Search this question and most of what comes back is written for the customer, or it is a job board. Homeowners want to know whether someone will come out to them. Nobody is answering the operator's version, which is narrower and more expensive to get wrong: how much of a working day can a drive consume before the job stops being worth taking, and what do you charge for the part you cannot avoid.
The radius is a billable-hours decision, not a mileage decision
A handyman sells hours. Not miles, and not square footage. The inventory is roughly eight of them per working day, it does not carry over, and anything that consumes one without producing revenue comes straight out of the top line. A 45-minute drive each way on a two-hour job puts three hours on the clock for two hours of billing. Half the block is spent in the truck.
That is the whole problem, and it is why a radius chosen in miles misleads. Twenty-five miles down a rural highway at 55 miles an hour is a smaller bite out of the day than twelve miles across a city at rush hour. Set the rings in minutes, not miles, and set them from your own typical driving conditions rather than from what the map says the distance is.
There is a second reason the radius deserves a real decision. Whatever service area you publish on your Google Business Profile and your website is the area that generates calls. A radius set optimistically produces leads you then have to decline, or take at a price that hurts. Every one of those is a small cost: the declined caller does not call again, and the reluctantly accepted job trains a customer to expect your in-town rate out of town. Publishing a radius you intend to serve is cheaper than sorting the overflow by hand.
What a drive really costs: mileage plus windshield time
Two separate meters run whenever the truck moves.
The vehicle. The IRS sets the 2026 business standard mileage rate at 76 cents per mile for July through December, up from 72.5 cents in the first half of the year.1 That figure exists as a deduction convenience, not as a billing rate, but it is the closest thing to a neutral, published estimate of what a mile of driving costs once fuel, maintenance, tires, insurance, and depreciation are counted. Use it to price your own exposure. Do not put it on a customer invoice as if the IRS set your rates.
The time. This is the meter operators forget, because it does not produce a receipt. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median wage for general maintenance and repair workers at $48,620 a year, or $23.38 an hour, as of May 2024.2 That is what the work pays someone whose employer owns the truck and finds the customers. Your own cost per working hour is higher than that number, because payroll taxes, liability coverage, tools, phone, software, and every unbilled hour of quoting and bookkeeping all ride on a smaller pool of billable hours. Whatever that figure comes to for you is the rate at which the drive is burning money.
Put the two meters side by side. At an illustrative 30 miles per hour average door to door, which is a reasonable mixed-suburban assumption and worth replacing with your own:
| Drive, one way | Round trip | Vehicle cost at $0.76/mi | Time in the truck |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 minutes | 10 miles | $7.60 | 20 minutes |
| 25 minutes | 25 miles | $19.00 | 50 minutes |
| 45 minutes | 45 miles | $34.20 | 90 minutes |
Notice how modest the mileage column stays and how fast the time column grows. Operators who set a travel fee by gas money alone are pricing the smaller of the two meters.
The three-ring structure
One radius cannot do this job, because the honest answer changes with distance. Three rings can, and each one gets a different rule.
Ring one, the free zone. Zero to roughly fifteen minutes. No travel line appears on the quote. The drive is real, but it is short enough that carrying it inside your hourly rate is simpler than itemizing it, and a free-travel zone is a genuine selling point when a caller is comparing you against a shop that charges from the curb. Keep this ring small. It is the one you will be tempted to stretch.
Ring two, the trip-fee ring. Fifteen to about thirty-five minutes. A flat fee, published, the same for everyone in the ring. Build it from the two meters rather than from what feels sellable. At 25 minutes out, that is $19 of round-trip vehicle cost plus 50 minutes of your time; at an illustrative $35 an hour of loaded own-cost, the time is worth $29. Call the fee $50 and print it. The number is illustrative, but the method is not: mileage plus windshield time at your cost, not at your shop rate, because customers will not pay a billing rate to watch you drive.
A flat fee by ring beats a per-mile charge for a reason worth stating. A per-mile line invites the customer to open a maps app and argue about your route and where you started from. A published ring fee is a policy they accept before booking, and it never turns into a conversation about the odometer.
Ring three, batch or decline. Beyond thirty-five minutes, the arithmetic stops responding to fees. As the worked example below shows, restoring a small job at that distance takes a travel charge nobody will sign. So ring three runs on two different levers. The first is a minimum job size: work out there happens only above a dollar threshold, because a bigger ticket spreads the same drive over more billable hours. The second is batching: far-side jobs go on a designated day and get grouped, so one long drive out and one long drive back are split across three tickets instead of one. If a job clears neither test, decline it and hand the caller a name. A referral you give away costs you nothing and comes back.
Putting the travel line on the quote
A travel policy that lives in your head is a doorstep negotiation waiting to happen. Put it on the document.
