How to calculate a service call fee
A loaded electrical hour begins with wage plus burden. The form starts at $34 an hour and 30% burden, which is $44.20 of labor before overhead. If your apprentices ride along, this single-rate formula does not see them. Either price the lead only and put the apprentice on the repair ticket, or type a blended hourly cost in the wage field and be honest about what that number includes.
Overhead starts at $28 an hour. That placeholder is a van, test instruments, licensing overhead you choose to spread across hours, software, and a bench of devices. It is not a statement of what a license costs and it is not a billable permit. Permits and inspection fees belong on the job that requires them, not smeared silently into every service call unless you have decided, on purpose, to recover them as overhead. If you do that, know the number.
Thirty minutes of diagnosis covers a dead outlet, a tripped breaker with an obvious cause, or a smoke alarm that will not hush. It does not cover a whole-house tracing job, a panel that needs a load calc, or an EV charger site visit that is really a sales appointment. Those are longer, or they are quotes. Put the minutes you include in the fee, and send anything beyond that to repair labor. The labor calculator is the companion for the hours after the cause is known.
Drive time and miles are the unglamorous half of a service call that techs forgive until the territory gets wide. If you charge one fee across a metro and the far county, check the far county with a longer drive and more miles before you promise the same $ figure. The formula will show you the gap. You can still choose one published fee, but you should know which jobs it subsidizes.
Margin comes after break-even, as a share of price. After-hours electrical work, especially anything the customer considers unsafe, is where the 1.5× or 2× multiplier belongs. The multiplier does not make a loose neutral safer. It pays for arriving when your posted hours are over. Round to the nearest $5 for the number the dispatcher memorizes.
Service call fee vs trip charge vs diagnostic fee
An electrical trip charge that is only 'we knocked' will feel absurd to a customer and slightly absurd to the tech who spent the drive thinking about the panel schedule. An electrical diagnostic fee that ignores the drive will feel fine until you notice the windshield hours are missing from the week.
Bundle them when the product is 'a licensed person arrives, makes the situation stable, and tells you the cause.' That is a service call. Do not bundle a panel replacement quote into the same minutes and then act surprised that the form looks low. A quote visit can be priced here if you type the minutes it really takes. Many shops treat a straightforward device failure as the service call and a service upgrade as an estimate with its own rule. Write that down. The customer line on this page only knows travel and diagnosis.
Safety language matters more in this trade than clever fee names. The fee can include making a circuit safe to leave. It does not include a code redesign you have not scoped. If you need to kill a breaker and come back, the first visit was still a visit. Decide in advance whether the return trip is a new fee. This calculator prices one visit at a time.
Compare the wording with the plumbing calculator if your company does both. The math is identical. The minutes you type should not be.
Should the fee apply toward the repair?
Crediting the service call toward an electrical repair is reasonable when the repair is a device, a home-run, or a fixture you are about to sell, and less reasonable when the visit only produced a 'this panel is done' conversation and no work. The toggle does not know which visit you are on. You do. Turn it on only if the sentence matches the job in front of you, or leave it on as company policy and train to that policy.
If the fee is always credited, small device swaps need a repair price that still covers the roll. Otherwise the suggested fee on this page is fiction you give away at the door. Build the repair with your real labor, not with a leftover from the trip.
If the fee is never credited, the customer is paying to know. That is a fair product when the answer is 'replace the panel' or 'this is not an electrical problem.' Say it before you dispatch so the invoice is not the first time they hear it.
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. Electrical placeholders are a $34 wage, $28 overhead per hour, and 30 minutes on site. Drive, miles, burden, mileage rate, and margin use the generic starting points until you change them.