WageTime is payroll for snow and ice management contractors, whose pay is triggered by storms nobody can schedule: per-push and per-inch rates, standby hours, and blizzard-week overtime are how the money actually moves.
The U.S. snow and ice industry spends an estimated $6.4 billion a year on labor across roughly 88,200 businesses, most of them small (SIMA Foundation, 2022 Industry Impact Study). Almost all of that pay arrives with the weather, not the calendar, and payroll built for a Monday-to-Friday office has no pay code for a storm.
A zero-tolerance account wants bare pavement before the lot fills, so crews go on standby the night a storm is forecast: phones on, trucks staged, some of them waiting at the yard for dispatch. Whether that waiting is on the clock is a real question under federal rules, and “we’ll sort the stand-by hours out later” is exactly how a wage dispute starts.
Paying drivers per push or per inch is how the storm gets priced, but the compliance math does not care how you count: per-unit earnings still have to clear minimum wage for every hour worked, and hours past 40 in a storm week still earn overtime on the blended rate. The push count that bills the client is not the paycheck.
A back-to-back event can put a driver at seventy hours in a single week, nearly all of it overnight and across a weekend or a holiday. When that week mixes per-push and hourly pay, overtime rides the weighted-average regular rate, and the night and holiday differentials stack on top. That is not a paycheck to reconstruct by hand at 4 a.m.
Seasonal contracts bill one fixed price for the whole season, so a light year is margin and a record year is labor you already promised to eat. Without labor cost pinned to each storm and each site, the account that went underwater in January stays invisible until the snow melts, and the salt bills on its own line the whole time.
Snow scales for storms on owner-operators with their own trucks, paid on 1099s, surged for an event and idle between them, working beside the W-2 sidewalk crew and loader operators. One storm run has to pay both and produce both year-end stacks, and whether a “sub” is really a contractor is a question the Labor Department answers by control, not by the 1099.
Pushes, events, and inches each carry their own WageTime per-unit pay code, hourly work runs beside them, and each account keeps its own rate table. When a storm week mixes methods, overtime rides the weighted-average regular rate, with minimum-wage processing on every hour.
Replaces the per-push spreadsheet that never heard of the regular rate, and the storm week it finally meets an investigator.
Standby, on-call, and callback run as their own pay codes, so once you decide those hours are on the clock they run as pay, not as an argument after the storm. Whether standby counts as hours worked stays your call with counsel.
Replaces the 4 a.m. paycheck reconstruction after the crew has finally gone home to sleep.
Every hour and wage dollar tags to a WageTime job-cost code, so labor reads by storm event, by site, and by crew, and the seasonal account that absorbed three surprise events shows up against its flat fee in January, not at renewal.
| Account | Labor cost | vs Fee |
|---|---|---|
| Northgate Mallseasonal · 3 events | $8,940.00 | 74% of $12,000 |
| Riverside Officesper-push · 3 events | $3,210.00 | billed per push |
| City lotsseasonal · 3 events | $6,180.00 | 52% of $11,900 |
| Maple HOAper-event · 3 events | $2,415.00 | billed per event |
Replaces finding out at spring melt that the flat-rate account lost money in the first storm of the year.
W-2 crew and 1099 owner-operator plows settle in the same storm run: sidewalk crew and loader operators on payroll, subcontractor trucks on 1099s. On the demo we’ll confirm the import flow from your ops system into WageTime, including how storm and site codes carry through.
| Worker | Type | Pay |
|---|---|---|
| Dave K.Per push + hourly | W-2 | $1,044.40 |
| Maria S.Hourly + overnight diff | W-2 | $612.00 |
| North Star PlowingPer push, 7 lots | 1099 sub | $980.00 |
| R&L TruckingPer event, 2 sites | 1099 sub | $1,150.00 |
Replaces the parallel spreadsheet for the sub checks, and the January scramble to build their 1099s from memory.
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 demoAll three run as pay codes, often on the same paycheck. WageTime handles per-push, per-event, and per-inch pay as per-unit codes next to hourly, and when a storm week mixes them it computes overtime on the weighted-average regular rate and checks every hour against minimum wage. You set the rates by account; the reconciliation happens in the run.
That depends on the facts, and it is your call with counsel: federal rules turn on whether workers are engaged to wait or free to leave, and on where they wait. What WageTime supplies is the mechanism. Standby, on-call, and callback are pay codes, so once you decide those hours are on the clock, they pay correctly and ride the same overtime.
Hours over 40 earn overtime, and in a week that mixes per-push and hourly pay the overtime is figured on the weighted-average regular rate, not the base wage alone. WageTime blends the rate, stacks any night, weekend, or holiday differentials into it, and closes the whole storm week in one run.
$50 for the company plus $10 for each person you actually paid that month. A quiet January where you paid four people is $90; the crew you never called out costs nothing. There are no per-run fees, so a busy back-to-back-storm week does not inflate the bill either.
Yes. Owner-operator subs paid on 1099s and your W-2 sidewalk and loader crews settle in the same storm run, with year-end 1099s and W-2s both included. Whether a plow sub is truly a contractor is the Labor Department’s economic-reality test, not the form, so that call stays with your accountant; WageTime removes the second-system excuse.
WageTime tags wages by class of work on every run and archives the records the audit relies on, so plow hours and landscape hours are separated in the numbers instead of reconstructed in spring. Premiums ride on classified payroll, so a clean class-of-work trail is what keeps the audit from turning into an estimate.
One event’s push counts, the hours from your field app or time clock, and your list of drivers and subs. Twenty minutes with a payroll specialist on a live demo company: you will see the per-push math, a blizzard week’s blended overtime, labor costed by storm, and the crew and subs paid in one run.
Book a 20-minute demo