$65 an hour. That is what the price list says a $130 house-call color earns across two hours of work. The appointment actually runs three hours and twenty minutes, door to door. After the car, the product, and self-employment tax, it pays closer to $25.
Most mobile stylists price house calls with salon logic: take the salon menu, add a vague “gas money” fee, book it. That structure ignores everything that makes off-site work different. Meanwhile the market is moving the other way. The mobile beauty market is projected to reach $28.5 billion by 2032, and clients accept premium pricing for convenience. The money is there. It gets lost in the drive.
The fix is to price one appointment as its own unit: every minute and every dollar, from the front door back to it. The worked example follows a mobile colorist in a mid-size metro; the numbers are hers, and the formula at the end is yours to refill.
The appointment is longer than the service
A salon color books as two chair hours. The same color at a client’s house books as five blocks of time.
| Block | Minutes |
|---|---|
| Drive to client (15 miles) | 25 |
| Setup: unload cart, mix color | 15 |
| Service | 120 |
| Teardown: pack, load, dispose | 15 |
| Drive home | 25 |
| Total | 200 |
Where the 3 hours 20 minutes actually go
Two hundred minutes. The client is paying for 120 of them. The other 80 are the appointment’s hidden freight, and the price list says nothing about them. Note also what service time means off-site: 45 of those 120 minutes are processing time, and processing happens at the client’s kitchen table. There is no second client to slide into that slot. In a salon, processing overlaps with other work. In a house call, it is dead time you still own.
What the car and the kit cost
The cash costs come in two layers: the car and the kit.
The car is the expensive one. EIA data put regular gasoline at $4.27 per gallon nationally in late October 2026. At 26 city miles per gallon, the 30-mile round trip burns about $4.93 in fuel. Fuel is the smallest piece. Depreciation, maintenance, and insurance ride along on every mile, which is why the IRS standard mileage rate exists: 76 cents per mile for the second half of 2026, up from 72.5 cents in the first half. That rate is the defensible full-cost basis for your car.
| Cost item | Math | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Vehicle (fuel, wear, insurance basis) | 30 miles x $0.76 | $22.80 |
| Color product (color, developer, foils, gloves) | $7.00 | |
| Off-site consumables (drop cloth, disposables, towel wash) | $3.00 | |
| Total cash cost | $32.80 |
The common response to this table is a flat $20 travel fee “for gas.” The fee fails twice. It does not cover the car even at the IRS rate, which is $22.80 for this trip. And it covers zero of the 80 non-service minutes. Self-employment tax then takes another 15.3% off the top of whatever survives, which is the hidden cost of independent work that surprises most solo operators.
The mobile hairdresser travel fee, built line by line
A travel fee has two jobs: cover the car and cover the clock. Price them separately.
M, the car. Bill per round-trip mile beyond your free radius. The IRS rate is your cost floor at $0.76; bill $1.00 per mile and the extra 24 cents is vehicle margin. That $1.00 is not a guess. A Check Cherry analysis of more than 2,000 travel zones found event-service businesses bill a median of $1.00 per mile, and 64% of those who charge per mile bill the round trip, because you have to drive home too.
T, the clock. Bill drive minutes beyond your free allowance at your cost per working minute. That is the number from the salon pricing formula: monthly overhead divided by billable minutes. For this colorist it is $0.57. Drive time gets billed at cost because its profit lives in the menu premium, which comes next.
🧮 The travel fee for a 15-mile-each-way client
Free zone: 10 round-trip miles, 20 drive minutes.
M: (30 miles − 10) x $1.00 = $20.00
T: (50 minutes − 20) x $0.57 = $17.10
Fee: $37.10 → quote $40
The market says this range is real. Dash Stylists, a network of mobile stylists, reports that doubling a drive radius adds $20 to $40 to the ticket. Two rules keep the fee clean: waive anything under $10, because the waiver costs less than the argument, and round up to the nearest $5. State the fee on the booking page before checkout. Per Nextro’s guide for mobile hairdressers, an unexpected travel charge on the day of the visit is the most common source of client complaints in mobile work.
Mobile salon pricing: the premium, the minimum, the list
The travel fee covers the drive. Two more numbers complete mobile salon pricing: the menu premium and the minimum.
The premium. Mobile menus should sit 15 to 25% above salon equivalents, per Nextro’s pricing data. The $130 salon color becomes a $150 mobile color. That $20 is cost recovery with a marketing name: 30 minutes of setup and teardown at $0.57 per minute costs $17.10, plus $3 in off-site consumables. The premium buys those minutes back at cost; the skill was already priced into the menu.
The minimum. Add up the non-service time on the smallest job you would take: 80 minutes at $0.57 is $45.60, plus $22.80 for the car. That is $68.40 of cost before the first service minute. A 20-minute fringe trim at $25 on a house call is a guaranteed loss. The minimum ticket for a single-destination visit is $100, or require two services or 90 minutes of booked work. UK mobile stylists run the same guardrail at a £40 to £60 minimum visit, or a two-service requirement, per Nextro.
Put together, here is the mobile stylist price list this colorist quotes, using her free zone and rates:
| Round trip | Drive time | The math | Fee to quote |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 miles | 27 min | $0 + 7 x $0.57 = $3.99 | $0 (waived) |
| 20 miles | 40 min | $10.00 + 20 x $0.57 = $21.40 | $25 |
| 30 miles | 50 min | $20.00 + 30 x $0.57 = $37.10 | $40 |
| 44 miles | 70 min | $34.00 + 50 x $0.57 = $62.50 | $65 |
House call salon pricing only works when all three numbers move together: menu, fee, minimum. Drop any one and the other two are subsidizing it.
Run your own house call salon pricing math
Your house call, priced as a unit
Here is the same calculation on the worked example, with the fee and premium in place. Revenue: $150 service plus $40 fee equals $190. Cash costs: $32.80. That leaves $157.20 before tax. Self-employment tax at 15.3% leaves $133.15. Divide by the real 3.33 hours:
Two comparisons make the number meaningful. In the salon, that same color nets $61.50 per hour after product, minus roughly $10.40 per chair-hour of overhead, which lands near $43 after tax. The properly priced house call pays $40. Roughly even, before routing. And revenue per hour is the only honest way to compare the two, because the salon price and the house call price describe different amounts of your life.
Stack the route or decline the job
At $40 an hour, mobile work matches salon work. The margin lives in density.
🧮 Three clients on one street
Drive once: 50 minutes, $22.80, total.
Setup and teardown: 3 x 30 min. Service: 3 x 120 min.
Revenue: 3 x $190 = $570. Cash costs: $22.80 + $30 = $52.80.
Time: 500 minutes = 8.33 hours. After 15.3% self-employment tax: $438.07.
$53 per hour. The same clients, booked separately at $40 each, paid $120 for the same driving.
That is the whole game. The fee schedule exists to make far jobs sayable and bad jobs declinable. Cluster the day’s house calls geographically, book the third client on the same street, and the driving turns from a cost into a rounding error. A client 40 minutes away with no neighbor to pair is a $65-fee job or a no.
Run the math before the next house call, not after. Priced like a salon menu, that $130 appointment pays $25 an hour. Priced as its own unit, it pays $40, and $53 when the route stacks.
