do you charge for your time driving to & from the job?

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zappy

zappy

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Do you include it along with labor,gas,material? Sometimes i think i should'nt because most people that work for someone else don't get paid for driving to work and back home time.
 
zappy said:
Do you include it along with labor,gas,material? Sometimes i think i should'nt because most people that work for someone else don't get paid for driving to work and back home time.
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Yes I charge for both directioms but gas is part of the overhead included in my price.
 
Depends.... As a broader scope of overhead it is a cost of doing biz... Charge accordingly. I wouldn't have it as an itemized portion of your billing, but it is and should be part of your rate.

Site to Site - you're paying for it - so charge for it. From say your house to site maybe not - but say from your office or shop - yeah. If say your house is your office or shop - yeah.... Depending on where and when you start and end your day.
 
Speaking as an engineer, I do. If I am required to attend a design review meeting that lasts one hour, and if the round trip drive takes an hour, I will charge two hours to the project. I will also submit an expense report for the mileage, and that will usually make its way into our invoice to the client. This is all part of our contract with the client.

That said, now speaking as a homeowner, if I were to hire someone to do work at my house, and if you were going to charge me for the drive to or the drive from my house, I would want to know that when we first speak about the job. Tell me your terms, and I will decide if I think them fair, and I may decide to shop around for better terms. But if you don't tell me your terms, and if you try to charge me for something I was not expecting to pay for (such as paying labor rates for your lunch break), we are going to have words. Here again, put it in your contract, so that there is no room for disagreements later.
 
zappy said:
Do you include it along with labor,gas,material? Sometimes i think i should'nt because most people that work for someone else don't get paid for driving to work and back home time.
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If you worked for someone else and drove around in their truck you'd want to get paid wouldn't you? If you don't want to list it as a seperate charge, work it into your overhead.
 
Here's another way for you to look at it:

When someone hires you for a job, they're paying you to not be working somewhere else instead. Why should you drive to a job free when you could be working elsewhere during the same time and getting paid without question?

So, yes, absolutely, driving time counts.
 
If you do service work, or jobbing, you better. How to do it is the tricky part. Say you need $800/day/truck to cover payroll, OH and make a profit. That's $100/hr. Service work runs about 50% productivity.

Do you bill your customer $100 for your time and an additional $100 for travel?

Do you just bill them $200/hr for the time you are there?

Or do you flat rate it, and give them a total price that includes your travel?

For residential, they don't all work equally.
 
"Do you include it along with labor,gas,material? Sometimes i think i should'nt because most people that work for someone else don't get paid for driving to work and back home time."

People that work for someone else don't have the overhead that a contractor has.

Travel time should be included in your rate, whether you make it a separate line item such as a trip charge or service charge or just include it in your hourly/Flat rate is up to you.

As for what Charlie B said, it is not up to the customer to decide what they think is fair about your pricing model, they have no concept of overhead or the cost of doing business. I'll give you my price and if you don't think it is fair then find somebody else ( and there is no shortage of contractors under charging and going out of business). I'm not going to explain in detail to a customer how I arrive at my price.


What is amazing to me is how a customer will pay an auto mechanic with no question $300 for a tune up that takes an hour ( this after you bring the car to them mind you) but they will try and nit pick a contractors price and expect them not to recover the travel time to and from the job.
 
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Rich R said:
What is amazing to me is how a customer will pay an auto mechanic with no question $300 for a tune up that takes an hour ( this after you bring the car to them mind you) but they will try and nit pick a contractors price and expect them not to recover the travel time to and from the job.
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And you have to bring the car to him, customers have no idea of the overhead and operating cost, of a full time small service business.
 
I spent over 22 hours driving to and from one job, someones got to pay for that time and $990.00 in fuel in one week OUCH.
 
brian john said:
I spent over 22 hours driving to and from one job, someones got to pay for that time and $990.00 in fuel in one week OUCH.
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I suggest you get a GPS. Or at least buy a map:D
 
and DC is easy to get around in...if he was in Boston, he might have had 44 hrs of travel (that town is one of the worst to drive in)....:D
 
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