronage on hours worked, taxed as ordinary income, and reported on the co-op's Form 1099-PATR. Where we differ from a single-proprietor shop is that we don't have a shareholder taking a separate cut on top of wages — that whole line of the rate sheet is just gone.

Discounts and adjustments

• Working farms (defined as USDA-classified Class I–IV operating farms in our four counties): 8% off labor for jobs >= 8 hours on site. The discount comes off the bottom line.
• Repeat customers (3+ jobs over 5 years): truck-roll fee waived for follow-up calls inside the day-call radius.
• Apprentice-time discount: hours billed against an apprentice are also a teaching cost on our side. We pass through 18% of those hours to the customer at no charge — labeled on the invoice as "apprentice teaching hours, not billed."
• Old shops we replaced: if you were a customer of a shop that closed and asked us to take over the existing infrastructure, the first service call is at apprentice rate regardless of who shows up, because the legwork that day is mostly figuring out what the old electrician did.

What the rate does not include

• Permitting fees are passed through at cost. Vermont electrical permits go through the VT Division of Fire Safety.
• Utility coordination with Green Mountain Power, Washington Electric Co-op, or Vermont Electric Co-op for service drops is billed at the standard hourly rate.
• Engineering stamps on systems > 100A or microhydro > 5kW are subcontracted to a Vermont-licensed PE and passed through at cost.

Payment

Net-15 from invoice for jobs under $5,000. Net-30 for jobs $5,000–$25,000. For jobs over $25,000 we ask for 30% on contract signing and 40% at the equipment-staged milestone, with the balance net-15 from completion. Check, ACH, or card (3% card fee added). We do not finance.

If you can't pay on time, call us before the due date. We have not sent a customer to collections in the co-op's history; we have, twice, restructured a long payment plan when the dairy market did what it did in 2018 and again in 2024.