Most tradespeople are donating 6 to 12 hours of labor to their customers every single week and calling it "the cost of doing business."
It's not. It's a pricing mistake.
Drive time is work. You're in your truck, your tools are loaded, your brain is on the job. The only difference between being on-site and being in transit is the zip code. If you're running 4 to 6 jobs a day across a metro area, you're easily burning 90 minutes in the truck before you've touched a single tool. At a $95 hourly rate, that's $142 gone before lunch.
Multiply that by five days. That's $710 a week. Over a year, that's more than $36,000 you worked for free.
Why You're Not Charging (And Why That Logic Is Broken)
The reason most guys don't charge for travel is fear. Fear that the customer will say no. Fear that the competitor down the street doesn't charge it. Fear of the awkward conversation.
Here's what's actually happening: your competitor isn't charging for it, so they're either broke or they've baked it into their rates in a way that's invisible to the customer. You can do the same thing, but if you're quoting hourly or doing flat-rate service calls, you're leaving it on the table clean.
The customer who balks at a $25 to $50 travel fee and cancels was never going to be a good customer anyway. They were already looking for the cheapest option. You don't build a real business on those people.
The Exact Language to Use
You don't need to justify it. You need to state it plainly.
When quoting over the phone or in a confirmation message, say this:
"There's a $35 travel fee that covers our drive time to your location. That's separate from the service call rate. Everything else is quoted on-site or by the job."
That's it. No apology. No "unfortunately." No "we've recently had to start charging."
In practice, fewer than 1 in 10 customers pushes back when it's presented as a standard line item rather than a new add-on. It's the framing that kills you, not the fee itself.
If you use a booking or dispatch tool, put it in writing at the confirmation stage so it's never a surprise at the door. Surprises at the door become bad reviews. Surprises at the booking stage become accepted terms.
How to Structure It
There are three ways to handle this:
Flat travel fee. Charge a fixed $25 to $50 per job depending on your typical drive radius. Clean, simple, easy to explain.
Zone-based pricing. Split your service area into inner and outer zones. Inner zone is $25, outer zone is $45. This rewards customers who are close and captures more margin from the long hauls.
Built into the minimum. Raise your minimum service call rate by $30 to $50 and stop itemizing travel separately. Some customers feel better not seeing it broken out. You get paid either way.
The built-in method works best if you get a lot of price-sensitive callers who scrutinize line items. The flat fee works best if you want transparency and fewer surprises. Either is better than zero.
What to Do With That Recovered Revenue
In practice, tradespeople who add a flat travel fee to every job recover $400 to $900 a week depending on volume. That's not found money to spend. That's the margin that funds your next van, your first hire, or the slow season when work drops 40% and your fixed costs don't.
Most solo operators are one bad month away from pulling from personal savings. Travel fees are not a luxury line item. They are part of building a business that doesn't break you.
VettedCalls exists because the calls you're missing while you're driving are just as expensive as the unpaid drive time itself. But that's a problem for another issue.
The drive time problem you can fix today.
This week's move
Add one line to your next phone quote or booking confirmation: "There's a $35 travel fee that covers our drive time" — and say it the same way every time until it feels automatic.
Forward this
If another tradie you know is still losing leads to voicemail, send them VettedCalls.