Electrician service call fee calculator
Drive time, mileage, book rate and minimum on-site time in. Trip fee floor, first-hour price and the smallest job you should accept out, checked against the 2026 band. The service call is the one number every customer asks about first, and the one most solo electricians pull out of the air.
Your numbers
The math
Drive cost = (drive minutes × 2 + admin minutes) ÷ 60 × book rate
Truck cost = miles × 2 × cost per mile
Trip fee floor = drive cost + truck cost, rounded up to $5
First hour = trip fee + book rate
Minimum job = trip fee + minimum hours × book rate
Example at the defaults: 25 minutes each way plus 20 minutes of phone and invoice is 70 minutes, at $95 that is $111. Twenty-four miles at $0.70 is $17. Trip fee floor $130. First hour on site $225. A ten-minute outlet swap still bills $225, because the other 80 minutes happened whether the customer saw them or not. The published band is $79 to $200 for the trip fee and $100 to $200 for a call with the first hour included; a solo shop with a real drive lands in the top half of both, and that is correct. The $79 end belongs to shops with five vans in a dense zip code.
How to say it
Quote the first hour, not the fee. "It is $225 for me to come out, which covers the first hour, and I will give you a flat price for anything beyond that before I start." Customers hear one number and a promise. "There is a $130 trip fee plus $95 an hour" is the same money and sounds like two ways to get charged. If they ask whether the fee comes off the job, the honest answer is that it is already inside your flat prices, which is true when your price book carries the trip fee on every job. The Pricing Kit ($49) puts the fee, the rate and 35 flat prices in one spreadsheet you own.
Three mistakes that make the service call a loss
- Charging the drive at your wage instead of your rate. The hour in the van is an hour you could have billed. It costs $95, not $38.
- Waiving the fee to win the repair. On a $180 repair that is a 40 percent discount you did not mean to give. Raise the repair price to carry it or keep the fee.
- A minimum under one hour. Half-hour minimums fill the calendar with $60 calls that each burn 80 minutes of your day. One hour is the floor, and some shops run 1.5.