Mobile Tyre Fitter Hourly Rate Calculator
This free calculator works out the hourly rate a self-employed mobile tyre fitter should charge for their time, starting from the income you need, then builds the per-tyre and call-out prices clients actually pay out of the hours each fitting honestly holds. Clients buy a car that can move again — the flat swapped in the office car park, the worn pair replaced on the driveway before the school run — and they picture the tyres when they picture the cost. Inside that price hides a workshop that fits in a van: the fitting machine and balancer riding in the back, the stock chosen each morning against the day’s bookings, wheels torqued and pressures set at a kerb instead of a ramp, and all of it done where the car already is. The tyre itself is a part with a brand and a size, and it belongs on the invoice as itself; what the client pays the fitter for is the machine, the judgement and the journey. With the honest presets below the rate lands near $91 an hour, $728 for a full day — and the work built from it: a single tyre fitted where the car sits at about forty-five minutes, $68 of labour; a pair at about an hour and a quarter, $114; a full set of four at about two hours, $182 — the rubber beside each figure as its own line.
The pricing reality for mobile tyre fitters
Mobile fitting is bought per tyre and per visit, and earned twice over: once at the wheel and once on the road between wheels. The fitting itself is brisk — bead broken, tyre swapped, balanced, torqued — but each job carries its island of travel, set-up and packing away around it, and the day’s profit is decided by routing: six fittings in one postcode are a business, six fittings in six postcodes are a driving job with tyres attached. Two cars wearing the same tyre size work very differently: alloys that surrender their wheels politely, and a corroded run-flat on a car park ramp in the rain that turns forty-five minutes into ninety.
It answers for the four contact patches and nothing else, which is where it parts from the neighbours. The car mechanic answers for how the car runs — diagnostics, brakes and engines, mostly over a ramp in a workshop; the fitter’s whole world is where rubber meets road, and the workshop travels. The mobile car detailer works the same driveways but perfects how the car looks; the fitter’s work is safety hardware, torqued and balanced. Its closest mechanical cousin is the paintless dent repair technician — another van, another route of small precise jobs — but dent repair persuades panels while the fitter replaces the one part of the car designed to be replaced.
The numbers below are starting presets, not a survey: a $52,000 target income, $13,500 a year of expenses — the van and fuel leads, with the tyre machine, balancer and fitting equipment, tools, jacks and compressor, tyre stock carried on the van, liability insurance, waste tyre disposal, phone, booking and job software, marketing, and training — a 25% tax estimate, four weeks of vacation, a 40-hour week and 55% billable time. With those starting numbers the calculator lands near $91 an hour. The billable share is the shape of van work: the fitting bills, but the driving between driveways, car parks and roadsides — and the waiting on a stock delivery — does not, and the per-tyre price has to carry the journeys inside it.
Your numbers — mobile tyre fitter 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 mobile tyre fitters forget to put in the rate
- The van is the workshop. Fitting machine, balancer, compressor, generator — a workshop’s worth of equipment riding in the back, bought, maintained and eventually replaced. Every fitting is done with it, so every fitting carries a share of it.
- Tyres asleep in the back. A fitter who arrives without the size is a messenger, not a service: stock is carried against the day’s bookings, and money sleeps in rubber until it is fitted. The float — and the sizes that come back unfitted — are costs of being ready.
- Old tyres are a bill, not a bin. Every tyre fitted leaves a corpse that must be disposed of properly, at a per-tyre fee, through licensed channels. Disposal rides on every job; the fitter who forgets it is subsidising the dump.
- Locking wheel nuts and other ambushes. The missing locking key, the nut swollen in its seat, the alloy welded to the hub by corrosion: small jobs hide their delays inside the wheel arch, and the day’s schedule absorbs them. Fitting time that assumes clean wheels is fiction.
- The roadside hour. A motorway verge at night is not a driveway at noon: emergency call-outs carry the travel, the wait and the hour itself. Priced as an ordinary fitting, the call-out quietly taxes every daytime job that subsidises it.
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 mobile tyre fitter presets — four weeks off, 40 hours a week, 55% billable — that is 1,056 billable hours a year: the fitting, repairing and balancing clients can pay for, once the driving between them has taken its share.
Next, work out what those hours must bring in. Add your desired income and your annual business expenses together — $65,500 on the presets — gross the total up for tax by dividing by one minus your tax rate — at a 25% estimate, divide by 0.75 to get $87,333 — then add your profit margin to reach $96,067 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 prices clients actually buy. The single tyre is the headline unit: fitted, balanced and torqued where the car sits, at about forty-five minutes — $68 of labour, with the tyre itself beside it as its own line, brand and size named. A pair at about an hour and a quarter, $114; a full set of four, the morning’s driveway visit, at about two hours, $182; a day routed through a postcode at $728. The emergency call-out is priced as what it is: the fitting at these figures plus a call-out that pays for the road and the hour it happens at — shown as its own line, so the daytime jobs stop subsidising the midnight ones. Quoted that way, the client can see what they are buying: not a journey to a fitting bay and a morning in a waiting room, but the bay arriving at the car.
Mobile Tyre Fitter rate questions
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