How to Set a Service Call Fee That Covers the Trip

What the fee has to cover

A service call has up to three costs before any repair starts:

• Drive time, both ways. Travel from job site to job site during the workday is work time and counts as hours worked, while ordinary home-to-work travel does not (DOL Fact Sheet #22). A midday drive to a call is paid labor.
• The truck's miles. Fuel, maintenance, repairs and tires go up with every mile. The site's example truck runs 37.48¢ a mile: AAA's 2026 half-ton pickup figure of 11.82¢ for maintenance, repairs and tires (AAA), plus fuel at $4.465 a gallon (the EIA U.S. regular gasoline price for Monday, September 28, 2026) at 17.4 mpg. The truck cost guide shows where each number comes from.
• Any on-site time the fee includes, such as a diagnostic, an estimate or a minimum.

That gives two numbers worth knowing. The cost floor is what the trip itself costs, before overhead and profit. The fee at your rate is what the trip should bring in.

How to set the fee, step by step

The example uses the site's example shop and a trip of 12 miles and 25 minutes each way. Trip distance is only an example; the site found no national figure, so use your own dispatch or GPS records.

1. Measure a typical one-way trip in minutes and miles. Example: 25 minutes, 12 miles.
2. Double it. 50 minutes (0.8333 hours) and 24 miles round trip.
3. Work out the cost floor: drive hours × loaded labor cost per worked hour, plus miles × the truck's operating cost per mile. The example shop's loaded labor is $80,390.62 a year over 1,872 worked hours, or $42.94 an hour. So 0.8333 × $42.94 = $35.78, plus 24 × $0.3748 = $9.00, for a floor of $44.78.
4. Price the drive at your hourly rate. 0.8333 × $125.20 = $104.33. The rate from the labor rate calculator already carries labor burden, overhead, the truck and profit, so add no mileage charge on top.
5. Add any on-site time the fee includes. A 30-minute diagnostic is 0.5 × $125.20 = $62.60, for $166.93.
6. Round up to the next $5. $166.93 becomes $170, and the drive alone becomes $105.
7. Compare the fee with the floor. With the 30 minutes at loaded cost, the floor is $66.25. The $103.75 between the floor and the $170 fee is what pays overhead, the truck's ownership costs and profit for that time.

If your hourly rate leaves the truck out, price the miles at the truck's full cost instead. At a rate of $109.93 (the example shop without its truck line): 0.8333 × $109.93 = $91.61 for the drive, 24 × $1.1146 = $26.75 for the miles and 0.5 × $109.93 = $54.97 for the diagnostic. That is just over $173, which rounds up to $175.

Don't charge for the truck or the drive twice

The truck. If your hourly rate includes a truck line, the drive time billed at that rate already pays for the truck. Adding the full $1.1146 a mile on top would collect its ownership costs a second time.

The drive time. The example rate assumes 65% billable efficiency, the figure Field Promax, a field service software company, reported from 300 HVAC companies (ACHR News, June 16, 2026). Field Promax measured it as a share of paid time; the site applies it to worked hours, which gives fewer billable hours and a higher rate. That data counted about 1.13 hours a day of driving that wasn't recovered through trip charges. In that data, unbilled driving sits inside the 35% that isn't billable, and a rate built on 65% already absorbs it.

If you bill drive time through a fee, count those hours as billable when you measure your efficiency. Otherwise your rate absorbs the drive and the fee collects it again. The billable efficiency guide shows how to measure it.

Credit it toward the repair, or keep it separate?

The site found no neutral source on how many shops credit the fee, so treat it as a pricing decision and look at the arithmetic.

Separate fee. The customer pays $170 plus the repair. Your repair prices then shouldn't include drive time, or the customer pays for the drive twice.

Credited fee. The fee comes off the repair if the customer approves it, so it only brings in extra money on calls that end without a sale. On every approved job, the trip has to be inside the repair price. A 1.5-hour repair at $125.20 is $187.80 of labor; with the $104.33 drive built in, it is $292.13 before parts. If the repair price doesn't carry the drive, the credit gives back the $104.33 drive on every approved call.

Whichever you choose, say it on the phone before dispatch and write it on the estimate. The estimate guide covers what else belongs there.

After hours, long drives and what the market shows

After hours. A 1.5 multiplier on the $166.93 call gives $250.40, rounded up to $255. Federal law requires overtime pay only for hours over 40 in a workweek, not for nights, weekends or holidays as such (DOL overtime; DOL on night work). The multiplier is a pricing choice; your labor cost rises only when the call puts the tech into overtime or your own pay policy adds a premium.

Long drives. Price the minutes rather than stretching a flat fee. A trip of 40 minutes and 25 miles each way comes to 1.3333 × $125.20 = $166.93, rounded up to $170, against a floor of $75.99.

The market. Angi's consumer cost guide (updated March 17, 2026, built from a survey of more than 30,000 of its customers) lists plumbing service-call fees of $100 to $250 in its table and $150 to $250 in its summary (Angi). It describes emergency plumbing at 1.5 to 3 times normal rates, and trip fees of $50 to $300 for customers more than 10 miles away. These are homeowner-side ranges, not a survey of contractors, and the site found no reliable source for HVAC or electrical diagnostic fees.

The FTC Cooling-Off Rule and in-home sales

The FTC's Cooling-Off Rule covers sales of consumer goods or services of $25 or more made at the buyer's home, or $130 or more at certain other places away from the seller's place of business, including when the buyer invited the seller (16 CFR 429). The buyer can cancel until midnight of the third business day, and every day except Sundays and federal holidays counts as a business day. The rule is about purchases for personal, family or household use, so purchases made for a business fall outside it.

For a covered sale, the seller must hand over a completed receipt or contract with a cancellation statement and two copies of a Notice of Cancellation, and must tell the buyer about the right orally. After a valid cancellation, the seller must refund within 10 business days.

Two exclusions matter for service calls:

• Requested repairs. The rule excludes a sale where the buyer initiated contact and specifically asked the seller to come to the home to repair or maintain the buyer's personal property. Goods or services sold during that visit beyond the replacement parts the repair needs are not excluded.
• Emergencies. It also excludes a sale made to meet a bona fide immediate personal emergency, where the buyer initiated contact and gives you a separate, dated, signed statement in their own handwriting that describes the emergency and waives the three-day right.

The FTC's consumer page describes the repair and emergency exclusions in plain language. State laws on home sales can also apply, since the federal rule doesn't override them unless they directly conflict (16 CFR 429.2).

This is general information, not legal advice. Whether a particular sale is covered, such as a water treatment system sold during a call about a dripping faucet, is a question for your attorney or your state attorney general's consumer protection office.

Next step

Open the service call fee calculator and enter your typical one-way drive, your hourly rate and any on-site time the fee includes. It shows the cost floor and the rounded fee side by side.