What is admin
actually costing you?
UK small business owners lose around 11 hours a week to admin and finance tasks - six working days a month. Put your numbers in below and see what that’s worth to your trade business.
These figures are opportunity cost - the value of billable work you could be doing in place of admin. Default values reflect the Amex SME Barometer (American Express and Small Business Saturday UK, July 2026, 1,000 UK small business owners).
Where the numbers come from.
The 11 hours/week figure comes from the Amex SME Barometer, published in July 2026 by American Express and Small Business Saturday UK from a survey of 1,000 owners of UK micro, small and medium-sized businesses. It counts admin and finance tasks together, so if your accountant already has the bookkeeping, put in your own number. We default the calculator to 48 working weeks/year - allowing for 4 weeks of holiday and bank holidays - but you can adjust if that doesn’t match your reality.
Hourly-rate suggestions: a self-employed electrician typically charges £40–50/hr, a plumber £45–60/hr, a joiner £45–55/hr, a builder £55–65/hr for labour. A small firm with overheads often needs to clear £65+/hr to be profitable. Use the figure you’d actually invoice a customer for an hour of work.
The output is unbillable opportunity cost - the value of the billable hours you didn’t do because you were on the laptop instead.
Now you know.
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