How to calculate a service call fee
Start with what one hour of a technician costs before the truck rolls. Take the hourly wage and add labor burden: payroll taxes, workers' compensation, unemployment insurance, and benefits, as a percentage of the wage. A $30 wage with 30% burden is $39 of labor. That figure is still not the cost of an hour in the field, because the truck, the tools, and the office are not in the paycheck.
Add overhead per hour. Spread the rest of the business across the hours you can actually bill: truck payment, insurance that is not already inside burden, tools, software, phones, and a share of the office. Fuel and depreciation can live here or in the mileage rate, but they should not live in both. Wage plus burden plus overhead is the loaded hourly rate. With the starting numbers on this page, that rate is $64 an hour. Those numbers are a worked example of the formula, not a claim about what shops pay.
Then count the time this fee is supposed to cover. Round-trip drive and the diagnostic minutes you include are both part of the visit, even though you are not yet billing a repair. Add the minutes, divide by 60, and multiply by the loaded rate. That is the time cost. This page splits it into labor and overhead so you can see which one is pushing the fee around.
Add the vehicle as miles times your cost per mile. The IRS standard mileage rate is a reference point only. Check the current year on IRS.gov, or use the fuel, tires, maintenance, and depreciation you actually track. The $0.70 sitting in the form is not a statement of the IRS rate. Change it.
Time cost plus vehicle cost is the break-even fee. You have covered the visit and made nothing. Profit margin is not markup. A 20% margin means profit is 20% of the price, so price equals break-even divided by 0.80. A 20% markup would have been break-even times 1.20, which is a smaller share of the price and a different quote. This calculator always uses margin.
After hours, multiply that price by 1.5 or 2. The drive did not get more expensive in diesel. The multiplier pays for the disruption. The suggested fee then rounds to the nearest $5 so you can say it out loud. The exact price stays on the card so you can see what rounding moved. Using the starting numbers, break-even is $88.67, the exact price is $110.83, and the suggested fee is $110. Swap in your own wage and the card will leave this example behind.
Service call fee vs trip charge vs diagnostic fee
Shops use these labels as if they were synonyms. Customers hear them as a single promise, then argue when the invoice does something else. The words can describe different piles of minutes.
A trip charge pays for getting a qualified person and a stocked vehicle to the door. It is mostly drive time and miles. It does not have to include opening the equipment or testing anything. If your trip charge includes a look at the unit, your form should say so in the on-site minutes, not in the nickname.
A diagnostic fee pays for the thinking: testing, measuring, and telling the customer what failed and what the repair will take. It assumes the expensive part is the diagnosis. On a first visit that is rarely the whole story, because someone still had to drive.
A service call fee, the way this calculator builds it, bundles both. Travel and a defined block of diagnosis sit in one number. That is the honest price of a first visit when you do not yet know the repair. If your company uses a narrower promise, lower the on-site minutes instead of hunting for a published average. There is no national definition that will save you from writing a sentence. The customer-facing line under the result is that sentence. It says the fee covers travel and diagnosis, and it can say the fee is credited toward the repair if that is your policy.
Should the fee apply toward the repair?
The toggle does not change the math. It changes the sentence you can hand to a customer. Crediting the fee toward the repair is a sales choice.
Crediting the fee makes the visit feel less like a toll. The customer who hires you is not paying twice for the same hour, which matters when the repair is small and the trip was most of the cost. The risk is quiet. Every job that closes just gave away the travel you priced on purpose. If you waive the fee, the repair labor has to carry the trip. Price that repair with the trip inside it, or keep part of the fee as the cost of showing up. The labor calculator is the other half of that decision. This page will not invent a labor rate for the repair.
Leaving the fee in place is cleaner accounting. The trip paid for the trip. The repair pays for the repair. Some customers will mention a competitor who waives the service call. You can still say, in one line, what the fee bought them. A clear sentence beats a discount you did not plan and cannot see in the books.
Either policy can be honest. An unclear one is how a $110 visit turns into an argument in the driveway. Pick the toggle that matches the words your tech is allowed to say, then keep those words. Defaults are illustrative starting points. Enter your own costs. Nothing on this page is a market average, a survey, or a recommended price for your city.