A remodeler’s payroll is private homes where labor cost per house is the whole margin, a crew half W-2 and half 1099, and an EPA lead-safe cert expiring on a clock nobody’s watching. WageTime puts all three on one weekly run.
Remodeling payroll is hard for reasons the big-contractor tools miss: the jobs are many and small, the workforce is half employee and half sub, and the compliance that bites is lead paint, not Davis-Bacon.
Renovate a pre-1978 house and the EPA’s Lead-Safe rules apply: your firm must stay certified, and a trained renovator has to run the work. Both certifications expire, on three- and five-year clocks, and the day one lapses you can’t legally take the job. It lives on a wall certificate, not in your payroll.
A remodeler runs a kitchen, two baths, a deck, and an addition in the same week, with one crew moving between them daily. When the hours land in payroll as one lump, the labor cost of each job is a guess, and the next bid is priced off that guess.
On a fixed-price remodel, the price is locked and the labor is not: every hour over the estimate comes straight out of margin. On cost-plus, you bill the homeowner a markup on actual labor, so a mis-coded hour under-bills or over-bills a client who reads the invoice line by line.
Your lead carpenters and helpers are on the books; the electrician, the plumber, and the tile setter are 1099 subs paid per job. Two systems, two schedules, and every January someone rebuilds a year of sub checks from the checkbook to cut 1099s.
The crew punches in Buildertrend, busybusy, or QuickBooks Time, and every Thursday someone exports the week and re-types it into payroll. The hours arrive with no job number attached, so the labor-cost report is stale before it prints.
WageTime tracks the certifications that let you take a pre-1978 job. Under the EPA’s Renovation, Repair and Painting Rule, the firm’s Lead-Safe cert lasts five years; a Certified Renovator’s runs three or five, depending on the refresher taken.
| Worker | Expires | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Ray M.Certified Renovator (hands-on) | Apr 2027 | Current |
| Danny O.Certified Renovator (online) | Sep 2026 | 61 days |
| Luis T.Certified Renovator (hands-on) | Aug 2026 | 29 days |
| FirmLead-Safe Certified Firm | Mar 2029 | Current |
Replaces the wall certificate nobody checks, and the start-day discovery that a renovator’s card expired last month.
Every hour a crew punches gets coded to the house it was worked on, so each job’s labor cost is a number, not a guess. WageTime pulls each punch from the crew’s phones, GPS-stamped against a per-house geofence you size yourself.
| Job | Hours | Labor cost |
|---|---|---|
| Kitchen · 214 Alder St3 crew · punches in geofence | 96.0 | $2,784.00 |
| Master bath · 88 Linden Ct2 crew · punches in geofence | 41.5 | $1,203.50 |
| Rear addition · 33 Poplar Ave4 crew · punches in geofence | 132.0 | $3,960.00 |
| Deck rebuild · 5 Birch Ln1 crew · 1 outside geofence | 18.0 | $486.00 |
Replaces the Friday lump of hours, and the next bid priced off a guess about the last one.
A cost-plus remodel bills the homeowner a markup on actual labor, and WageTime gives you that number straight off the run that cut the checks. Drop it under your markup and the labor line reconciles to what you paid, line by line.
| Also on this job | Amount |
|---|---|
| Materials, subs, markupOn your invoice, not payroll | - |
Replaces the spreadsheet that guesses the labor line, and the homeowner’s question you can’t answer.
The W-2 crew and the 1099 trade subs get paid on the same run, coded to the same jobs, with both year-end forms filed by WageTime so January stops being a reconstruction project. Who counts as an employee stays your call.
| Payee | Type | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Ray M.214 Alder St | W-2 employee | $1,406.00 |
| Maria S.88 Linden Ct | W-2 employee | $1,140.00 |
| Volt Electric LLC33 Poplar Ave | 1099 sub | $2,850.00 |
| TrueLine Tile214 Alder St | 1099 sub | $1,600.00 |
| Cortez Plumbing88 Linden Ct | 1099 sub | $1,975.00 |
Replaces the second payment system in accounts payable, and the January scramble to rebuild a year of sub checks into 1099s.
$50 per month per company plus $10 per person paid that month, with unlimited runs: WageTime never turns a remodeler’s weekly cadence into a fee schedule, and the price doesn’t move when a final check goes out on Tuesday.
| Run | People paid | Net pay |
|---|---|---|
| Fri Jul 4 · Weekly | 9 | $11,240.00 |
| Fri Jul 11 · Weekly | 10 | $12,610.00 |
| Fri Jul 18 · Weekly | 10 | $12,880.00 |
| Tue Jul 22 · Off-cycle (final check) | 1 | $1,340.00 |
| Fri Jul 25 · Weekly | 9 | $11,905.00 |
Replaces the per-run line items on the payroll invoice, and the wait to pay a departing framer until the next scheduled run.
Full-service payroll is $10 a month per person paid that month, plus $50 a month per company, with unlimited runs. No long-term contracts, no per-run charges.
Off-cycle runs and bonuses cost nothing extra. No long-term contracts; cancel anytime.
Example: 50 people paid × $10 + $50 company = $550 for the month
HR & hiring, onboarding, PTO, time tracking, benefits, and workers’ comp are optional add-ons, priced separately when you’re ready.
See a demoYes. WageTime holds each Certified Renovator’s status on the employee record with expiration alerts on a recurring 30, 60, and 90-day schedule, and stores your firm’s Lead-Safe certificate and RRP project records in document storage. It tracks the dates and keeps the paperwork so a cert never lapses unnoticed; the EPA filing and the lead-safe work itself stay yours.
Every hour is coded to the house it was worked on. Crews punch on a GPS-stamped mobile clock, and hours land in payroll tagged with a cost code up to 40 characters, adjustable to the codes you bid with. Labor cost reports by project and crew, so each job is a clean number before the next estimate goes out.
Yes. Because hours are already coded by house, the actual labor cost of each job comes off the same run that cut the checks. Drop it under your markup and the labor line reconciles to what you paid. On a fixed-price job, the same number tells you whether you’re beating the bid while there’s still time to correct.
On one run. Your carpenters and helpers run as W-2 employees with tax withheld, and your electrician, plumber, and tile subs run as 1099 contractors on the same payroll, coded to the same jobs. Year-end W-2s and 1099s are included, built from the payments already made instead of rebuilt every January.
No. That call stays yours: a signed agreement or a 1099 doesn’t settle it under federal law, and WageTime doesn’t give classification advice. What it does is run whoever you tell it to on one payroll and file the year-end forms that follow, so the paperwork matches the people you actually paid.
We import clock hours so there’s no double entry. Tell us your field-time or project app on the demo and we’ll confirm the exact flow for your setup, including how hours land against your job codes. No app? Crews can punch on WageTime’s own GPS-stamped mobile clock instead.
$50 per month per company, plus $10 per person paid that month, with unlimited runs: weekly pay costs the same as biweekly, and off-cycle final checks and job-close bonuses are at no extra cost. Switching is full-service and paid; we’ll scope the effort and timing so you can pick a sane cutover week.
One week of timesheets, your open jobs and their cost codes, your sub list, and your renovator certifications. Twenty minutes with a payroll specialist on a live demo company: you’ll see the run, the per-home labor cost, the W-2 and 1099 on one check date, and the credential alerts.
Book a 20-minute demo