Electrician Service Call Rates: What to Charge
Most electricians either guess at their service call rate or copy whatever the guy down the road charges. Both are a good way to leave money on the table.
Here's a straight answer: what a service call should cost, when to waive the fee, and how to say the number out loud without starting an argument.
What a service call rate actually covers
A service call rate isn't your hourly labor rate. It's the cost of loading up the truck, driving out, and diagnosing the problem before you've done a single minute of repair work.
Most solo electricians charge $75 to $150 just to show up and figure out what's wrong. That's separate from whatever the actual repair costs once you know what you're dealing with.
What to actually charge
Realistic ranges for most markets: a trip fee or diagnostic charge runs $75 to $150. Your hourly rate once you're actually working should land at $100 to $150. After-hours or emergency calls should carry a 1.5x to 2x premium over your normal rate.
If your market runs higher or lower than that, adjust from here. For the full breakdown by job type, the electrical pricing guide covers flat rate vs. hourly and what to charge for standard jobs.
Should you waive the trip fee?
Plenty of guys waive the service call fee if the customer hires them for the repair. That's a reasonable move, but it should be a choice you make on purpose, not something you do by default because you're worried about losing the job.
Waive it every time and you're training customers to expect free diagnostics. Over a year of calls, that adds up to real money.
How to say it without an argument
Most pushback happens because the fee gets explained wrong, or not explained at all until the customer sees it on the invoice.
Say it plain, up front: "That call is $95. It covers me coming out and telling you exactly what's wrong. If you want me to fix it today, that gets rolled into the final invoice." Nobody argues with that. They argue with a number that shows up with no explanation attached.
The part that quietly kills your margin
Drive time. If you're not building windshield time into your service call rate, you're working for free every time a job is more than ten minutes from your last stop. Either bake it into the trip fee or charge a mileage rate past a set radius. Pick one and stick to it.
None of this matters much if the invoice for the call takes you fifteen minutes to write up that night. OhmFlow turns your notes into a professional invoice in 45 seconds so the job actually gets billed the same day, not whenever you get around to it. It's built specifically for solo electricians running one truck, service calls included.