Call-out fee calculator

A call-out fee that only covers "coming out" is more common than it should be — the driving time and the fuel get forgotten, and the visit quietly loses money before any work starts. This tool adds up the actual floor: round-trip travel time at your hourly rate, the van cost for the round-trip mileage, and a small overhead for admin and consumables. Whatever you charge for a call-out, it should clear this number before it clears anything else.

Why "just the diesel" undercharges

The van cost per mile figure in this tool isn't only fuel — it's fuel, servicing, insurance and depreciation spread across the miles the van actually does. If you haven't worked out that figure for your own van, the van cost-per-mile calculator gives you a proper number to plug in here instead of guessing. The travel time side is just as easy to undercount: twenty minutes each way doesn't sound like much until it's forty minutes of paid time that produced no billable work.

A worked example

A job ten miles away, twenty minutes each way, on a £50/hour rate with a van costing 45p a mile: the round trip is forty minutes of labour (£33.33) plus twenty miles of van cost (£9), plus a small £5 overhead — a floor of roughly £47 before the actual work is even priced. Set a call-out fee below that and every first visit is quietly subsidising the customer's convenience.

Setting the fee itself, not just the floor

Once you know the floor, the actual call-out fee is a business decision on top of it — how much to charge for the risk of a visit that doesn't convert into work, how much competitors in the area charge, and whether the fee gets waived or credited if the customer goes ahead with the job. A common approach is pricing the call-out at roughly 1.5-2x this floor figure, which leaves room for a wasted trip or two without the whole week running at a loss.

What this isn't

This is the floor, not the fee itself — most tradespeople price a call-out somewhat above this number to also cover diagnosis time, the risk of a job that doesn't convert, and general business overhead beyond what's captured here. It also assumes a single straightforward round trip; multi-stop days or jobs with unusually long access times will need adjusting by hand.