How to calculate a service call fee
Build the loaded hour the same way you would for any trade, then refuse to borrow someone else's trip charge. A $32 wage with 30% burden is $41.60 before overhead. Overhead at the $28 placeholder is meant to suggest a van with a camera, a small stock of stops and supplies, and software, not to report what those things cost you. Divide your real monthly overhead by the hours you bill. If drain machines live in that overhead, do not also hide them inside an inflated mileage rate.
Plumbing drive time is frequently longer than the repair. Forty minutes round trip and thirty minutes on site is 1.17 hours of loaded time before a wrench has done much. If your service area is a dense neighborhood, cut the drive minutes and the miles. If you cover a rural loop, raise both. The fee is allowed to be different on the edge of the map. A single company-wide number that ignores a 40-mile one-way drive is how the far jobs lose money quietly.
On-site minutes should match the promise. 'We will find the shutoff, stop the leak, and tell you the repair' is a different block of time than 'we will camera the line.' If the camera is included in the service call, put those minutes in the form. If the camera is a separate sale, leave it out of this fee and price it as its own line. Do not describe a camera inspection with a 30-minute diagnostic you do not intend to honor.
Vehicle cost is miles times your rate. Water in the cab and a wet crawlspace do not change the per-mile math, but they are a reason techs resent a fee that was priced for a dry faucet job. You still should not invent a hardship surcharge in this formula. If the visit takes longer, the minutes are the honest place to put it.
Then apply margin, not markup, and the after-hours multiplier if the call is a night leak or a Sunday with no water. A burst line at 9 p.m. is the case for 1.5× or 2×. Say that when you book it. Rounding to the nearest $5 keeps the phone quote and the invoice in the same neighborhood. The exact price remains on the card for the bookkeeper.
Service call fee vs trip charge vs diagnostic fee
Plumbers say 'trip charge' more often than 'service call,' and customers hear 'you are charging me to park.' Sometimes that hearing is fair, because the fee was never tied to a diagnostic promise. Sometimes it is not, because stopping the water and finding the failed part was the skilled work.
If your trip charge is only windshield time, set on-site minutes to zero and let the number be smaller. Then charge diagnosis when diagnosis starts. If your trip charge quietly includes the first half hour, the form should show that half hour and the customer line should say travel and diagnosis. The electrician calculator and the HVAC calculator use the same split, because the argument is the same in those trades.
A diagnostic fee that assumes you are already standing in the kitchen underprices the first visit. A trip charge that assumes you will know the repair without looking underprices the thinking. The bundled fee is usually what the phone script is actually selling. Write the script to match the minutes.
Opening a wall is rarely inside a standard service call. Say so before the drywall is cut. The fee got you to a cause. The repair, including patching if you offer it, belongs on the labor side of the quote.
Should the fee apply toward the repair?
Crediting a plumbing trip toward the repair is attractive on water-heater replacements and painful on a $12 supply line. The toggle only edits the sentence: the fee is credited toward the repair, or it is not. Your tech should not improvise a third policy because the customer is upset.
If you always credit the fee, small repairs subsidize the drive only when the repair price is fat enough. Many are not. Either keep a minimum, raise the repair labor, or stop promising the credit on every ticket. The labor calculator is where the repair price should be built so the credit has somewhere to land.
If you never credit the fee, say that before dispatch, especially after hours. A homeowner with a ceiling drip will agree to almost anything at 10 p.m. and dispute it on a dry morning. The sentence under the result is short enough to read while you are still on the phone.
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. Plumbing placeholders are a $32 wage, $28 overhead per hour, and 30 minutes on site. Everything else starts from the generic form until you edit it.