What are you actually making per hour?
You know what your salary is. You have probably never known what your hour is worth, because nobody has ever made you divide one by the other.
Most superintendents in this valley are salaried. That means the fiftieth hour is free to the company. So is the fifty fifth. So is the Saturday in March when the inspector came back and somebody had to be there. A man can work that way for fifteen years and never once see the number.
I got into this trade in 1992 and I worked those jobs. So this does the division for you, on your numbers, and it tells you to stay where you are when that is the answer.
Six questions. Nothing you have to look up.
Nothing is sent anywhere. This runs in your browser and we never see your numbers.
What the numbers say
That is the wage only. Want the honest version?
Wages are the easy part of a comparison and the smallest part of the difference. Five more questions and this will price the truck, the health coverage and the time off on both sides, including the places where your current job wins.
Everything is on that page. The pay, the two or three projects, how much of it is hands on, what we do not offer yet, and all five steps of what happens after you apply.
Five more, and this gets uncomfortable for one of us.
Two of these usually go against us. That is the point.
Hochuli Design & Remodeling Team, Scottsdale. We publish what we pay because you should not have to sit through two interviews to find out.
What does a construction superintendent make in Phoenix?
The median construction superintendent in the Phoenix metro earns about $79,000 a year, across roughly 16,600 people doing the job. What that figure never tells you is how many hours it took. A $79,000 salary spread across a fifty hour week is $30.38 an hour. At Hochuli Design & Remodeling Team the same position pays $40 to $45 an hour with forty hours guaranteed in writing and overtime at time and a half, which puts a normal year between $95,000 and $105,000.
Wage figures for first line supervisors of construction trades come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program. Arizona percentiles for the same occupation run from $58,080 at the tenth to $103,440 at the ninetieth. Reviewed August 2026.
Here is exactly how it got those numbers.
A calculator you cannot check is just a sales pitch with arithmetic in it. So here is every assumption, and you are welcome to run it on a napkin and see whether we are telling you the truth.
Your real hourly rate
Salaried: your annual salary, divided by the hours you actually work in a year. Your hours per week times 52.
Hourly: forty hours at your rate, plus everything past forty at whatever you told us you actually get for it. If you said you are not paid past forty, those hours count as hours worked and add nothing to the pay, because that is what unpaid means.
This is the only number that matters and almost nobody calculates it. A $95,000 salary is a great number until you divide it by 2,600 hours and find out you are at $36.54.
What this position pays
Forty hours at the rate, plus every hour past forty at time and a half, times 52.
The rate used for the main figure is $42.50, the middle of our published $40 to $45 range. The week is shown at 42 and at 45 hours, which is where a normal week here lands.
| Rate and week | Annual |
|---|---|
| $42.50 at 42 hours | About $95,000 |
| $42.50 at 45 hours | About $105,000 |
| $45.00 at 45 hours | About $111,000 |
| $40.00 at 42 hours | About $89,000 |
Where you would start in that range depends on how much you can already run without somebody checking behind you. We will tell you roughly where we think you fall, and why, on the first phone call rather than after three interviews.
Hours of your life back
Your weekly hours minus 45, times 52. Then divided by 40 to turn it into weeks.
We compare against 45 rather than 42 on purpose. Forty five is the busy end of a normal week here, so this is the conservative version of the number. Comparing against 42 would make it look better than it is.
The truck, and why it is bigger than people think
This is a take home truck with the fuel on us. Our superintendents burn about a full tank a week in a 2018 Silverado double cab, which works out to roughly 350 to 400 miles a week, or something near 18,000 miles a year including the drive in.
Counted conservatively, at about 40 cents a mile for fuel, tires and wear, that is roughly $7,500 a year. That is the number this calculator uses.
The IRS values a business mile at 76 cents as of the second half of 2026, because that rate also carries the payment, the insurance and the depreciation. On that basis the same miles are worth about $14,000.
We used the smaller number on purpose. If you would own a work truck regardless, $7,500 is the honest figure for you. If this would replace a truck payment, the real answer is closer to twice that, and you should adjust it in your own head rather than have us do it for you.
Time off
Thirteen paid days in year one. Eight paid holidays plus five days of PTO, and the PTO goes up every year after that. We show it against yours as a count rather than as dollars, because paid time off is mostly a wash between two employers who both pay it, and turning it into a dollar figure would be arithmetic theater.
If you get more days than that where you are, the calculator says so plainly. Five days in year one is on the thin side and we are not going to dress it up.
