Commercial trade rates, by city.
Commercial trade rates are the hourly rates a facility or property team pays a contractor for commercial, facility-side work, and they run materially above the residential rates most published figures describe. This page gives a median hourly rate for 8 trades across 24 North American cities. Every figure here is currently an estimate, derived from public regional wage data multiplied by a documented service multiplier, and is labelled as such. None of it is a quote. Open any city for the full estimate breakdown, local labour-market context, and, where available, screened local contractors, or see the methodology page for how the figures are built.
Canadian figures are priced in CAD and U.S. figures in USD: the two currencies aren't directly comparable dollar-for-dollar in the table below without a conversion this page doesn't attempt. Ranked within each country instead: among the 16 U.S. cities, Chicago runs the highest median rate across all 8 trades ($97/hr), and Houston the lowest ($64/hr): strong-union, high-cost-of-living metros (Chicago, Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle) price well above open-shop, lower-cost-of-living Sun Belt metros (Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami). Among the 8 Canadian cities, Quebec City runs highest ($93/hr CAD) and Halifax lowest ($73/hr CAD): Quebec's CCQ compulsory wage-scale system sets a floor across most trades in Montreal and Quebec City, while Alberta's open-shop market in Calgary and Edmonton runs lower, tracking oil-and-gas-sector demand for skilled trades instead of union scale.
Summary
- Evalystar publishes median commercial hourly rates for 8 facility trades across 24 North American cities.
- These are commercial, facility-side rates, not residential rates, and they run materially higher than the residential figures most published sources report.
- Every rate on the site today is Estimated: public regional wage data multiplied by a documented service multiplier of 2.5x to 3.0x, computed at render time.
- US rates are shown in USD and Canadian rates in CAD; the two are not directly comparable without a conversion these pages deliberately do not attempt.
- A city page upgrades from Estimated to Measured in place, at the same URL, once enough real job data clears the k-anonymity threshold of 5 companies, 3 vendors, and 10 jobs.
Median rate by city and trade
| City | Plumbing | Electrical | HVAC and Refrigeration | General Maintenance | Janitorial and Cleaning | Landscaping and Grounds | Roofing | Carpentry |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canada (CAD) | ||||||||
| Quebec City | $116 | $112 | $113 | $69 | $58 | $61 | $105 | $106 |
| Vancouver | $83 | $95 | $116 | $79 | $68 | $66 | $83 | $87 |
| Montreal | $109 | $103 | $88 | $61 | $55 | $63 | $101 | $94 |
| Toronto | $97 | $96 | $102 | $66 | $63 | $61 | $91 | $99 |
| Calgary | $83 | $110 | $105 | $77 | $58 | $58 | $80 | $88 |
| Edmonton | $83 | $105 | $107 | $77 | $55 | $58 | $77 | $94 |
| Ottawa | $95 | $106 | $110 | $69 | $55 | $58 | $83 | $77 |
| Halifax | $96 | $85 | $85 | $69 | $52 | $55 | $74 | $69 |
| United States (USD) | ||||||||
| Chicago | $137 | $135 | $103 | $77 | $51 | $60 | $109 | $106 |
| Seattle | $126 | $135 | $106 | $80 | $61 | $64 | $85 | $101 |
| San Francisco | $103 | $123 | $104 | $84 | $58 | $64 | $98 | $118 |
| Boston | $128 | $106 | $104 | $79 | $62 | $65 | $88 | $99 |
| New York | $104 | $104 | $103 | $79 | $57 | $60 | $101 | $98 |
| Los Angeles | $94 | $98 | $98 | $75 | $51 | $59 | $84 | $100 |
| San Diego | $96 | $101 | $99 | $72 | $51 | $60 | $82 | $97 |
| Detroit | $114 | $108 | $84 | $64 | $48 | $51 | $84 | $87 |
| Washington, D.C. | $95 | $100 | $95 | $76 | $50 | $56 | $77 | $80 |
| Denver | $84 | $83 | $95 | $69 | $51 | $61 | $74 | $86 |
| Cleveland | $83 | $94 | $83 | $69 | $48 | $51 | $74 | $80 |
| Las Vegas | $79 | $94 | $80 | $69 | $52 | $50 | $66 | $82 |
| Atlanta | $77 | $78 | $78 | $66 | $48 | $51 | $65 | $67 |
| Dallas | $81 | $78 | $79 | $65 | $46 | $50 | $62 | $64 |
| Miami | $76 | $78 | $77 | $61 | $45 | $49 | $63 | $68 |
| Houston | $81 | $78 | $78 | $62 | $41 | $48 | $60 | $66 |
Cite this data
These benchmarks are published under CC BY 4.0: reuse them anywhere, including commercially, as long as you attribute Evalystar. The machine-readable version is at /api/rates/index.json, with one file per city.
Evalystar (2025). Commercial facility trade rate benchmarks. Retrieved from https://evalystar.com/rates. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.Common questions
What is a commercial trade rate?
The hourly rate a facility, property, or multi-site operator pays a contractor for commercial, facility-side work. It is not the residential rate most published figures describe, and it runs materially higher, because it carries commercial insurance, prevailing-wage exposure, compliance overhead, and after-hours access requirements that residential work does not.
Where do these numbers come from?
Public regional wage data for the trade and metro, multiplied by a documented service multiplier of 2.5x at the low end and 3.0x at the high end. US wage inputs come from BLS OEWS via O*NET OnLine; Canadian inputs come from Job Bank Canada. The multiplier covers overhead, burden, and margin between what a tradesperson earns and what a contractor bills.
Are these real quotes from real vendors?
No, and no page here claims otherwise. Every figure on the site today is labelled Estimated, meaning it is modelled from wage data rather than measured from invoices. Estimated pages deliberately carry no sample size or company count, because presenting a model as a measurement would misrepresent it.
Why are Canadian and US rates not compared directly?
Because Canadian figures are in CAD and US figures in USD, and these pages deliberately do not apply a conversion. A currency conversion would add an exchange-rate assumption on top of a wage-model assumption, and the combined figure would be less trustworthy than either input.
When will these become measured rates?
A city page upgrades from Estimated to Measured in place, at the same URL, once real jobs logged in Evalystar clear a k-anonymity threshold of 5 companies, 3 vendors, and 10 jobs for that cell. The threshold exists so no individual customer's pricing can be reverse-engineered from a published benchmark.
Can I use these figures to benchmark a vendor invoice?
As a sanity check, yes: that is the intended use. As a negotiating position on its own, no. A single quote can sit legitimately outside these ranges for scope, access, response time, or union agreement reasons that a city-level median cannot capture.