Bike Repair Price List: Price Every Service From Your Own Numbers

October 26, 2026 · Pricing a service business

A bike repair price list for a mechanic comes from four numbers you already have: the hourly floor your year needs, your own timing for each service, the consumables it uses up, and the margin you want on top. In the illustrative mobile mechanic below, the floor is $57.97 a paid hour, and the price list comes out at $79.96 for a basic tune, $163.68 for a full service and $339.85 for an overhaul, with parts and the call-out priced separately.

None of these figures are what a bike service costs in your area. Every hour, part cost and mileage belongs to one made-up mechanic, there to be replaced with your own records. This is the bike repair cost calculator worked by hand, from the mechanic’s side of the counter.

The bike service cost formula

hourly floor  = (income / (1 - tax share) + business costs)
                / paid hours a year
service cost  = your hours x floor + consumables
service price = service cost / (1 - margin)
part price    = (part cost + shipping) x (1 + markup)
call-out cost = miles x cost per mile
                + (drive + set-up minutes) / 60 x floor

Step 1: your hourly floor

The example mechanic wants $42,000 a year kept after a 25% tax set-aside, and carries $12,000 of business costs (insurance, tools, a stand, software, phone; vehicle running cost is charged per mile in step 5). Paid hours are 30 a week for 46 weeks, counting wrenching plus call-out driving and set-up, because step 5 charges those. No-shows, rain-outs and slow weeks take 15% of them, leaving 1,173 paid hours. The year needs $68,000.00, so the floor is $57.97 per paid hour. Ignore the lost hours and you would set it at $49.28, too low from the first job.

The mechanic also spends 8 hours a week on parts runs, booking and invoicing, none of it billed. Only 67% of the working week is paid, and the mechanic keeps $24.03 per hour actually worked. That gap is why the floor is set per paid hour.

Step 2: the price list

Each tier is the mechanic’s own list of what it includes and their own timing for it. Consumables are what the service uses up: lube, degreaser, rags, cable ends, bearing grease. Parts the customer pays for are not here.

On a full service, the 20% margin is $32.74 above the floor. That margin is not extra pay; it covers the jobs that run long, the comebacks and the quiet months the floor did not foresee.

Step 3: parts on top

A $48.00 part with $6.00 shipping lands at $54.00. A 35% markup sells it at $72.90, a $18.90 profit. That 35% markup is a 25.9% margin, under the 30% the mechanic wants, which needs a 42.9% markup and a price of $77.14. The markup vs margin chart converts both ways. Fitting time stays in the tier hours or the job minutes below, never in the part price.

Step 4: checking one line on the list

Single jobs, a wheel true or a brake bleed, sit on the list as fixed prices. Check each one against your own timing. A 45-minute job with $4.00 of consumables costs $47.48 at the floor. The example lists it at $55.00: that covers the cost, but a 20% margin needs $59.35, $4.35 more. At $55.00 the job can run 52.79 minutes before it pays less than the floor, so a list price that “feels right” can still be fine on a good day and under your floor on a seized bolt.

Step 5: the call-out

A mobile mechanic’s trip is a cost of its own. The example stop is a 16 mile round trip at the mechanic’s own $0.60 a mile.

Booking 2 bikes at the stop spreads the trip to $31.37 a bike. Either charge the trip cost as the fee, or add the shortfall to the bikes’ prices. Leaving it uncharged means the price list is right and the day is still short, which is the next point.

The insight: a day in the van is not a day at the stand

Each stop takes 40 minutes of driving, 15 of set-up and 75 minutes per bike on 2 bikes: 205 minutes. In an 8 hour day that is 2 stops and 4 bikes, with 70 minutes left that will not fit another stop. Only 5.00 of the 6.83 hours used are spent on bikes.

At a $95.00 ticket per bike (parts included) plus the $35.00 fee per stop, the day brings in $450.00, or $355.00 after the 25% of each ticket that is parts at cost. That is $51.95 per hour used, below the $57.97 floor. Take out the $19.20 of vehicle miles for the day and it is $49.14. Part of the gap is the call-out fee from step 5, which falls short of the trip it is meant to pay for, on every stop. A bike service cost calculator that stops at the bench never shows this.

A yearly plan

Some mechanics sell a plan of tunes paid up front. 2 basic tunes at a 10% discount make a $143.93 plan. If 80% of plan tunes get used, it earns $41.58 beyond the floor, against $25.58 for the same tunes paid one at a time. If every tune is used it still earns $15.99. The share used is a guess until you have your own records; set it to all of them if you have none.

Did the visit pay?

After the visit, check the actuals. Say it sold a full service, one part and the call-out for $271.58, and took 3.00 paid hours against 2.92 planned. Take out a 3% card fee ($8.15), the $54.00 part, $15.00 of consumables and $9.60 of miles: $184.83 is left, or $61.61 a paid hour, above the $57.97 floor even with the overrun. Log the actuals after every visit; the ones that come in under the floor show which lines on the list need repricing. The handyman rates post builds a trip charge and minimum the same way.

How these were calculated

The floor is (income / (1 - tax share) + business costs) / (paid hours a week x (1 - share lost) x weeks). A tier’s cost is hours x floor + consumables, and its price is cost / (1 - margin). Part price is (cost + shipping) x (1 + markup); the markup for a margin is margin / (1 - margin). The trip cost is miles x cost per mile + drive and set-up minutes / 60 x floor. Stops per day are rounded down to whole stops. Figures are carried from step to step as the spreadsheet shows them, to the cent. Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program that builds the year week by week and adds stops to the day one at a time, and the two agree. All inputs are illustrative, not measured rates or market prices. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.

To run your own price list, parts and call-outs through the same arithmetic, the pack below has eight linked calculators.