How Much to Charge for Car Detailing, Worked From Your Costs

October 19, 2026 · Pricing a service business

To work out how much to charge for car detailing, find the hourly rate your year needs for every hour you spend on a car, multiply by the hours the package takes, add the products that go on the car, and round up. For mobile work, cost the drive separately and set a minimum charge that covers it. In the illustrative example below, the floor is $54.69 an hour on a car, a 3-hour sedan package prices at $175, an SUV at $215 and a truck at $245, and no mobile job goes out below $125.

There are no going rates on this page. Every input belongs to one made-up solo mobile detailer and is there to be replaced with your own: your income, your bottles, your hours on a car, your miles.

The car detailing price formula

floor rate    = (income + overhead + equipment a year)
                / (weeks x hours a week x share of hours on cars)
package price = round up( hours on the car x floor rate + products per car )
mobile cost   = miles x vehicle cost a mile
                + (drive minutes + setup minutes) / 60 x floor rate
                + water and power you bring

The share of hours on cars is the part of your week a customer is paying for. Messages, quoting, buying supplies and driving come out of the rest.

Step 1: what an hour on a car has to earn

The example detailer wants $50,000 for the year before income tax, carries $9,000 of overhead and spreads $4,000 a year across the pressure washer, extractor, polisher and water tank. They work 48 weeks of 40 hours, and 60% of those hours are spent on cars.

Spread the same $63,000 over every hour worked and it looks like $32.81 an hour. Price from that figure and the 40% of the week spent off the car is unpaid. The floor is $54.69.

Step 2: what the products on one car cost

Divide each bottle’s price by the number of cars it actually does. Mark the bottle and tally the jobs; until you have counted, the cars-per-bottle figures below are guesses.

Products come to $7.83 a car, 4.4% of a $180 package. The wax or sealant is the biggest line at $2.33. Products matter, but they are not where a detailing price goes wrong. Hours are.

Step 3: package prices for a sedan, an SUV and a truck

The example full detail takes 3 hours on a sedan. At the floor rate that is $171.90 with products, rounded up to the next $5. Larger vehicles take longer and use more product, so both scale by a size multiplier: 1.25 for an SUV and 1.40 for a truck or van in this example.

The multipliers are the inputs that change the answer most between vehicles. Measure them: time three sedans and three SUVs doing the same package, and divide. A heavily soiled car (pet hair, sand, stains) is extra hours, priced as hours, not a guess at a surcharge.

Mobile detailing prices: the drive is a cost

A shop price assumes the car comes to you. A mobile price has to pay for going to the car. In the example, the round trip is 24 miles, takes 40 minutes of driving, and 15 minutes go to unloading hoses, the tank and mats, then packing them away:

That $68.73 is 39% of the $175 sedan package. Charge it as a $70 travel fee, or build it into a mobile price list, but do not leave it out. A short job carries the same $68.73: a 1-hour job is $54.69 of time plus the trip, which rounds up to a $125 minimum for any mobile job.

The insight: a mile costs more than the vehicle

The $0.65 vehicle cost a mile is the number the fuel receipts and the tire bills point to. It is the small part. In the example the vehicle accounts for $15.60 of the trip, and the driving and setup time at the floor rate account for $50.13. All in, each mile driven costs $2.86, about 4.4 times the vehicle figure.

That is why a mobile route is priced by the minute, not the mile. Every minute in the truck is a minute that the floor rate was counting on being spent on a car. If your bookings scatter across a wide area, the share of hours on cars falls, and the floor in step 1 rises with it. The same arithmetic sets the price of a window cleaning route and the price of a weekly lawn cut: time off the job is paid for by the time on it.

Add-ons: paint correction and ceramic coating

Price these from hours too. The example car needs 6 hours of correction and a 3-hour coating. Pads and compound, the coating (a $140 bottle that does 2 cars, so $70.00 a car) and the prep products carry a 20% markup, and each price rounds up to the next $10. Correction comes to $360, the coating to $270, $630 together. A car with deeper defects takes more correction hours, so test a spot before quoting. If you are unsure whether a product markup is the same as a margin, it is not: the markup vs margin chart shows the gap.

Maintenance plans against one-off details

A plan in the example is a $110 maintenance wash less 10%, 2 visits a month at 1.25 hours each: $99 a visit, $198 a month, $2,376 a year. Each visit costs $87.96 at the floor rate with products and the vehicle, so the plan clears its cost by $11.04 a visit. Against a customer who books 3 full details a year:

The plan earns $63.52 an hour, and the one-off customer’s $525 a year earns $50.52, less than the $54.69 floor once the vehicle cost of each trip is counted, because the package price alone does not include the drive. Charge the travel fee on one-off bookings, or the gap stays.

Short plan visits also fill the day. Each full detail takes 225 minutes door to door with 30 minutes of driving and 15 of setup, so 2 fit in a 9-hour day and 1.5 hours are left. That is room for a maintenance wash, not another full detail.

How these were calculated

The floor rate is (income + overhead + equipment a year) / (weeks x hours a week x share of hours on cars). Product cost per car is each bottle price divided by the cars it does, plus other supplies. A package is hours x the floor rate + products, scaled by the size multiplier and rounded up to the next $5. The trip is miles x vehicle cost a mile + drive and setup minutes at the floor rate + water and power; the minimum adds one short job’s time. Add-ons are hours at the floor rate plus products with markup. The plan comparison counts revenue less products and the vehicle cost per visit, divided by hours on the car. Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program, and the two agree to the cent. All inputs (income, overhead, bottle prices, hours, size multipliers, miles, prices) are illustrative, not market rates. Income tax and self-employment tax are not computed. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.

To run this on your own bottles, hours and route, the pack below has the same seven calculators linked together, from the hourly floor to how many jobs fit in your day.