Stop guessing what to charge. Enter your costs, the income you want, and the hours you can actually bill — this shows your break-even rate and the hourly rate you should charge to hit your target.
To find your hourly rate, add your yearly business overhead to the take-home pay you want, add a profit buffer, and divide by the hours you can actually bill in a year. Most mobile mechanics undercharge because they price off what shops charge instead of their own numbers — and because they forget that driving, quoting, and admin aren't billable. This does the math for you.
Join Mechanics Alliance to save your numbers, and—as the State of Mobile Mechanics survey fills in—see how your rate compares to real mobile mechanics in your region and years in business.
Join free More toolsYour target rate is (overhead + take-home pay) × (1 + buffer) ÷ billable hours per year. The trap most mechanics fall into is dividing by hours worked instead of hours billed. If you work 50 hours but only bill 25, half your time is unpaid drive-and-admin — and your rate has to carry that. That's why a mobile mechanic billing 25 hours a week often needs a higher rate than a shop tech who's wrenching most of the day.
Your break-even rate only covers overhead — it's the floor. Never quote near it. The gap between break-even and your target rate is your actual pay.
The benchmark in the results panel is the annual median wage for Automotive Service Technicians and Mechanics, occupation code 49-3023, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey for May 2025. We pulled all fifty states plus the District of Columbia straight from the BLS public API. As a check, the state employment figures sum to exactly 704,640, which is the published national total.
Read that comparison carefully, because it is not a labor rate. It is what an employed technician takes home, and an employee does not pay for the van, the insurance, the tools, the phone, or the hours spent driving and quoting. Your hourly rate has to sit well above an employee’s hourly wage just to match their take-home. That gap is the entire reason this calculator exists.
One more thing worth knowing about the federal number: it excludes the self-employed entirely, by design, because the survey samples employer payroll records. The BLS Employment Projections program, which does count the self-employed, puts this occupation at 825,800 against the 704,640 that OEWS records. The roughly 121,000 difference is essentially the self-employed, which is to say people doing what you do. There is no federal wage figure for that group at any geography.
Add up insurance, your van payment and fuel, tool and equipment costs, phone, software/subscriptions, and marketing. Most solo mobile mechanics land between $1,200 and $2,600 a month. When in doubt, estimate high — undercounting overhead is how you accidentally work for free.
Not automatically. You save the customer a tow and come to them, which is worth a premium — but you also bill fewer hours per day because you drive between jobs. Price off your own numbers first, then sanity-check against the local market.
No — this is your labor rate only. Parts are billed on top, usually at cost plus a markup. Use the Job Profit Calculator to price a full job with parts.