Appliance repair technician hourly rate calculator
This free calculator works out the hourly rate a freelance appliance repair technician should charge, starting from the income you need — pricing the diagnostic hour properly instead of giving it away inside a callout fee. Clients meet your price in pieces: a callout, a repair, a part. Underneath, all three are your hours plus the van that carries them. With the honest presets below the rate lands near $91 an hour, $729 for a full day — and the conversion clients actually buy: the diagnostic visit is about an hour of your skill door to door, $91 of labour inside the callout fee, and a two-hour repair carries $182 of labour with the parts priced as their own line.
The pricing reality for freelance appliance repair technicians
Appliance repair is sold in pieces — a diagnostic visit, then labour, then parts — and the piece most often priced by guesswork is the first one. The diagnostic hour is the most skilled hour of the whole job: it is the hour that decides whether the machine lives, what it needs and what the repair will cost. Give that hour away free, or price it as a token, and the repairs that follow have to carry it — which is why so many repair rounds feel busy and pay thin.
The van is the second reality: a workshop and a warehouse that both charge rent. A stock of common parts rides with you so a repair finishes in one visit, and that stock is capital asleep until the day it saves a second trip. The driving between jobs bills nothing. Warranty callbacks bill nothing. Parts runs bill nothing. The presets below use a 60% billable share: the hours at the machine bill in full, and the route, the stockroom and the callbacks take theirs first.
The third reality is that a repair is not finished when you leave the house. It is finished when the ordered part arrives, survives the courier and turns out to be the variant the manufacturer actually fitted that year. Model numbers fork into production runs, and the pump listed against a machine is sometimes one of three. Every wrong-part round trip is unpaid route time, and every day a machine sits dead is a day the client reconsiders whether the repair is worth finishing at all. Technicians who work from the rating plate — photograph it before ordering, every time — run fewer second visits than technicians who order from the fault code alone, and their weeks hold together noticeably better for it.
The numbers below are starting presets, not a survey: a $62,000 target income, $14,000 a year of expenses — van and fuel lead, with tools and diagnostic equipment, the parts stock you carry, liability insurance, licences and refrigerant-handling certification, dispatch software and marketing — a 22% tax estimate and 60% billable time. Notice what is not in the rate: the part fitted to a client’s machine. That is the client’s line on the invoice — at cost, or at cost plus a handling margin you state — never a cost hiding inside your hour. With those starting numbers the calculator lands near $91 an hour.
Your numbers — appliance repair technician presets
Your recommended rate
| Income + expenses needed | $0 |
| Grossed up for tax | $0 |
| With profit margin | $0 |
| Working weeks | 0 |
| Total working hours | 0 |
| Billable hours | 0 |
Your rate is saved on this device only, so the Proposal Generator can show it when you price a project.
Costs appliance repair technicians forget to put in the rate
- The free diagnosis. Driving across town to pronounce a machine dead, free, three times a week. The diagnosis is skilled work with a cost — van, fuel, insurance, your hour — and pricing it at zero does not make you competitive; it makes the paying repairs carry the unpaid ones.
- Warranty callbacks. A repair that fails inside its guarantee comes back on your time: the return trip, the second fix, sometimes the second part. Callbacks are a predictable share of repair work, and they live in the billable percentage, where they belong.
- Van stock asleep. Boards, pumps, elements and belts riding in the van are money parked in cardboard boxes. Some will never be fitted. The carrying cost of having the part to hand — the thing that makes one-visit repairs possible — is a real expense of the trade.
- The route between jobs. Three repairs in three suburbs can put two hours of driving inside a six-hour day. Jobs do not arrive in a tidy line on the map, and the miles between them are priced by nobody unless your rate prices them.
- Certification and compliance. Refrigerant handling, gas work in some places, licences and their renewals: the paperwork that lets you touch the machine legally is recurring, and it expires whether the diary is full or empty.
How this calculator works
Start with the hours you can genuinely sell. Take 52 weeks, subtract your vacation weeks, multiply by your hours per week, then multiply by your billable percentage. With the appliance repair presets — three weeks off, 40 hours a week, 60% billable — that is 1,176 billable hours a year: the hours at the machine that clients can pay for, once the driving, parts runs and callbacks have taken theirs.
Next, work out what those hours must bring in. Add your desired income and your annual business expenses together — $76,000 on the presets — gross the total up for tax by dividing by one minus your tax rate — at a 22% estimate, divide by 0.78 to get $97,436 — then add your profit margin to reach $107,179 and divide by your billable hours. That final number, $91, is the rate below which the year stops adding up.
Now translate the hour into the pieces clients buy. The diagnostic visit runs about an hour door to door — the travel is shared with the route, the skill is not — so the callout fee carries $91 of labour before any repair is agreed. A typical repair at two hours is $182 of labour, with the part priced as its own line on top. A solid day of four booked repair hours is $364 of labour: fewer hours than the day holds, which is exactly the point — the rate already knows about the driving.
Price a real route day against it. Three diagnostic visits at an hour each are $273 of labour. Two repairs at two hours each are another $364, so the day books $637 of labour across seven hours at machines — a strong day, and still short of the $729 day rate, because the day rate is a yearly average the diary has to hit across the month, not a toll every single day must pay. Quieter days book four hours, and the average is what keeps both honest. The day only goes wrong when one of those diagnostics was given away free: the same route returns $546, the driving is unchanged, and the missing $91 has to be earned back on a day that was already full.
Appliance repair rate questions
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