Should you charge for a quote?
For most domestic jobs, no: a free quote is what customers expect, and the cost of the visit belongs in your overheads. Charge when producing the quote is itself a piece of work — finding a fault, a survey, a design, or a long drive for a small job. If you do charge, say so before you set off. Citizens Advice tells customers “Some traders charge for quotes - ask about this first”, so a fee they hear about on the doorstep is a fee they were warned about.
Why free is the default
A homeowner is told to get more than one quote — Citizens Advice says at least three — and most do. If two trades will look at the job for nothing and the third wants £40, the third is usually dropped before anyone has seen their work. On ordinary jobs — a bathroom, a rewire, a fence, a room to decorate — the free quote is the price of being considered.
That does not make the visit free to you. The hour on site, the drive and the evening writing it up are costs of winning work, and they belong in your rate with the van and the insurance. The guide to pricing a job covers the overheads people leave out; unpaid quoting time is one of them. The jobs you win pay for the quotes you did not.
When charging is fair
- You have to find the fault to price the fix. Tracing a leak, testing a circuit that keeps tripping, working out why the boiler locks out. That is skilled work with a result the customer can use, whoever does the repair.
- The quote needs a survey or a design. A drawn layout, a heat-loss calculation, a planting plan, a specification detailed enough that the customer could hand it to another trader to price.
- The job is small and far away. An hour's drive each way to price a morning's work is a loss before you start.
- The quote is for somebody else's paperwork. A written quote or report for an insurer or a landlord, where the person asking may never be the one who orders the work.
A quote, a call-out and a survey are different things
Much of the awkwardness goes when each visit has the right name. A quote is a fixed price for work you have looked at. A call-out is a paid visit to diagnose a problem, and often to fix it there and then. A survey or report is a document the customer pays for and keeps. Customers accept a call-out charge from a plumber or an electrician without complaint, and resent a “charge for a quote” for the same visit. If what you are doing is fault-finding, call it that and price it as that.
How to charge without losing the job
- Say it on the phone, then put it in a message. The fee, and what they get for it, before a visit is booked. A charge the customer first hears about afterwards is one you will struggle to collect and will be remembered for.
- Make it a fixed fee. “£60 for the visit and a written report” is easy to agree to. “My hourly rate for however long it takes” is not.
- Take it off the job. “Deducted from the price if you go ahead” turns the fee from a cost into a deposit on your time. Serious customers barely notice it, and the rest have told you something useful.
- Hand over something they can keep. The findings in writing, the drawing, the measurements. A paid visit that ends in a number on the back of a card feels like being charged for nothing.
The cheaper fix: make each quote cost you less
Most of the pressure to charge comes from how long a quote takes, and that can be reduced from both ends.
Before the visit, ask two questions on the phone: what the job is, and when they want it done. Ask for a couple of photos. For plenty of jobs that is enough to give a rough figure, clearly labelled as an estimate, and the customer who was hoping for half that amount saves you both the trip. The quote vs estimate guide explains why the label matters. Visit the ones who still want a fixed price.
After the visit, the cost is the write-up. Speak to Quote takes that down to the time it takes to describe the job: dictate it before you leave the site and it comes back as a priced, itemised quote with your details on it, ready to send. It builds estimates the same way, and turns an estimate into a quote once you have seen the job. The plumber page has a worked example.
What about people who are only collecting prices?
You cannot tell from the first call, and treating every enquiry as a time-waster costs more work than it saves. What you can do is sort enquiries cheaply. A rough estimate first, a visit only when they come back, and a written quote with a valid-until date on it, so a price collected in March is not accepted in September. If the quote goes unanswered, one follow-up is reasonable — see why hasn't my customer replied? — and after that your time is better spent on the next enquiry.