Reviewing your rates without losing customers

Trade rates move slowly and costs move constantly. A rate held for three years is a price cut nobody ever chose.

The reason is rarely laziness. Raising a rate feels like a conversation with every customer at once, so it waits for a year that never comes.

Start from your own numbers, not the market

Asking what other trades charge tells you only what they hope to get. Your own finished jobs say what the work actually costs. That is the only figure worth pricing from, and it sits in records you already keep.

A quarter of completed jobs holds the answer. Compare what you billed against your labour hours, your materials and your vehicles, and the gap is your real margin.

Four costs move without asking you

• Wages, including the increases you gave and the ones the award set.
• Vehicles, where fuel, servicing and replacement all drift upward.
• Insurance and licensing, which arrive annually and rarely fall.
• Materials, which move per line and hide inside jobs you already quoted.

Added together across a year, those four usually surprise the business paying them.

Raise deliberately, and not evenly

A flat increase across every line protects your weakest work and punishes your best. Your margin differs by job type, and your rise should follow it.

Raise most where your margin is thinnest and your demand is strongest. Callout work and small urgent jobs usually carry a rise better than large quoted projects.

Tell your regulars before the invoice does

A customer who learns about your new rate from an invoice feels ambushed. The same customer told a month earlier usually says nothing at all.

Your regulars deserve a short note with a date. Most people accept a rise they can see coming and resent one that arrives without warning.

Quote the new rate from a fixed date

Work already quoted stays at the old price. Anything you quote from the change date carries the new one, and your quote says which it is.

That line prevents the argument entirely. Our guide to quoting for trade jobs covers where it belongs in the document.

Expect to lose a few, and count which ones

A rise that loses nobody was too small. A few customers will leave, and the useful question is which ones.

The question is whether the leavers were your thin margin work. Losing those improves the business, and losing your best customers means you raised the wrong lines.

Your minimum charge matters more than your hourly rate

Small jobs lose money at almost every hourly rate. The drive, the setup and the paperwork cost the same on a twenty minute job as on a full day.

A minimum charge covers that fixed cost. A business with a rate that works and no minimum still loses money every time somebody rings about a tap.

The minimum comes from your real cost of attending, and it belongs in the booking conversation. Most customers accept it, and the ones who do not were never profitable.

A minimum charge also protects your schedule. Small jobs fill a day quickly, and pricing them properly means you take the ones that are worth the drive.

Your customers judge a rise by the warning they got, far more than by its size.

What to change first

• Margin comes from a quarter of your own finished jobs
• A year of wage, vehicle, insurance and material increases, totalled
• The largest rises land where margin is thinnest and demand strongest
• Regulars hear a month before the new rate starts
• The quote names the change date, so old quotes hold
• The leavers get counted, and the question is whether losing them helped