Setting a minimum service call fee

A customer calls at 8:40 on a Tuesday: the AC is blowing warm. You drive 13 miles, find a failed capacitor in half an hour, write up the repair price, and hear "let me talk to my wife." Nobody approved the work, so nobody paid. The visit still took 90 minutes, 26 miles and a slot you could have sold. A minimum service call fee covers that part — dispatch, drive, diagnosis, and the time you held for them.

Price the visit before you price the work

Here is what one stop costs a two-truck HVAC shop, before any billable repair time. The hours are averages off their own tickets, which is why the decimals are odd. Run yours.

Tech time     1.67 hrs × $45     = $75   drive 40-70 min, diagnosis 20-45
Office time   0.25 hr  × $30     =  $8   booking, confirming, write-up
Vehicle       25 mi    × $0.76   = $19
Direct cost                       = $102
+ overhead (rent, insurance, phones, software), 20–35%  = $122–$138
+ profit, 10–20%                                        = $134–$166

Their floor is $135 to $165 a stop. Not the price of the repair — the price of the truck being in the driveway.

Three inputs need your own numbers. Loaded labor cost is wage plus payroll taxes, workers' comp and benefits — commonly 1.25 to 1.5 times the wage, higher where workers' comp class codes are expensive.

The mileage rate is the current IRS standard rate; look it up on irs.gov, because it changes at least yearly and sometimes mid-year. In 2026 the IRS set 72.5 cents through June 30 and 76 cents from July 1. It is a tax deduction figure for ordinary passenger vehicles, not a measured cost, so a loaded van can run higher — use your own cost per mile if you track it.

Overhead here is marked up from direct cost. Many shops budget it as a share of revenue instead, which gives a bigger number: 25% of revenue is a 1.33x markup, not 1.25x. Ask your bookkeeper which your books use.

What other shops charge

Nobody surveys service call fees, so there is no official source. The ranges below are what consumer cost aggregators and field-service software vendors report for 2026 — HomeGuide, Angi, ServiceTitan and similar. Treat them as a sanity check, not a target. What sets your fee is your own dispatch cost, how far you drive, how full the week is, and which calls you keep turning down.

If your floor lands above the local range, tighten the radius, not the fee.

Nights, weekends and holidays are their own rate.

What you do with the fee after the diagnosis

Four ways to handle it. Which one you pick matters more than the number.

Flat diagnostic fee, kept. "$129 to diagnose, and you get a written estimate before we touch anything." Protects margin on every stop, including the dead ones. Most pushback on the phone, best screen against four-opinion shoppers.

Credited toward the repair. "$99 trip charge, credited if you approve the work." The customer hears a refund and a tire-kicker still risks $99. You eat it on approved jobs, so build it into your rate.

Waived on approval. Fine when your average repair is $500 and up; on a $150 fix you gave away the visit.

One-hour minimum. "The first hour is $145, ten minutes or sixty." Easy where hourly billing is normal, weak when the drive is long and the fix short.

Which one converts better is contested. The one broad finding we could source is a field-service vendor's own job data, not independent research: charging something booked better than nothing. Test one structure on your call log before you switch.

Free estimates still make sense in one place. Measuring for a $7,000 furnace replacement is a sales call and pays for itself; diagnosing a $180 repair is production work and should be paid. Painters, roofers, remodelers and cleaners are the exception — their customers are trained on free quotes, so a first-visit trip charge mostly buys fewer leads. Charge a measure or design fee for a real take-off instead, credited against the contract if they sign.

"You want how much just to come out?"

You will hear it. The instinct is to explain your truck payment — the one thing the caller does not care about. Answer with what they get.

• "The $119 covers the visit and a full diagnosis. You get a written price before we do any work."
• "It comes off the repair if you go ahead."
• "That's a trained tech on site, not a guess over the phone."

Only say "licensed" if you hold the license the caller would picture. There is no national trade license, and not even a state-level one everywhere — roughly a third of states leave HVAC licensing to cities and counties, and handyman work is often unlicensed by design. Name what you actually hold: the state or county contractor license, or the federal EPA Section 608 refrigerant certification.

Two habits beat any script. Say the number before they ask — booking call, confirmation text, website — so it is never a surprise at the door. And never negotiate it on the phone: cut $119 to $79 and the caller learns your numbers are soft. Flex on the repair, not the trip.

Three rules to check before you print the number

Some states make you quote it up front. California requires a registered appliance and electronics repair dealer to quote the service call charge and the diagnosis fee before making the call, and folds the diagnosis fee into that charge (16 CCR § 2752). Rules vary by state and trade: check your state licensing board and attorney general's pages.

The three-day cancellation right usually does not apply. The FTC's Cooling-Off Rule covers sales of $25 or more made at a buyer's home, but not a visit the customer asked for to repair or maintain their property (16 CFR Part 429), so a service call they booked is normally outside it. That is the federal floor; several states run their own home-solicitation laws with different carve-outs and longer windows.

Sales tax on the fee is a state question. Nothing here is nationally true. In Texas, repair labor on tangible personal property is taxable, and so is any charge incidental to it — which pulls the trip charge in. But labor to repair residential real property is not taxable there, while the same work on nonresidential property is. So the same $129 diagnostic is taxable on a warehouse rooftop unit and not on a home dishwasher. Get your trade's rule from your state department of revenue.

Load it once, charge it every time

The fee only works if every job carries the same number. Set it up in DoneQuote as a catalog service — "Diagnostic visit, credited to approved repair" — so it drops into every estimate and nobody decides on the doorstep.

The short version

• Cost the whole visit — booking, drive, diagnosis, paperwork, vehicle — then add overhead and profit.
• Published fees run roughly $35 to $200 by trade and market. Sanity check only.
• Keeping the fee protects margin best, but which structure converts better is unsettled.
• Say the number before the visit. Never negotiate it on the phone.
• Check your own state on two things: quoting the fee up front, and sales tax on it.