Service area and travel fees
Drive time is unpaid labour unless you price it, and it is the largest uncosted item in most one-van businesses.
The arithmetic that matters is not distance. It is what the round trip does to the number of jobs you can fit. An hour of driving is an hour you cannot sell, and it costs the same hour whether the job at the end pays $80 or $400.
Set a radius, publish it, and charge beyond it. A travel fee that was on the booking page all along is part of the price. The same fee introduced during a quote feels like a surprise and gets negotiated.
Draw the radius around your customers, not around your house. Most solo operators' work clusters, and a circle centred on home usually includes a lot of area they never work and excludes some they do.
And the one that changes most decisions: the cost of a detour depends on the rest of the day. The same job is worth taking on a Tuesday when you are already across town and not worth taking on a Thursday when it splits two jobs near home.
Costing a trip properly
Two components, and people count one of them.
Vehicle cost. Miles at a per-mile figure. The IRS standard mileage rate is a reasonable proxy for a mixed-use vehicle, and it exists precisely because per-mile cost is otherwise hard to estimate.
Time cost. The hour you spent driving is an hour you could have been working. This is almost always the larger number and it is the one that gets left out, because it does not appear on any receipt.
Worked: a job 35 minutes away, so 70 minutes round trip and roughly 40 miles.
- Vehicle: 40 miles at the second-half 2026 rate of 76 cents is $30.40
- Time: 70 minutes at a $60 working rate is $70
- True cost of getting there: about $100
A $149 job at that distance is a $49 job. That is not automatically a reason to refuse it, and it is a reason to know it before saying yes.
Setting the radius
Start from the map of your existing customers. Plot them. Most solo operators find two or three clusters rather than an even spread, usually shaped by the roads rather than by distance.
Draw the boundary around the work, not around the house. If everything is north, a circle centred on home spends half its area on places you will never go.
Pick a number you can say out loud. "Within 15 miles of X, and beyond that there's a travel fee" is a sentence a customer understands immediately. A boundary you have to explain is a boundary you will keep making exceptions to.
Then publish it, on the booking page and in the quote. The published version is what makes the fee normal instead of awkward.
The travel fee
Beyond the radius, a stated fee. Simplest version that works: a flat fee per band. Under 15 miles, none. 15 to 25, one figure. 25 to 40, a larger one. Beyond that, quoted individually.
Bands beat per-mile pricing for one reason: a per-mile charge invites arithmetic in the customer's head and it usually undercharges the time, which is the larger half of the cost.
Whatever the structure, it should cover the drive at your working rate plus the miles. Below that, you are paying for the privilege.
Saying no, and the better version of saying no
The instinct with a far job is to refuse or to quote low and hope the day works out. Both are worse than the third option.
Quote it at the price that makes it worth doing. If they accept, it was worth doing. If they do not, you lost a job you did not want at the price they wanted.
That framing removes most of the discomfort, because you are not judging whether they deserve to be served. You are stating what it costs to bring the business to them, which is a fact about geography.
The scheduling half
Distance decisions are really scheduling decisions.
Cluster by area, not by request order. A day that runs across town twice fits fewer jobs than one that runs a loop, at the same total mileage.
Put far jobs at the end or the start of a day, so the drive replaces a commute rather than splitting the middle.
Protect the gaps. The most expensive booking is not the far one. It is the one accepted into a slot that leaves 25 minutes of driving between two jobs and turns the whole afternoon late.
Recurring cleaning route planning. · Is your diary full but your month bad?
What Rigsheet does with this
Service area and radius are set during onboarding, with a pin and a radius, and the booking page uses them.
Scheduling shows the drive-time gap before each job, so a booking that looks fine in a calendar and is actually impossible shows up as impossible before you accept it. Conflicts flag rather than surfacing at 8am.
Route optimization is on the Pro tier, because it uses a paid mapping API on every recalculation and that is a real cost to serve. Drive-time gaps and service-area settings are not: they are on every plan, including the $4 Starter tier, because a scheduler that ignores driving is not a scheduler for this trade.
What a no-show actually costs. · What each plan includes. · The pricing calculator.
More in this section
About Rigsheet
Rigsheet is a job app from Baker Ventures LLC for one-to-three-person mobile service businesses: mobile auto detailers and residential cleaners first. Scheduling with drive-time gaps, quotes with vehicle and home-size pricing, deposits, "on my way" texts, before and after photos, invoices, and automated review requests. Plans start at $4 a month, with unlimited jobs, customers, quotes and invoices on every tier and no per-user fees.
It exists because the alternatives charge a solo operator team prices. A one-van business is not a small version of a ten-truck business, and pricing built around seats and add-ons makes that mistake expensive. The pricing calculators and operator guides on this site are free and need no account.
Questions and answers
How far should a mobile detailer or cleaner travel?
As far as the day still works. The useful test is not distance but what the round trip does to the number of jobs you can fit, because an hour of driving is an hour you cannot sell and it is the same hour whether the job pays $80 or $400.
Should you charge a travel fee?
Charge one beyond a stated radius, and state the radius publicly. A fee that appears during a quote feels like a surprise; a fee that was on the booking page the whole time is just the price.
How much should a travel fee be?
Enough to cover the drive time at your working rate plus the vehicle cost of the miles. Anything less means you are paying to serve that customer, and anything framed as a per-mile charge should still cover the time, which is usually the larger half.
Is it better to raise the price or refuse the job?
Quote it at the price that makes it worth doing. If they accept, it was worth doing. Refusing outright removes the option of finding out, and quoting low to win it guarantees the wrong outcome.
How do you set a service radius?
Start from where your existing customers are, not from a circle on a map. Most solo operators find their work clusters, and a radius drawn around the cluster is more useful than one drawn around home.
What about a job just outside the radius?
Take it if the day already goes that way, at the travel-fee price. The cost of a detour is a function of the rest of the schedule, which is why the same job is worth taking on Tuesday and not on Thursday.
Rigsheet. “Service area and travel fees.” Baker Ventures LLC, September 7, 2026. https://rigsheet.bakerventuresstudio.com/guides/service-area-and-travel-fees/