Should you charge for an estimate

You drove across town, crawled under the house with a flashlight, measured the runs, and wrote up a repipe estimate. The homeowner already had three others. You will not hear back. That morning cost you half a day of billable time, and it shows up on no invoice.

Whether to charge for that is arithmetic, weighed against what your market expects — and the answer really does differ by trade. A plumber can charge a dispatch fee just to show up. The painter down the street would lose most of his calls if he tried it.

Price the visit before you decide

Three blocks of time, plus the truck: round-trip drive, time on site, and takeoff and write-up at the desk.

Starting figures — time your next three and use your own.

Now price those hours at what the time would have earned in the field, and divide by your close rate. At $85 a billable hour, the repaint estimate costs about $150 plus mileage; win one in three and each painting job carries roughly $450 of estimating. The kitchen remodel costs $680 to $1,105, and at one contract signed in four, every remodel you land absorbs $2,700 to $4,400. That gap — not principle — is what splits the trades.

When the visit is the deliverable

In HVAC, plumbing, electrical and appliance repair, the customer usually is not asking what a known job would cost. They are asking what is wrong with it. Finding out takes meters, gauges, experience and an hour of your day. The price comes after the diagnosis.

What shops advertise, taken from published price guides and shop websites rather than any survey:

Those swing widely by market and rise sharply for nights, weekends and holidays, so read the booking pages of the shops within twenty miles of you. Most that charge credit the fee toward the repair if the customer goes ahead. Watch the split inside a single trade: an HVAC company that charges $129 to diagnose a dead condenser will often price a whole new system for free, because a replacement quote is a sales call, not diagnostic work.

When the design is the deliverable

A kitchen remodel, custom cabinetry, or a big landscape install cannot be priced accurately from a walk-through. Somebody has to take field dimensions, draw a layout, work through selections, and get real numbers from subs and suppliers. Do that free and you have donated a week to a homeowner who can take your drawings to a cheaper builder.

Three structures are common, and all three normally credit back:

• A flat design or pre-construction agreement. A set fee for a defined package — measured drawings, a scope, a real budget — credited in whole or in part against the contract if they build with you.
• Hourly design time at a stated rate, with an agreed cap so it cannot run away.
• A percentage of the projected project budget, more common on larger design-build and landscape-architecture work.

Whichever you use, put in writing what the deliverables are, how many revision rounds are included, and who owns the drawings if the customer does not build. That last clause is the whole point of charging.

Where free is still correct

Painting, handyman work, cleaning, lawn care and straightforward roof replacement stay free almost everywhere. The estimate is cheap to produce — measure, photograph, apply a unit rate you already know, sometimes from photos or aerial imagery without a visit at all. And every competitor advertises free, so a fee mostly buys you fewer calls.

The middle ground in those trades is not a fee but a phone screen. Ask the budget range, the timeline, whether they own the home, and how many other bids they are collecting. Two minutes of questions cuts out most of the drives a fee would have cut out, and costs you nothing in bookings.

What a fee actually filters

A fee does not sort good customers from bad ones. Someone gathering five bids for work they plan to do next spring is behaving sensibly; they are simply not a visit you can afford this week. What a fee changes is that a free, unlimited service becomes a priced one, and anyone who pays $95 has already decided to spend money on the problem now.

The cost is real too. You will lose jobs you would have won, mostly first-time customers with no reason to trust you yet.

Charging it without surprising anyone

Say the number before you get in the truck. On the phone, on the booking form, in the confirmation text. A fee first mentioned at the door is the one that earns a bad review.

Say what it buys. "That covers up to an hour of diagnostic time. If it turns into more than that, I'll call you before I keep going."

Credit it, and say exactly how. "The $95 comes off the repair." Be clear whether the credit applies to any work performed or only to the specific job quoted.

Do not advertise free estimates while charging a fee. Not on the truck, not on the website, not on an old directory profile. Advertising one price and charging another is deceptive advertising, and state attorneys general enforce it.

Watch the cancellation rules on anything signed in the home. The FTC's Cooling-Off Rule lets a buyer cancel until midnight of the third business day on sales of $25 or more made at their residence. One exclusion cuts your way: a visit the customer asked for, to repair or maintain property they already own, sits outside the rule (16 CFR 429.0(a)). Anything extra you sell them while you are there is not covered by that exclusion. A design or pre-construction agreement signed at the kitchen table can land inside the rule. Many states also run their own home-improvement cancellation statute, sometimes with a longer window and required wording on the contract. Those often reach contracts the federal rule does not. Read the FTC rule text and your state's consumer protection agency, or have an attorney check your terms once.

To a hesitant caller, the whole thing fits in two sentences: "There's a $95 diagnostic — that's for the time it takes to find out what's actually wrong, not for a piece of paper. It comes off the bill if you have me do the work." Then stop talking.

Keeping the fee consistent

A fee only works if it lands the same way every time, and the part that slips is the credit — remembered on one job, forgotten on the next. In DoneQuote a diagnostic fee or design retainer sits in your catalog as a priced service, so the number you decided on is the number the customer sees, and the credit line is there when the job converts.

Where that leaves you

Charge when the customer is buying an answer they could not have gotten without you, or when the estimate is itself days of skilled work you would be donating. Stay free when it is cheap to produce and every competitor gives it away. When it is close, the tiebreaker is your calendar: holes in it make free estimates cheap marketing, and a three-week backlog makes the fee a capacity tool.