“Is it OK to charge just to show up?” Yes. Every job, large or small, starts with the same cost: someone drives there, walks in, sets up, cleans up, takes payment and drives away. On a two-day job that cost disappears into the price. On a twenty-minute repair it is most of the price. A minimum charge or a trip fee is simply the floor that keeps the small job from costing you money.
The real question is whether your number covers the trip. It is tempting to pick a figure that sounds reasonable, or to match a competitor’s. Here is how to build it from your own costs instead, and then how to say it so nobody is surprised at the door.
What a truck roll costs: three parts
1. Time that is not the repair
Count the drive both ways, plus everything on site that is not the work itself: finding the house, the walk-in and the talk, unloading, cleanup, taking payment, writing up the ticket. Time a week of small calls and take the middle, not your best day. If the person in the truck is an employee, much of that time is paid time; whether drive time is paid covers the federal rule.
Price that time at your loaded labor cost, not the wage. For scale, the Bureau of Labor Statistics measured private employers’ cost for installation, maintenance and repair workers in June 2026 at $49.01 an hour in total compensation: $33.61 in wages and $15.41 in benefits. For private-industry workers in the construction industry the total was $51.96. Those are national averages, and they still leave out the hours you pay for but cannot bill. Your real hourly cost builds your own number.
2. The vehicle
The best figure is your own: a year of truck costs (payment or depreciation, fuel, insurance, tires, repairs, registration) divided by the miles you drove. If you do not have that yet, two published yardsticks give a sense of scale:
Neither is your truck. A loaded work truck on short hops may cost more or less per mile than either; your own records settle it. Keeping them also helps at tax time, as writing off the truck explains.
3. A share of overhead
Insurance, phones, software, the office, advertising and your own time answering calls cost the same whether the next job is $150 or $15,000. Divide a year of overhead by a year of visits to get the overhead each visit has to carry. It is the easiest part to leave out of a trip fee.
A worked example
Say a one-truck repair business wants a minimum that covers the trip plus the first 30 minutes of work. Every input below is made up for the example; put in your own.
| Line | How it is figured | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Time that is not the repair | 50 minutes of driving + 16 on site = 1.1 hours at a $52 loaded rate | $57.20 |
| Vehicle | 18 miles round trip at $1.10 | $19.80 |
| Overhead | $60,000 a year ÷ 1,500 visits | $40.00 |
| Truck roll | The three lines above | $117.00 |
| First 30 minutes of work | 0.5 hours at $52 | $26.00 |
| Cost of the smallest job | Truck roll + first 30 minutes | $143.00 |
| Minimum charge | $143 ÷ 0.70 for a 30% margin = $204.29, rounded up | $205 |
Two things fall out of that table. First, a $95 service call in this business loses money on every visit that ends with nothing else sold, because the trip alone costs $117 before any profit. Second, the price is divided, not multiplied, by the margin: $143 plus 30% is $185.90, which leaves a margin of only about 23%. Markup vs. margin explains why.
Minimum charge, trip fee, or both
Night and weekend calls are a different price again; emergency and after-hours pricing covers them.
Saying it on the phone
Say the number before you book, in the same words every time, with what it buys. For example:
“Our minimum is $205. That gets a tech to your door with a stocked truck, and the first half hour of work. If the job will take longer, he’ll give you the price before he goes past it. If you have a few small things that need doing, put them all on the list, because the minimum covers the visit, not each item.”
That last line is the honest selling point of a minimum: the homeowner with a list of small jobs gets more for the visit. Then put the same words in writing in the booking confirmation, so the number on the invoice is one they have already seen twice.
Decide your waivers in advance too. If you credit the minimum when a larger job is sold, say so on every call; if you never waive it, never waive it. A rule applied to some customers and not others is the one that invites the angry review.
Saying it on the website
Put one line on each service page and next to the request form: “Service visits start at $205 within our main area, including the first 30 minutes of work.” List the zones under it. A homeowner who will not pay that finds out before you drive, not in the driveway.
If you show price ranges on your site with NapkinPrice™, set the bottom of every range at or above your minimum, so no range quotes a number you would not take.
Check it twice a year
The inputs move. The IRS changed its own mileage rate in the middle of 2026 because fuel went up; your wages, insurance and overhead change too. Re-run the table each spring and fall with the last six months of real numbers, and change the minimum when the cost of a visit changes, not when a competitor does.