Guide
Most small jobs lose money because the minimum charge was guessed, not built. Here's how to work out the real floor cost of a visit and price your minimum around it.
An hourly rate covers the time you spend swinging a spanner or a spade. It does not cover the time you spend driving there, the fuel you burn, the ten minutes you spent booking it in, or the card fee on the way out. On a two-hour job those costs get absorbed into a long invoice and nobody notices. On a 20-minute tap washer or a quick diagnostic, they eat the whole job.
A minimum job charge is not a penalty for small jobs. It is the true cost of showing up, with a bit of labour bolted on. If you don't set one, every short job quietly subsidises the customer instead of paying you.
Add these four things up before you price anything:
Stack those up and a single visit typically costs somewhere between $70 and $140 before a single billable minute of work has happened. That range is the floor. It's not profit — it's what you spend just to be standing in the customer's driveway.
Take a plumber with a loaded hourly cost of $60, a 20-minute drive each way (40 minutes round trip), and a 12-mile round trip.
| Cost item | Calculation | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Drive time | 40 min ÷ 60 × $60 | $40.00 |
| Fuel | 12 miles × $0.70 | $8.40 |
| Booking admin | 15 min ÷ 60 × $60 | $15.00 |
| Card processing | 3% of $150 invoice | $4.50 |
| Subtotal — cost to show up | $67.90 |
Add slot-risk margin — the cost of the appointment falling through, running over, or the next job in the day being pushed back — and you're realistically at $80-$100 before any tools come out of the van. That's why minimums that only cover "an hour of labour" at your bare hourly rate are usually still too low. You need to cover the visit cost plus a chunk of billable time on top.
Once you've established the $70-$140 floor cost of a visit, build the minimum charge as your loaded hourly rate multiplied by 1 to 1.5 hours. At a $60-$80 loaded rate, that lands the minimum somewhere between $125 and $250 depending on your market and how far you typically drive.
Check the number against your actual numbers with the break-even calculator — if your break-even point per job sits above what your current minimum charges, that's the gap you're currently giving away for free.
A minimum charge should not stack on top of your labour rate — it should be the floor that labour rate rises above. If the minimum is $150 and the job takes an hour at your $120 hourly rate, the customer pays $150, not $270. If the job runs to two hours, they pay $240 (2 × $120), because that's already above the minimum. This is the standard, fair structure and it's worth stating plainly on your quote so nobody feels double-charged.
If you serve a wider area, don't average your drive costs across every job — that punishes your close-in customers and undercharges the far ones. Instead, set two zones:
Customers rarely object to a clearly labelled travel zone. They do object to a flat rate that feels arbitrary.
Once you're on site and the visit cost is already covered by the minimum, a second small task — tightening a hinge, checking a second outlet, swapping a filter — costs you almost nothing extra in drive time or admin. Price these at a discounted add-on rate, maybe 60-70% of your normal hourly rate for the extra 15-30 minutes, rather than a fresh minimum charge. It converts a marginal ask into extra revenue instead of a favour, and customers appreciate the fair pricing.
If you get a run of low-value jobs in the same postcode or suburb, book them on the same day rather than spreading them across the week. One drive out, several minimums collected, admin done in one block. This is the single biggest lever for improving margin on small jobs without raising prices — it cuts the drive-time cost per job without the customer noticing anything different. Run a few of these batched days against a normal spread day through the job profitability calculator and the difference in margin per hour worked is usually stark.
Everything above assumes a scheduled, normal-hours visit. Emergency or after-hours call-outs carry a different cost structure entirely — overtime labour, disrupted schedules, higher risk of a wasted trip — and need their own higher rate, not this minimum. Mixing the two undercharges your emergency work and overcharges your routine bookings.
Work out your loaded hourly cost, your average round-trip drive time, and your typical mileage. Run those through the maths above and you'll have a defensible minimum, not a guessed one. Review it every time fuel prices or your hourly rate move — a minimum set two years ago on old fuel costs is quietly losing you money on every short job you take.
The Small Business Operations Kit ($19) turns guides like this one into fill-in-once worksheets: rate card, quoting sheet, job costing, payment terms and follow-up templates. Built by the same people who write these guides.