Trip Charge & Service Call Fee Calculator

Mileage cost is the round-trip miles times your cost per mile (the editable IRS standard rate, or gas price ÷ MPG). Drive-time labor is the drive minutes — derived from distance and average speed, or typed in — times your combined crew hourly rate. The two sum to a base fee, which is floored to your job minimum, then multiplied by the after-hours premium.

round_trip_miles = round_trip ? one_way × 2 : one_way
mileage_cost     = round_trip_miles × rate        (IRS)
                 = round_trip_miles × gas / mpg    (gas)
drive_minutes    = (one_way / speed) × 60 × (rt ? 2 : 1)   (derive)
                 = one_way_minutes × (rt ? 2 : 1)          (manual)
drive_labor      = (drive_minutes / 60) × crew_rate
base_fee         = mileage_cost + drive_labor
floored_fee      = max(base_fee, job_minimum)
final_fee        = floored_fee × after_hours_multiplier
recommended      = round to nearest $5
band             = ±20% of the unrounded final fee, each to nearest $5

Worked example: 14 mi one-way, round trip (28 mi), IRS $0.70/mi, crew $25/hr, 22.5 min one-way (45 min round trip), $75 floor, weekend ×1.5 → mileage $19.60 + labor $18.75 = $38.35 base, floored to $75, ×1.5 = $112.50 → recommended $115 (range $90–$135).

After-hours multipliers (none 1.0 / evening 1.25 / weekend 1.5 / holiday 2.0) are round, defensible midpoints of cited trade ranges — edit them to your shop. Distance is whatever you enter; this tool does not look up routes or maps, which keeps it private and instant.

A trip charge is a per-visit fee, and it is a different instrument from a fuel surcharge, which moves across a whole book of work when pump prices do. Set that second one in the fuel surcharge calculator rather than burying it inside the fee this page returns.

The cost-per-mile figure this page multiplies by is worth deriving rather than guessing, which is what the vehicle cost per mile calculator does from your own running costs.

How the mechanical trades fold the same fee into a whole job is shown in HVAC service call pricing, and the plumbing job pricing calculator carries a trip-fee field that expects exactly the number this page produces.