Write travel as its own line with the distance visible in it: "Travel, outside standard service area, 25 mi round trip." Three things happen when it sits there in writing. The charge survives the customer's memory of the phone call, which is where most billing disputes are born. It stays separate from labor, so your hourly rate does not get read as inflated by someone comparing rates across quotes. And it becomes a lever you can give up on purpose, because waiving a named $50 travel line to win a job you want is a clean concession, while shaving your labor rate to the same effect resets what that customer expects forever.
State the service area itself somewhere permanent as well, on your site and in the quote footer, phrased in minutes or by the towns you cover rather than as a raw mileage number.
Two adjacent charges are worth keeping distinct on paper. A fee to come out and look at a job is not the same as travel on the job itself, and if you charge both, or credit one against the other when the work is booked, say so before the visit. That structure is covered in should a handyman charge for an estimate. Separately, a second trip caused by a part the job turned out to need is neither the estimate fee nor the standing travel line; it is added work that gets approved before it happens, the same way any mid-job addition should, as covered in how to charge for extra work not in the estimate.
The "just this once" job and when it is worth it
Rings leak one exception at a time. Some exceptions earn their keep.
A job worth breaking the ring for opens a route rather than filling a slot. A property manager with four buildings on that side of town, or a small commercial account with recurring work, turns the long drive into an acquisition cost against future short ones. A job that rides along with something already on the calendar out there qualifies too, since the drive is already paid for. So does a job that fills a hole in a half-empty afternoon, where the honest alternative is zero revenue, and even then only at the published ring fee.
The exceptions that do not earn their keep are more common. "There might be more work later" is not a route, it is a hope, and it is one of the more expensive sentences a customer can say to a handyman. Taking a distant job at your in-town price to be accommodating does not read as generosity; it sets the price for every job that customer ever books. And a far emergency squeezed into a full day is not one unhappy customer avoided, it is three booked customers pushed late.
The workable test is whether you can write the reason down. An exception with a named reason is a business decision. An exception without one is a mood, and moods do not scale to a calendar.
Worked example: the same $180 job at 10, 25, and 45 minutes out
All figures below are illustrative. They show the shape of the math, not what your market pays. Assume a $180 job that takes an hour and a half on site, a 30 mile per hour average, and the IRS vehicle cost of 76 cents per mile.
| Drive, one way | Total block | Vehicle cost | Net revenue | Effective hourly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 minutes | 1.83 hours | $7.60 | $172.40 | $94 |
| 25 minutes | 2.33 hours | $19.00 | $161.00 | $69 |
| 45 minutes | 3.00 hours | $34.20 | $145.80 | $49 |
Same customer, same invoice. The drive alone moves the effective rate from $94 an hour to $49. And $49 is before overhead and every unbilled hour of quoting and invoicing, against a BLS employee-wage baseline of $23.38 an hour for the same trade with someone else carrying the truck.2 That is a thin margin for owning a business.
Now try to fix it with a fee. Bringing the 45-minute job back to the 25-minute figure of $69 an hour means clearing $207 of net revenue over the three-hour block, which after the $34.20 of vehicle cost requires a travel line of about $61 on a $180 job. That is a third of the ticket. Almost nobody signs it, which is the practical proof that ring three does not run on fees.
Change the job instead. A $450 job at that distance, three and a half hours on site, spreads the same 90-minute drive across a five-hour block and returns roughly $83 an hour. Or batch: three jobs grouped on one far-side day means one drive out and one drive back split three ways, with short hops between. Both levers work on the same insight. The drive is a fixed cost per trip, so the fix is more billable hours per trip, not a bigger surcharge per job.
Once the rings are set, the number the whole structure rests on is your hourly rate, since the free zone absorbs travel into it and the ring fees are priced off your cost per working hour. If that rate was set by looking at what other handymen charge rather than by building it from your own costs, the handyman pricing guide works through the derivation.
Put the travel line where the customer sees it first
We built EosLog's quote generator so a travel charge can sit on the quote as its own named line, with the distance in the description, next to labor and materials on one PDF. The customer reads it before they book instead of hearing about it in the driveway.
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No account required. You can also create a free EosLog account to keep the quote and the invoice on the same job record, or see the plans first.
Sources and further reading
- Internal Revenue Service, Standard mileage rates (business use: 76 cents per mile for July 1 through December 31, 2026; 72.5 cents for January 1 through June 30, 2026). Used here as a published estimate of vehicle operating cost, not as a customer billing rate.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, General Maintenance and Repair Workers (median annual wage $48,620, or $23.38 per hour, May 2024). Used as an employee-wage baseline, not as a billed rate.
This guide reflects general US handyman practice as of 2026 and is not tax or legal advice. Every dollar figure in the rings and the worked example is illustrative, including the 30 mile per hour average and the loaded hourly cost. Build your own rings from your own driving conditions and costs, and confirm mileage deduction treatment with your tax preparer before relying on it.