Ask what to charge for a full detail in any detailing group and you'll get forty answers in an hour. $150. $250. "I get $400 and I'm booked out." All of them are true for the person who typed them, and none of them are useful to you.
The reason is simple. A price isn't a fact about detailing. It's a fact about your costs, your market and your time. Somebody else's number tells you nothing about any of those.
So here's the method instead. Do this once, properly, and you'll never have to ask the question again.
Start with your hourly floor
Before you price a single job, you need to know what an hour of your time actually has to earn. Not what you'd like it to earn — what it has to.
Add up everything that gets paid every month whether you work or not:
- Van payment and insurance
- Fuel
- Product and consumables
- Phone, software, subscriptions
- Business insurance
- Your own rent or mortgage
Say that comes to $4,000.
Now be honest about how many hours you can actually bill. Not how many you work — how many you get paid for. If you're working five days and spending real chunks of each one driving, quoting, chasing people and cleaning your gear, you might be billing 25 hours a week. That's about 108 hours a month.
$4,000 ÷ 108 = roughly $37 an hour just to break even.
That number is your floor. It's not your price. It's the line where you start making money instead of buying yourself a job. Every quote you give from here on gets measured against it.
Most detailers who feel busy and broke have never done this bit of arithmetic. They're pricing off vibes and wondering why a full calendar doesn't turn into a bank balance.
Price by vehicle size, not by "package"
The single biggest pricing mistake is charging one price for "a full detail" regardless of what rolls up.
A two-door coupe and a seven-seat SUV with three kids' worth of crumbs in it are not the same job. One might take you two and a half hours. The other takes four and a half. If you quoted both at $200, you just earned $80 an hour on one and $44 on the other — and the second one is the customer who books you again.
Split your pricing by size. Three tiers is plenty:
- Small — coupes, hatchbacks, small sedans
- Medium — most sedans, small SUVs, crossovers
- Large — full-size SUVs, trucks, vans, anything with a third row
Then price each tier off your hourly floor plus your margin. If a medium full detail is a genuine 3 hours and you want $70 an hour, that's $210. Not $200 because it sounds tidier. $210, because that's what the maths said.
And time yourself for two weeks before you trust your own estimates. Almost everyone underestimates. The job you think is three hours is usually three and a half by the time you've packed up.
Why undercutting the guy down the road is a trap
The instinct when you're starting out is to look up the three detailers in your area, find the cheapest, and come in $20 under.
Here's what actually happens when you do that.
You win the customers who chose you on price. That's the whole pool you've fished from — people for whom the deciding factor was cost. So the moment somebody newer and hungrier turns up and goes $20 under you, those same customers leave. You didn't build a customer base. You rented one, and the rent is going up.
Meanwhile you've capped your own ceiling. Raising prices later on people who came to you because you were cheap is the hardest sell in this business.
The detailers who do well aren't the cheapest in their market. They're the ones who are clear about what they do, show their work properly, turn up when they said they would, and charge a number that lets them keep doing all of that. Being reliable is worth more to most car owners than being $20 cheaper, and reliable is something you can actually control.
If you're genuinely new and need volume to build a reputation, fine — but do it with a time-limited introductory offer, not a permanently low price. "First detail $40 off" leaves your real price intact. "I'm the cheapest around" makes it your identity.
When to raise your prices
Two signals, and they're both simple.
You're booked solid two weeks out. If people are consistently waiting, demand is ahead of your supply and your price is behind the market. Put it up.
Nobody flinches. If you quote and essentially everyone says yes without a pause, you're leaving money on the table. A healthy price gets the occasional "ooh, that's a bit more than I thought." That's not a problem — that's the sound of a price that's set correctly.
When you do raise it, don't announce it or apologise for it. Just quote the new number to new customers. For your regulars, tell them plainly, a few weeks ahead, once: "Heads up — my pricing goes up from the 1st. You'll stay at the old rate through September." Most of them will say fine. The ones who leave over 10% were going to leave over something.
Do it in small steps, once or twice a year. A 10% rise on a $210 job is $21. Nobody's life changes over $21, but across a year of work it's real money to you.
The honest version
There isn't a right price. There's a price that covers your costs, pays you properly for the hours you actually work, and holds up when somebody cheaper shows up.
Work out your floor. Split by vehicle size. Time yourself honestly. Put it up when the signals say so.
That's the whole method. It takes an afternoon and it'll do more for your income this year than any amount of asking strangers what they charge.
If you want the recurring side sorted too, we wrote about pricing a monthly plan here — that's the piece that turns a good price into a predictable month.
Want your prices, packages and booking in one place? Thynk Detailing gives you a branded app your customers book and subscribe through — your tiers, your pricing, your name on it. Build yours free in about two minutes.