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The minimum you charge even if the job takes ten minutes
Once you've got that down, you know what to do with a short service call: with individual customers, you knock the actual time off their package and charge the trip fee separately, and a flat minimum per call is something you only agree to with businesses or professionals.
By Yodai · Published September 6, 2026 · Updated October 12, 2026
A customer with a ten-hour package calls you about a five-minute fix: a dripping faucet washer, four turns of a wrench and you're done. Do you just subtract five minutes from the package? If that's all you do, nobody's paying for the drive over, the parking, or the toolbox you hauled out of the trunk.
The problem doesn't show up with that one client. It shows up when you've had ten calls just as short in a single month: you've gone out ten times, and the packages only show fifty minutes used. That's where your margin slips away, and it never shows up on any single invoice. It shows up when you compare how many jobs you ran that month against the hours you actually got paid for.
The time it takes to figure out what's wrong
You already decided to sell hours of work, not one-off visits. But inside every call there are two distinct stretches. One is figuring out what's wrong: looking, testing, ruling things out. The other is fixing it, once you already know what to touch. The first stretch takes about the same time whether the problem turns out to be simple or complicated.
If you only deduct the second stretch from the package, you're giving away the first one for free. And that first stretch is your work, backed by your experience: knowing where to look first is what makes you faster than someone without the trade, not a free part of the service.
Diagnosis doesn't weigh the same in every trade
A computer repair tech who makes house calls diagnoses on-site: he turns the machine on, checks what's wrong, decides if it's the hard drive or the charger. That diagnosis might take him ten minutes or forty, depending on the case, which is why he deducts only the actual time: a flat minimum would charge an individual customer for work that never happened. If he works for businesses and they agree on a minimum block, then a generous one, half an hour or more, makes sense.
A hairstylist who does house calls for a specific style barely diagnoses anything: she knows what she's going to do before she leaves home, because the client already told her when booking. The only thing that doesn't change here is leaving the house and packing her kit, not deciding what to do, and that's exactly what makes sense to charge separately as a trip fee, if it's not already baked into the hourly rate.
Actual time comes out of the package; the trip fee is charged separately
With an individual customer, the actual time of each call, diagnosis included, comes out of the package, with no rounding up: consumer protection law considers it unfair to charge for time the customer didn't actually use, except in trades with their own specific rules, like in-home appliance repair. What the law does allow is charging separately for a cost that's unavoidably tied to starting the job, like a house call, if it's not already in your hourly rate and it matches the service you provide. Set it as a flat trip fee per call, the same for every customer in the same area. With a business or a professional who hires you for their company, you can agree in writing on a minimum block per call, half an hour, for example.
Watch out for the opposite extreme too: charging a full hour for a ten-minute fix is also costly, just in a different way. It doesn't add up for the customer; they'll do the math and call you out on it. And they'd be right: charging for the diagnosis is one thing, charging for work you never did is something else entirely.
There's one case worth deciding ahead of time: the customer who cancels the moment you arrive, before you've touched anything. If you've already made the trip and started looking things over, that call deducts the minutes you spent assessing it, and the trip fee is charged just the same. You did work, even if it turns out nothing needed fixing. Decide this now, in writing, not case by case on the day of the call.
- Works for problems you can identify at a glance: a tripped outlet, a dripping faucet
- The client barely notices a difference between how long the call took and what gets deducted
- Works for services where you need to test several possible causes before knowing what's wrong: an old electrical system, a leak with no visible source
- Covers the time spent setting up and testing tools, not just thinking
- Worth stating before the first visit, because on a very short job the client will notice the deduction
- This fits best with trades where diagnosis time varies a lot from one call to the next, like a computer tech who services offices
Which one do I pick: With individual customers, none: deduct the actual time and charge the trip fee separately. With businesses, time the diagnosis over a normal week of simple calls, don't just estimate it from memory. If most of your issues are obvious at a glance, fifteen minutes is plenty. If you usually need to test a few things before touching anything, bump it up to half an hour. And if your lineup mixes both types of service, the block doesn't have to be the same for each one: set it per service, not per package.
Those two rules, actual time and the trip fee, are written into the terms you hand over when you sell the package, and on each call you apply them yourself when you log it in your tracking sheet: you don't need to explain them to the customer every time, because they've had them in writing since day one.
Write it the same way for every customer who gets the same service. A rule that changes depending on the day, or on how much you happen to like the customer, is the one that causes the most arguments when two people compare their balances with each other.
- With individual customers, the actual time of each call, diagnosis included, with the trip fee charged separately at a flat rate
- With businesses or professionals, and only if you agree on it in writing, a minimum block per call: half an hour, for example
- The standard for setting that block based on how long diagnosis actually takes you, not from memory
- The exact written terms you hand over when you sell the package
- The decision already made for a call that gets canceled the moment you arrive
Test yourself
Answer before opening each one. If one gives you trouble, go back to the section that explains it.
1. A locksmith opens a stuck door in eight minutes and spots the problem right away, without needing to test anything. Should his minimum block be fifteen minutes or thirty?
It depends on who you're working for. If it's an individual's door, none: deduct the eight minutes and charge the trip fee separately. If it's a business and you've agreed on a block, fifteen minutes: the diagnosis is immediate, and setting a half-hour minimum for a job that's obvious at a glance is exactly what makes a customer complain the first time they check their balance.
2. A landscaper has a twenty-hour package with a client and in the same week makes two ten-minute calls for her, in the same yard, for two different things. What comes out of the package and what gets charged separately?
Twenty minutes of work come out of the package, ten per call: with an individual client there's no minimum block. The trip fee is charged both times, because each call is a separate trip for a separate thing. Combining both into a single visit is a different call to make, but it's made by whoever's doing the work before heading out, not by the package afterward.
3. A plumber shows up to a problem, checks it out for ten minutes, and the customer decides right then that they don't want it fixed yet. Do you deduct anything even though nothing got fixed?
Yes, the ten minutes of inspection, plus the trip fee if you charge it separately: the diagnosis has already been done and it's real work, backed by the plumber's expertise. Not deducting it would treat that time as if it never happened, and it did. What you don't deduct from an individual customer is a minimum block beyond those ten minutes.
The short service call is settled; next is deciding what happens when the job runs over an hour instead of running short.
NextRunning over time: what you deduct from the balance