Should I charge customers for travel time?

Travel uses capacity even when tools are not in your hands

An hour spent driving to and from a job is an hour the business cannot sell somewhere else. Ignoring that time can make distant or scattered jobs look more profitable than they are.

Common ways businesses recover travel

• Build normal local travel into a minimum service charge.
• Use geographic service zones with different minimums.
• Add a trip or mobilization fee outside the normal area.
• Include expected travel time inside a flat project price.

Include vehicle economics too

Fuel is only part of vehicle cost. Maintenance, insurance, depreciation or payments and the driver's time can all matter. Avoid counting the same cost twice if vehicle overhead is already included elsewhere in your model.

Measure door-to-door job performance

When reviewing jobs, include the business time the job actually consumed. A one-hour service call that requires 90 minutes of round-trip travel occupies far more capacity than one productive hour.

Keep customer pricing simple

You can recover travel without presenting customers with complicated internal math. The important part is that your final price supports the real time and cost required to serve the job.