How to calculate a service call fee
Load the hour from the wage you pay and the burden you actually carry. This form starts at $26 and 30% burden. Overhead starts at $24 an hour for a truck that may carry springs, cables, rollers, and an opener or two. Those are illustrations so the page is not identical to the appliance or HVAC calculators. If your spring inventory is large, it still should not be dumped into the service call as a vague cushion. Inventory is a part until you use it. Overhead is the truck, the tools, the insurance, the software, and the office, divided by billable hours.
Drive plus on-site time is the visit. Thirty minutes will reset a sensor, set force and travel, or spot a broken spring. It will not cover a full door rebuild, a custom wind of springs you are not stocked for, or a wooden door you have to persuade back onto the track. If your service call promises 'we will make it safe and name the repair,' put enough minutes in the form to do that. A broken spring is a safety issue. The fee is not a lesson in doing the repair from a blog, and this page will not walk through a spring replacement. It will price the time a trained person spends.
Miles times your cost per mile finishes the break-even. Door companies sometimes run a wide radius because the skill is specialized. A wide radius with a downtown fee is a discount you give the far subdivision. Type the real round trip before you publish one number on the website. Use IRS.gov to check the standard mileage rate if you want a benchmark, then prefer your own fuel and depreciation when you have them. Do not treat the form's $0.70 as that benchmark.
Margin is a share of the price. A 20% margin divides break-even by 0.80. Markup language ('we add 20%') will not match this card. After hours, a door that will not close is a security call, and 1.5× or 2× is how you say that the tech is coming from off the clock. Quote the multiplier when you book the call. Then round to the nearest $5 so the night dispatcher and the invoice use one figure.
Service call fee vs trip charge vs diagnostic fee
Garage door companies often collapse all three ideas into 'a service call to come look at the door.' That can be fair if the look includes a real diagnosis and a price to fix it. It is unfair if the trip charge is a hook that resets to zero only when the customer buys the expensive repair you already planned to sell.
A trip charge with no diagnostic minutes says you were paid to arrive. A diagnostic fee with no drive says the door was somehow already in your shop. The bundled service call is the honest default for a residential door. Sensors, limits, and a visual check of springs and cables can live inside the on-site minutes. Selling an opener, rebuilding a door, or replacing springs is the repair, priced with labor and parts after you know the door.
If you offer a 'free safety inspection' with every tune-up, this calculator is the cost of that hour when the tune-up is declined. Know the number even if you choose not to charge it. Hoping the inspection is free because the spring sale will land is not a fee. It is a bet.
Keep the words stable. The customer line says the fee covers travel and diagnosis. If your company also adjusts the door as part of that fee, add those minutes, and make the spoken script match. The line will not grow a second sentence on its own. Read it, and if it is incomplete, fix the policy or accept that the line is the policy.
Should the fee apply toward the repair?
Crediting the service call toward a spring or opener replacement is common, and it is easy to promise because those tickets are large. The same promise on a sensor realignment gives away the only dollars on the job. The toggle does not discount the card. It states the promise. Use it if you mean it for this visit or as a standing rule.
If the rule is 'credited when they repair,' small adjustments need another way to be paid: either they are inside a longer included diagnosis you actually priced, or they are a paid minimum. Do not discover the gap in the driveway. A tech who can see the break-even on a printed card makes a better promise than one who remembers a fee from 2019.
If you do not credit the fee, a declined opener quote still paid for the diagnosis. That is reasonable. Say it at booking so 'I thought it came off if I didn't buy' is not the review you get later. The labor calculator covers the repair hours once the door's problem is known. Link the two numbers in your price book, not in your head.
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. Garage door placeholders are a $26 wage, $24 overhead per hour, and 30 minutes on site. The appliance calculator is the closest sibling if you want a lighter van as a comparison, and it is still not your books.