How Much To Charge For A Road Call

Most mobile diesel operators should be billing $150 to $195 an hour with a two-hour minimum, plus a $75 to $150 trip charge. After hours, that goes up 1.5x. Weekends and holidays, 2x to 2.5x.

If that number made you wince, keep reading, because there is a good chance you are underpriced and the math below will show you by how much.

What shops are actually charging in 2026

These are published rates, not guesses. Two real rate cards, and the survey median.

The $149 and $160 medians come from Fullbay's State of Heavy-Duty Repair, which surveys thousands of shops with ASE and the ATA's Technology and Maintenance Council. The rate cards are two real operators publishing what they charge.

Notice the gap. Mobile bills about $11 an hour more than in-shop at the median. Most mobile guys are not charging even that much of a premium, and they should be charging more.

Start with your break-even, not the other guy's rate

Here is the mistake almost everybody makes. You call around, find out the shop across town charges $130, and you charge $125.

That is not pricing. That is copying somebody who might also be broke.

Work it from the bottom instead:

A diesel tech costs you about $45 an hour, loaded. That is a $65,000 salary plus payroll taxes and benefits burden, divided by the roughly 1,800 hours a mobile tech actually bills in a year. Not 2,080. You lose hours to drive time, parts runs, paperwork and truck maintenance.

Add overhead and your break-even lands somewhere between $72 and $95 an hour.

Add a profit that is worth getting out of bed for and your floor is $90 to $119 an hour before you have made a dime worth keeping.

So if you are billing $65 an hour with no parts markup, you are not running a business. You are running a very expensive hobby. Somebody on a diesel forum put it better than I can:

"I ran $65 an hour no markup on parts this was the down fall."

The trip charge and the two-hour minimum are not optional

Your truck is a rolling shop. Getting it to the job is the product.

Charge a trip fee of $75 to $150 inside your normal radius, and mileage past it. The going rate is $2.00 to $5.00 a mile, and the logic is simple: the IRS mileage rate covers your cost, so multiply it by three to five to cover what that drive time was worth instead.

Then set a two-hour minimum. Both published rate cards above do. A road call that takes forty minutes still cost you an hour and a half of driving, and you cannot resell that time to anybody.

Zone pricing works well if your area is spread out:

• Zone 1, first 15 miles: no trip charge
• Zone 2, 16 to 30 miles: $75 to $125
• Zone 3, 31 to 50 miles: $150 to $250
• Zone 4, past 50: $275 to $400 plus mileage

After hours is not a favor. It is a third of your money

This is the part worth sitting with.

Emergency and after-hours work runs 30 to 40 percent of total revenue for an established mobile diesel operation. Not a side hustle. Not a nuisance. A third of the business.

And it is your highest-margin third, because the multiplier stacks on top of a rate that is already the highest you charge:

• After hours: 1.5x, so $150 becomes $225
• Weekends and holidays: 2x to 2.5x, so $150 becomes $300 to $375
• Same-day urgent that bumps scheduled work: add $150 to $350

A fleet with a loaded reefer sitting on the shoulder at 2am is not shopping around on price. Their downtime clock is running at hundreds of dollars an hour. You charging them a night rate is not gouging. It is the only reason you got out of bed instead of letting it wait until Tuesday.

If you are charging your day rate at midnight, you are subsidizing a fleet's logistics problem out of your own sleep.

The leak almost nobody plugs: parts

Labor gets all the attention. Parts is where the money quietly walks out.

The heavy-duty benchmark for parts is 45 percent gross profit. What shops actually average, across thousands of them: average parts cost $195, average parts revenue $246. That is 21 percent.

Run that gap.

At the 45% benchmark:   $195 / 0.55  =  $354.55 billed
What most shops bill:                   $246.00
                                        --------
Gap per repair order:                   $108.55

At 65 repair orders a month, that is about $7,000 a month you are handing over for nothing. No extra labor, no extra drive time, no extra risk. Just a number in a box.

Use a parts matrix instead of a flat markup. Higher percentage on cheap parts, lower on expensive ones. A fifty cent bolt should bill at two-fifty. A $4,000 turbo does not need an 80 percent markup and your customer will notice if it has one.

A rate card you can copy

Start here and adjust for your market:

• Standard mobile labor: $150 to $195/hr, two-hour minimum
• After hours (nights, weekends): 1.5x, so $225 to $290/hr
• Holidays: 2x to 2.5x
• Trip charge: $100 inside 30 miles, $2.50/mile past it
• Diagnostic: $150, credited toward an approved repair
• Parts: matrix pricing targeting 45 percent gross
• Shop supplies: 5 to 6 percent of labor, capped around $40

Then review it every single year. Only 45 percent of shops assess their labor rate annually, and 46 percent just match whatever the competition charges. Meanwhile technician wages went up 14.1 percent in one year while labor rates went up 7.4 to 10 percent.

That gap is not a rounding error. That is the trade quietly compressing its own margins, and the only shops that escape it are the ones that raise their rate on purpose.

One last thing about the 2am call

You can have the best rate card in the county and it does not matter if the phone rings while you are under a truck and goes to voicemail.

That is the ugly math behind all of this. Your after-hours work is the highest-margin third of your revenue, and it arrives on the one channel you physically cannot get to.

Somebody else answers, and they bill your rate.