What is not in the math
| Left out | Why |
|---|---|
| Taxes | They depend on your filing status and they hit both sides roughly the same, so including them would add noise and change nothing. |
| Your bonus | Because we cannot verify it and neither can you until it pays. Add it yourself if it is reliable. |
| The $50 review bonus | Every five star review pays $50 to every person in the company. It is real, it adds up, and we left it out rather than pad our own side. |
| Your job satisfaction | We ask for it and we refuse to price it. A number that claims to convert how you feel about your work into dollars would be the least honest thing on this page. It changes what the verdict says, not what the math says. |
Where we put a thumb on the scale, and which way
We valued our own truck at $7,500 instead of the $14,000 the IRS would allow. We left the review bonus out entirely. We compared hours against a 45 hour week rather than a 42, which is the version that flatters us least. Every one of those choices costs us on the scoreboard.
Meanwhile we ask what your employer pays toward your health coverage, and we add all of it to your side, because we pay nothing toward yours. That question alone will tell some people to stay where they are.
A comparison you tilted in your own favor is worth nothing to the person reading it. That is the whole reason this page shows its work.
What people ask about superintendent pay
Answered whether you ever apply here or not.
About $79,000 a year at the median, across roughly 16,600 people doing the job in this metro. Arizona percentiles for the occupation run from $58,080 at the tenth to $103,440 at the ninetieth. Those are federal wage figures and they are the best public number available, but none of them record how many hours were worked to earn it, which is the part that decides whether the pay was any good.
It depends entirely on the week attached to it. Forty dollars an hour at forty two hours with overtime paid is about $89,000. The same forty dollars with no overtime and a fifty hour week is $83,000 for eight more weeks of your life. Compare hourly rates against hours actually worked, never salary against salary, and the picture changes for most people.
Ask one question: does the hourly job guarantee a minimum number of hours in writing? Without that guarantee, hourly hands you the risk of a slow week and the company keeps the upside. With it, you carry none of the downside and all of the upside, because a long week costs the company more and pays you more. That is the difference between hourly as a demotion and hourly as a raise.
Take everything you earn in a year and divide it by every hour you actually work. Hours per week times 52. If you are salaried at $95,000 and you work fifty hours, that is 2,600 hours and $36.54 an hour. Almost nobody in this trade has ever done that division, which is exactly why salaries are the standard here and hourly is not.
It means the offer letter says you are paid for forty hours whether the work is there that week or not, so a slow February is the company's problem instead of yours. It is the thing that makes an hourly position safe to take. If a company will not put the guarantee in writing, it is not a guarantee, it is a hope, and you should price it accordingly.
No. Every number runs in your browser and nothing is transmitted, stored or seen by us. There is no email field and no sign up. If you run it, decide you are better off where you are, and close the tab, we will never know you were here. That was the point of building it this way.
Because the alternative is spending two months in conversations that were never going to work. We publish what a kitchen remodel costs on this website in dollars, for the same reason. If the numbers say you should stay where you are, you have lost four minutes instead of eight weeks, and we have not wasted a superintendent's time to find out something he could have learned on his phone.
Four things a calculator will never be able to tell you.
If the numbers came out in our favor, that is worth something and it is not worth everything. Nobody leaves a job over $8,000 and nobody stays at a good one over $8,000 either. Here is what the arithmetic cannot reach.
Whether you would carry more or less in your head
Two or three projects here, not six. That is possible because roughly 90 percent of the work on any job is performed by trade partners. But two or three is still two or three, and if somebody told you this was one job at a time they were being nice to you.
Whether anybody above you would notice
You report to Devan, our general manager, who came up running these projects himself. Scott walks your jobs. There is no layer between you and somebody who can make a decision on a Tuesday afternoon.
Whether the schedule is fiction
Design and scope are settled before a trade partner ever bids, which is the reason a schedule here can be real. That is not a promise nothing goes wrong. It is a promise that when something does, it gets priced and approved instead of absorbed.
Whether you would be the only one who cared
This is the one that actually moves people, and no calculator can measure it. Everyone here is held to the same five values our clients are promised. You would not be carrying the standard alone.
And the one that runs the other direction
We do not have company health insurance. If your current employer does, then this calculator was too kind to us and you should mentally add that back to their side.
Lorrie and I pay for our own family coverage out of pocket, same as everybody else here. I am working on it. I am not going to promise a date I cannot hold, and I am not going to let you discover it on your start date. The hourly rate, the guaranteed forty and the paid overtime are all set with that gap in mind.
If health coverage is the thing your family needs most right now, I understand completely, and you should weigh that carefully before you apply.
If the numbers said stay, then stay. That is a good outcome and I would rather you get it from a calculator than from eight weeks of interviews.
If they said something else, the position page has the rest of it. What the job actually is. What we need you to already have. Six reasons you should probably not apply. Every step of what happens after you do, including the part where the paid half day on a job site comes after the offer rather than before it.
Questions before any of that, call the office at 602.451.0323 and ask for Devan, our general manager. You do not have to apply to ask a question.