Guide
What to charge as a mobile mechanic
There is no average worth copying. There is arithmetic, and it takes about twenty minutes at a kitchen table.
The short answer
Charge the rate your own year requires, worked out like this: add up everything the business will spend in a year, add the pay you want to take out of it, and divide that total by the hours a customer will actually pay you for in a year. That is the floor. Anything below it is a hobby with invoices.
Then split the money you collect into four separate numbers rather than one: an hourly labour rate, a callout or travel charge, a diagnostic charge, and a markup on parts. Merging them into a single hourly figure is the mistake that makes mobile work look profitable on the invoice and feel unprofitable at the end of the month, because the driving and the diagnosing get absorbed into hours nobody is paying for.
This page contains no figures on purpose. Any average you find for mobile repair labour is either regional, unsourced, or both, and substituting somebody else number for your own is how people end up charging a rate that covers a van they do not have and misses the one they do.
The arithmetic, written out in words
Start with the year rather than the hour, because the year is the thing you actually have to survive. Write down what the business spends in twelve months: the van payment or its depreciation, fuel, insurance of every kind, tools and their replacement, the phone, software, accountancy, licensing, and the parts you buy and never manage to bill for. Then write down what you want to earn before income tax. Add the two together. That total is what your labour has to produce.
Now count the hours that produce it. Not hours worked, hours billed. Look back at a fortnight of real invoices and add up the labour hours you actually charged for, then work out what that is in a week. Multiply by the number of weeks you genuinely work once holidays and slow weeks are taken out.
Divide the first figure by the second. That is your hourly floor. It is not a market rate, it is not a recommended rate, and it is not what anybody else charges. It is the number below which your own year does not balance, which makes it the only number on the subject that is definitely true for you.
The labour rate calculator in the tools section of this site does exactly this arithmetic with four inputs, if you would rather type than scribble. It has the same limitation as this page: the answer is only as honest as the billable hours you feed it.
Billable hours are where the calculation goes wrong
Almost everybody overestimates this field, and it is the field the answer is most sensitive to. A ten hour day is not ten billable hours. The drive out, the drive back, the parts collection, the estimate you wrote at eleven at night, the customer who went quiet for a week, the van clean and the bookkeeping are all real work, and a customer pays for none of them unless you put them on an invoice deliberately.
A mobile mechanic loses a bigger share of the day to this than a shop technician does, because the driving is not a commute at either end of the day, it is threaded through the middle of it. Two jobs across a city can eat more of an afternoon than three jobs in the same street.
The consequence is arithmetic rather than opinion. Fewer billable hours carrying the same annual total means a higher hourly rate, every time. If your calculated rate looks high next to what you imagined, the honest response is usually that you have finally counted the hours correctly rather than that the calculation is wrong.
Why copying the shop down the road does not work
A shop posts an hourly rate on the wall and it is tempting to treat it as the going price. It is a price for a different product. A shop bills a much higher proportion of its technicians time, has a lift, a parts counter and somebody answering the phone, and spreads its overhead over several bays. You have none of that and you have driving instead.
Coming in under the shop rate feels like a competitive move and is usually a pay cut. The thing customers are choosing when they call a mobile mechanic is not a discount, it is that the car does not have to move and they do not have to arrange a lift home. That is worth something, and pricing as if it is worth nothing gives it away.
Where competitor prices are genuinely useful is as a sanity check on the top end. If your calculated floor lands well above what anybody near you charges, that is a signal to look hard at your overhead and your billable hours before concluding the area is wrong.
Four numbers, not one
Most pricing confusion in mobile repair comes from trying to express four different things as one hourly figure. They behave differently and they should be quoted separately.
The labour rate covers time spent working on the vehicle. It is the number you calculated above and it is the one customers ask about first.
The callout or travel charge covers getting there. It exists because driving is the part of mobile work that is genuinely unlike shop work, and because a job twenty minutes away and a job an hour away are not the same job even when the repair is identical. Some people charge a flat callout inside a radius and refuse work outside it, some charge by distance, and some fold a fixed amount into every quote and never mention it. All three work. Charging nothing does not, and it is why some mobile mechanics find their busiest weeks are their worst paid.
The diagnostic charge covers finding out what is wrong, which is a service in itself and frequently the most skilled part of the day. Giving it away turns your expertise into a free sample and attracts the customer who wants a diagnosis to take to somebody cheaper. That subject has its own guide in this cluster on how to price a diagnostic fee.
Parts markup covers the money and the risk in supplying components: your cash tied up, the collection trip, the wrong part sent, and the warranty you carry if it fails. Buying at trade and passing it on at trade means doing all of that for nothing.
Quote all four in a way the customer can see. A single blended hourly figure that quietly contains travel looks expensive next to a competitor bare rate, even when the total is lower.
The number you quote is not the number you keep
The invoice total and the money that stays with you are different figures, and the gap is bigger in mobile work than most people expect. It is worth walking one job through it once, honestly, because the exercise changes how you quote everything afterwards.
Take the total on the invoice. Subtract what the parts cost you. Subtract the fuel for the round trip and the parts run. Subtract the card processing fee if the customer paid on a card. Subtract the share of insurance, phone, software and van payment that a working day carries, which you get by dividing the annual figure by the days you actually work. What is left is what the day earned, and it is the number to compare against the pay you wanted.
