How much should you charge for mobile detailing?

The honest answer is that there is no national rate, and anyone who gives you one is selling a course. What there is: a range most one-van operators fall inside, a method for placing yourself in it, and a way to check afterwards whether the number was any good.

Start with the size of the vehicle, not the service

A full interior on a two-door coupe and a full interior on a crew-cab pickup are the same words and not the same afternoon. The truck has more glass, more carpet, more seat, and usually more of whatever the owner has spilled on it. Pricing them the same is a slow way to lose money on exactly the customers who call most.

The simplest structure that survives contact with real customers is one price list with a size multiplier on top:

Those multipliers are a starting point, not gospel. The thing that matters is that they exist at all and that you apply them the same way every time, including to the friend-of-a-friend.

Getting the size right without arguing about it

Customers will call a Highlander a car. You can settle this before you arrive by decoding the VIN — the seventeen characters on the windscreen tell you the body class the manufacturer registered, so a Crew Cab prices as a truck whatever anyone calls it on the phone. Mobile Detail Pro does that decode automatically and sets the price bracket; you can override it if the vehicle deserves it.

Then work out what the hour was actually worth

This is where most detailers stop, and it is the part that decides whether the business works.

Take one real job. Subtract what you spent on chemicals and pads. Subtract the fuel to get there and back. Divide what is left by the total time from leaving your driveway to leaving theirs — not the time with a machine in your hand.

A $250 detail that took five hours door to door, with $22 of product and $14 of fuel, paid you $42.80 an hour. That is a real number. "I charge $250" is not.

Do that for ten jobs and the pattern shows up fast: usually one service or one type of vehicle is quietly subsidising the rest.

What to do with drive time

Mobile means you are paid for detailing and not paid for driving, so the radius you accept is a pricing decision. Two workable approaches:

• A flat travel fee outside a set radius — simple to explain, easy to quote on the phone.
• A minimum job value that rises with distance — better if you would rather fill the day with bigger work than more work.

Either beats the common third option, which is absorbing it and wondering why a busy week did not pay.

Raising prices without losing the book

Raise on new customers first and leave existing ones alone for a cycle. You will know within a fortnight whether the new number sticks, and you have not spent your repeat base to find out. If the phone keeps ringing at the new price, move the repeats up at their next visit and tell them plainly, once, without apologising for it.

The check that matters

At the end of a month, you want to be able to answer one question without a shoebox: what did I make? Not what did I invoice — what was left after product, fuel and the things that quietly leave the account. If you cannot answer that, the price is a guess no matter how confidently you say it.