How to price emergency and callout work
A two hour callout consumes four and a half hours of your day. Billing two of them is how emergency work loses money.
The short answer
Price a callout against the whole block of time it removes from your day, not the hours spent on site. Travel, the interruption to scheduled work and the time getting back into it are all consumed by the callout, and a minimum charge is the mechanism that recovers them.
The formula
time consumed = on-site hours + travel + disruption to the scheduled job
cost = time consumed x cost per billable hour
minimum callout price = cost x (1 + markup%)
then add materials at their own markup
Disruption is real and measurable. Stopping a sequenced job and restarting it costs time at both ends, and on finishing trades the restart can be worse than the stop.
Worked example
Two hours on site, an hour of travel, and an hour and a half lost stopping and restarting the scheduled job, at a $46.42 cost per billable hour:
time consumed = 2 + 1 + 1.5 = 4.5 hours
cost = 4.5 x 46.42 = 208.89
charged at two hours x 79 = 158.00
loss on the callout = 50.89
minimum callout at 33.3% markup = 208.89 x 1.333 = 278.45
Charging your normal hourly rate for the two hours on site loses $50.89. The callout needs to be about $280 before it pays, which is a very different conversation to have on the phone.
Structure the charge so it is easy to say
A callout fee covering the first block of time, then an hourly rate after it. It is standard across trades, customers expect it, and it prices the interruption without requiring you to explain disruption cost to someone whose boiler has failed.
State it before you travel. A price agreed on the phone is a price; a price presented on the doorstep after a journey is a negotiation you are badly placed to win.
Out of hours is a different rate, not a different mood
Evenings, weekends and holidays cost you more in real terms: overtime multipliers on employed labor, and a genuine cost to your own time that you should not pretend is free.
Publish the multiplier rather than deciding it in the moment. A stated out-of-hours rate reads as professional and a number invented on a Sunday night reads as opportunism, even when they are the same figure.
What emergency work is actually worth to your business
It is how a lot of good customers arrive. Someone whose emergency you solved on a Friday evening is disproportionately likely to call you for the planned work later, and to recommend you.
That is an argument for doing it well, not for doing it cheaply. Underpricing callouts fills your week with interruptions that displace planned work, and planned work is where the margin is.
If callouts are crowding out scheduled jobs, the price is too low. That is the clearest signal available and it is usually read as being busy rather than as a pricing problem.
What this leaves out
- Uses a loaded cost per billable hour. Pricing callouts off a wage understates them by the same margin as everywhere else.
- Disruption of 1.5 hours is illustrative. On some trades and sequences it is far more, and on a day with no scheduled work it is nearly zero.
- Excludes stock carried on the van for emergencies, which ties up cash and belongs in overhead.
This arithmetic is free to run in your browser — no signup, nothing held back.
Open the free calculatorCommon questions
- What should a callout fee cover?
- Travel, the first block of time on site, and the disruption to whatever you left. Covering only the time on site guarantees the callout loses money, which is the most common structure and the reason emergency work has a bad reputation among trades.
- Should I charge more out of hours?
- Yes, and publish the rate. Out of hours costs you more in labor and in life, and a stated multiplier is far easier to defend than a number decided at 11pm.
- Is it worth doing emergency work at all?
- Priced properly, often yes, because it wins customers who then need planned work. Priced at your normal hourly rate it is a way of being busy while earning less, and it displaces the jobs that actually pay.
Spreadsheets that do this
The formulas above, already built and checked — so you fill in your numbers rather than the arithmetic.
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Last reviewed 22 August 2026