Do this on your own numbers rather than reading anybody totals. The point of the exercise is not the answer, it is discovering which line surprised you. For most people it is either the unbilled driving or the share of fixed costs, and each of those has a different fix: the first is a pricing structure problem, the second is a volume problem.
The reason this matters for pricing rather than for accounting is that a rate set from invoice totals is set from a number you never actually received. Rates built that way survive a good month and fail a quiet one.
Where the short answer stops being the answer
Every rule on this page has a situation it does not survive. Here are the ones worth knowing about before you meet them.
A repeat customer asks for your usual price on a much bigger job
Long jobs are not just several short jobs. They tie up a day you cannot fill with anything else, they carry more risk of finding something worse halfway through, and they usually involve more parts money out of your pocket before any comes back in. Quoting them at the same hourly figure is defensible, but quote the hours honestly rather than optimistically, and say what happens if the job turns out to be a different job.
The discount instinct is strongest here and it is worth resisting. A day booked cheaply is a day you cannot sell twice.
The customer wants a fixed price and you cannot see the vehicle yet
Quote a range and be explicit about what would put it at each end, or quote the diagnostic as a fixed price and the repair afterwards. A firm price given without seeing the car is a bet you are making with your own money, and the guide on quoting a job you have not seen yet covers the ways to structure it.
What does not work is a firm price you intend to revise on arrival. That conversation on a driveway, with the vehicle already apart, is where reviews get written.
You work a rural area with long drives between jobs
The arithmetic does not change but the billable hours field collapses, which pushes the calculated rate up. That is the correct answer rather than a broken one: fewer chargeable hours have to carry the same year.
The practical responses are to charge travel properly, to cluster bookings by area on the same day, and to be willing to decline a distant single job that cannot be paired with another. A day with one job and three hours of driving is the day that quietly funds nothing.
A fleet or a dealer wants an ongoing discounted rate
Volume work is worth something real: predictable scheduling, no chasing new customers, and usually faster payment. It is also the work that most often turns out to be paid slowest and priced tightest at the same time, which is the worst combination.
Before agreeing a rate, ask what the payment terms are and treat that as part of the price. A lower rate paid on the day is a different deal from the same rate paid whenever the office gets to it.
When it has already gone wrong
Most people find a page like this after the fact rather than before it. This part is for them.
Your calculated rate is far above what you currently charge
This is the normal outcome the first time and it is not a sign the arithmetic is wrong. There are only four levers and it is worth knowing which one you intend to pull: raise the rate, bill more of the hours you already work, cut overhead, or accept less pay. Most people pull the fourth without ever deciding to.
The fifth move looks like a rate rise and is not: start charging separately for the things you currently absorb. Travel, diagnosis, the return visit for a wrong part. Those hours already exist and moving them onto the invoice raises what the year earns without changing the number on your rate card.
You have been quoting too low for months and customers expect it
Raise it on new customers immediately and on existing ones with notice and a reason. The reason should be specific and true rather than apologetic: costs, or a change in what the price includes. The guide on raising your labour rate in this cluster goes through the wording.
Expect to lose some of the cheapest customers and count that as part of the plan rather than a failure. The arithmetic that matters is whether the remaining work at the new rate beats all the work at the old one, and it usually does far sooner than people expect.
You keep discounting at the moment of quoting
This is almost always a confidence problem dressed up as a pricing problem, and the fix is structural rather than emotional. Write the price down before the conversation, send it in writing rather than saying it, and let the customer respond to a document instead of to your face.
A written estimate the customer approves in their own time is also a much better record of what was agreed, which matters more the moment anything about the job is disputed.
Questions
What is the average hourly rate for a mobile mechanic?
This page does not give one, because nobody here has surveyed it and a figure without a source is worth nothing. Rates vary by region, by specialism and by how much of the day is driven rather than worked, and the useful number is the one your own costs and your own billable hours produce. The arithmetic for that is on this page.
Should a mobile mechanic charge more per hour than a shop?
The arithmetic answers it by cost rather than by comparison. A mobile mechanic bills a smaller share of the working day because driving is part of the job, so the same annual target lands on fewer chargeable hours and produces a higher hourly figure. Whether your local market pays it is a separate question from whether your year needs it.
How much should I charge for a callout?
Enough that a job at the far edge of your area is still worth taking. Work it out from your own driving: the time out and back, at your own hourly rate, plus fuel. Whether you present it as a flat fee, a distance based fee, or an amount folded into every quote is a presentation choice, but the amount should come from that calculation rather than from a round number that sounds acceptable.
Do I charge for the time spent getting parts?
One way or another, yes, because it is time you cannot sell to anybody else. Some people bill it as labour, some fold it into parts markup, and some avoid it by having parts delivered. What does not work is treating it as free, because the parts run is one of the largest unbilled blocks in a mobile week.
How do I raise my rate without losing customers?
Change it for new customers first, give existing ones notice with a specific reason, and change what the price includes at the same time if you can, so the conversation is about a different offer rather than a bigger number for the same thing. Some loss is expected and is usually concentrated among the customers who were least profitable anyway.