Should you charge for travel time

You leave at 7:15 to be on site at 7:45. At 4:00 you pack up and get home at 4:35. Nobody paid you for either leg, and it happens again tomorrow.

Charging for the drive feels rude until you price it. Then it is just a line you have not been billing.

Put a number on the drive before you decide

One hour of round-trip driving a day is five hours a week. Whether that hurts depends on how many hours you actually bill — after estimates, supply runs and paperwork, always fewer than you work. Bill 25 hours out of a 50-hour week and that five hours of driving is a fifth of your earning capacity, gone.

Run it out over a year on your own rate and vehicle:

The $4.05 in that table is the U.S. average for regular the week of August 17, 2026, from the EIA's fuel update; diesel ran near $5.45 the same week. Both move week to week and swing wide by state.

AAA's 2025 Your Driving Costs study puts maintenance, repair and tires at about 11 cents a mile against fuel at about 13 cents — near enough a wash, though AAA priced gas at $3.15 there, so at today's pump fuel pulls ahead. Depreciation is the line people forget: it dwarfs both on a financed truck and is near zero on an old one you own outright. AAA studies new vehicles in personal use, so treat it as a ceiling.

The IRS publishes a standard mileage rate for deducting business driving; look it up at irs.gov rather than a number you half remember. It is normally set once a year, but the IRS does revise it mid-year when fuel spikes — it did exactly that partway through 2026 — so check the effective date, not just the year. Using it is optional: deducting your actual vehicle costs often comes out higher on a thirsty truck. Either way it is a deduction rate for your tax return, not a price you are entitled to bill.

Four ways to recover it

The dollar figures there are formatting examples, not going rates. What to charge depends on your metro, your trade and your own drive-plus-diagnostic cost, and the published "averages" online come from field-service software vendors, not from anyone surveying your market. Price it off the table above, then check it against what shops near you quote on the phone.

Building it into the rate is zero friction, but close jobs subsidize far ones. Take work 40 minutes out and an 80-minute round trip rides on top of the job — a quarter off your effective rate on a four-hour job, with nothing on the estimate to show it.

A flat trip charge is strongest for on-demand repair: the customer is buying your arrival as much as your labor. Costing it out, and deciding whether you credit it back on approval, has its own guide. Switching per customer causes arguments.

A radius with a per-mile fee reads as fair — the distance was the customer's choice — and it does your scheduling for you: the far-out job either pays for itself or you decline it without feeling bad.

A drive-time or mileage line recovers the most. It is normal on commercial work and gets picked at by homeowners. Many shops bill drive time at a reduced rate — half to three-quarters of the labor rate is common — since you are not producing work while you drive. Pick a number you can defend and hold it.

The three trips nobody wants to bill

The estimate visit. The common residential default is a free estimate inside your radius and a fee outside it, often credited against the job if awarded — a convention, not a rule, and one plenty of shops break profitably. Where the visit is the expertise — a remodel takeoff, a repeat leak nobody has diagnosed — charge for the assessment and stop calling it an estimate.

The warranty callback. If the defect is yours, the trip is yours. Write the boundary into your warranty language up front — what is covered, for how long, within what distance — but know that written limits only go so far. Most states read an implied warranty of workmanlike construction into the job, and how far you can disclaim or narrow it varies by state and is tightly restricted on residential work in some. Have a construction attorney in your state read your warranty clause once.

The second trip for a part. If you should have brought it, that trip is on you, and billing it is how you lose a good customer. If the customer changed the scope mid-job, it belongs on the change order. The test is who created the trip.

Say it before the truck moves

The customer should hear your policy before dispatch and see it as its own line, not folded into labor. The amounts below are placeholders — use your own.

Trip charge — service call and diagnostic, credited toward approved repair — $95.00

Travel beyond service area — 34 miles past the included 25 — 34 mi at $2.00/mi — $68.00

One local check: in some states a separately stated travel, delivery or trip charge attached to taxable work is itself taxable, and in others it is not. The answer can also differ for repair work versus new construction. Ask your state revenue department or your accountant before you build the line item, not after an audit letter.

Making the line item automatic

Add the mechanism you picked to your DoneQuote service catalog as a standing item: a flat trip charge, or a per-mile rate with the included radius in the description. It then sits on every estimate, worded the same way, instead of depending on you remembering it at 9 p.m.

Summary

• An hour a day of driving costs about 240 unbilled hours a year, plus fuel and wear — run it on your own rate, truck and pump price
• The IRS standard mileage rate is an optional deduction figure, sometimes revised mid-year — check irs.gov for the rate in force, and never treat it as your price
• Pick one mechanism and apply it consistently: built-in rate, flat trip charge, radius plus per-mile, or a drive-time line
• Your defects and your forgotten parts are your trips; customer-created second trips go on a change order
• Quote it on the phone before dispatch, show it as its own line, and confirm with your state how travel charges are taxed