i would say about 7.00 per hour is reasonable for light to medium labor (dusting, vacuuming, raking leaves, mowing the lawn, etc) 10.00 to 12.00 per hour for mostly medium work (moving furniture like upholstered chairs and end tables, upright carpet cleaning machine, painting, digging weeds, cutting back heavy bushes, planting bulb plants, etc) and 16.00 to 20.00 per hour for intensive hard work (laying carpet, installing drywall, rebuilding stairs, pouring concrete, tilling a large plot of soil, shoveling out animal pens, etc)
what it really boils down to though is (a.) what can you afford (b.) what is he expecting and (.c) how much labor was done.
an example: when i movied a few months ago, i was on a very tight budget and all i could afford for my little sister’s boyfriesn and my co-worker from the hotel i work at was 50.00 each, i told them this up front and did as much of the heavy lifting as i could manage myself.
the real important thing when you hirer someone for a job is to tell them up front what the job entails and work out the pay rate ahead of time. it is bad business to work some one then tell them the pay when they finish. would you take a job if they told you “you’ll be paid in two weeks, we’ll figure out then what your salary will be”?
you need to sit down with your employee and work out what they expect vs what you can spend.