Appliance Repair Pricing Guide: Diagnostic, Parts, Labor

Short answer: An appliance repair pricing guide has to carry three prices, because they fail separately. The diagnostic covers the drive and the troubleshooting whether or not a repair follows. The part carries whatever it costs to get into your hand. Labor bills your own loaded hour. The same no-heat dryer below costs $185.69 when the element rides on the van and $550.14 when the assembly ships from an authorized channel — $300 against $885 at one margin.

The unit in this trade looks simple and is not. A customer thinks they are buying “a dryer repair.” You are selling a trip, an hour of diagnosis with a meter and a tech sheet, a part whose availability someone else controls, and often a second drive four days later. This page takes that bundle apart, builds each piece from your own cost, and runs one identical failure through two sets of conditions. The line-by-line paperwork is in what to include on an invoice, and the truck-and-tools side is in appliance repair business expenses.

Every dollar figure below is one shop’s number in one market, shown so the method is followed rather than copied. Technician wage, van cost, drive distance, brand mix, freight and what the local trade will bear move all of them, and a rural route with a two-brand mix builds a different loaded hour than a dense metro with six. Rebuild each layer from your own books before you quote anything.

What are the three prices, and why can they never share a line?

Because each one answers a different question, and a single number answers none of them.

Price	What it buys	What happens when it is buried
Diagnostic	Drive both ways, meter time, tech-sheet lookup, model and serial captured, a written answer	Declined calls become unpaid, and you subsidize shoppers with your paying customers
Part	Cost, freight, core deposit, van-stock money, the risk on a non-returnable board	Hard-to-source parts pay the same as easy ones, so the hard jobs lose
Labor	Time on the machine at your loaded hour, plus the return trip when a part is ordered	The second visit disappears into a price quoted for one

Two more items sit behind the three and belong in the price even though they are not lines. Your labor warranty is yours alone — the part carries whatever the manufacturer gives it, commonly ninety days to a year — so a callback in month five is your hours. And haul-away is a service, not a courtesy: loading, the recycler fee, and on anything with a sealed system the refrigerant has to be recovered first under EPA’s Section 608 disposal requirements.

Where does the diagnostic policy have to be written down?

In three places, in the same words, before anybody is standing in a laundry room: the phone script, the estimate, and the invoice.

Pick one policy and print it. “The $109 diagnostic is credited in full toward an approved repair.” Or: “The diagnostic is $109 and is not credited; the repair is priced separately.” Or a stated partial credit. The policy matters far less than the fact that it exists in writing, because this single sentence is the most common dispute in appliance repair.

Some states put that in law rather than leaving it to you. California registers appliance repair dealers and requires a written estimate; a dealer may not charge above it without the customer’s prior consent, and where that consent is oral, the written estimate rule requires the invoice to note the date, the time, the person who authorized the work, and the additional parts and labor involved. Check your own state before you assume a verbal yes on the driveway is enough.

What does an hour in the van cost me, and what does a call cost?

Build the hour in layers, then convert it into the unit you actually dispatch.

Layer	Example figures	Per technician hour
Technician wage	$31.00
Payroll burden	× 1.31 — comp, payroll tax, unemployment, paid time	$40.61
Van, tools, van stock	$19,800 a year ÷ 1,320 billable hours	$15.00
Operating cost		$55.61
Overhead	$47,300 a year — dispatch, software, insurance, licensing, tech data, unsold quotes ÷ 1,320	$35.83
Loaded hour		$91.44

Now the number that matters more. A day is 8.6 paid hours and produces 5.4 completed calls, so the average call consumes 1.59 technician hours including windshield. At $91.44 that is $145.39 of cost before a single part comes out of the van. Any flat repair price below that figure is a donation, and the diagnostic fee should sit near it rather than below it.

The denominator does the damage here. Count the hours you invoiced last year, not the hours you were awake. If you are the owner in the van, put a wage on your own line first, or the arithmetic quietly hands your pay to the parts distributor.

How do I price a part when the brand controls who can buy it?

There is no single multiple, because the cost of holding the right part has almost nothing to do with the number on the invoice.

Sourcing class	What it costs beyond the invoice	Effect on the price and the calendar
On the van	Money tied up, shelf obsolescence	Highest multiple — you pre-paid for a one-visit fix
Counter pickup	A drive and a wait at the distributor	High, and half a technician hour is real
Freight, next day	Freight charge plus a second trip	High, with the return visit costed on its own
Authorized channel only	No aftermarket equivalent, sometimes no access at all	Priced by what you can actually obtain
Non-returnable board or assembly	The whole cost of a wrong call	Reserve a percentage, then fix it with a tighter diagnosis
Core-charge parts	Cash out until the core goes back	Bill the core, refund it when it clears
Discontinued	Search time, no warranty	Bill the search or decline the job honestly

Check availability by model and serial before you promise anything on a brand you have no account with. A repair you quoted and cannot source costs more than the call you turned down.

What does the same no-heat dryer cost under two conditions?

Identical symptom, identical failure, identical technician. Only the supply chain moved.

Job A — mainstream brand, element and thermal cutoff kit on the van, one visit, 16 miles round trip. Job B — same failure on a brand that releases the heater assembly only through an authorized channel. Four-day lead, freight in, two visits, 52 miles across both.

	Job A	Job B
Visits	1	2
Technician hours including drive	1.45	3.10
Labor at the $91.44 loaded hour	$132.59	$283.46
Parts landed	Element $38.20 + cutoff kit $9.60 = $47.80	Assembly $214.00 + freight $28.50 = $242.50
Non-returnable reserve, 6% of the assembly	—	$12.84
Labor warranty reserve, 4% of labor	$5.30	$11.34
Cost	$185.69	$550.14
Price at a 38% margin	185.69 ÷ 0.62 = $300	550.14 ÷ 0.62 = $885
Less the $109 diagnostic already collected	$191 due	$776 due

The trap is a flat-rate card reading “dryer, no heat — $340.” It collects $340 on Job B against $550.14 of cost, which is $210 lost on a job that took two trips and four days of the customer’s patience.

Sealed systems behave the same way, only worse: a refrigerator that needs a compressor or a sealed-system repair is two visits, recovery equipment, and certification, so it belongs in its own price class rather than inside a generic service rate. Washer bearings and oven control boards each carry their own version of the same problem — bearings are labor-heavy with cheap parts, boards are part-heavy with fast labor, and one flat rate cannot serve both.

Is that 38 percent markup or 38 percent margin?

Different arithmetic, and the parts line is where the confusion costs the most. Markup is added to cost. Margin comes out of price. To hit a margin, divide cost by one minus that margin.

On the $242.50 landed assembly	Calculation	Billed	Margin collected
38% markup	× 1.38	$334.65	27.5%
38% margin	÷ 0.62	$391.13	38.0%

A gap of $56.48 on one part. Two ordered assemblies a week for a year is roughly $5,900, which is a van payment you believed you were already making.

When does the arithmetic say replace instead of repair?

When the quoted repair approaches half the delivered price of a comparable new machine, say so before you order anything.

Job B illustrates it perfectly. If a comparable dryer lands at the customer’s door for $760, an $885 repair is 116 percent of new and there is nothing to discuss. Job A at $300 is 39 percent of new on a machine with years left, so it proceeds. Same trade, same day, opposite advice.

Charge the diagnostic either way. You drove out, you read the machine, and the honest answer has value even though nothing got fixed. Then price the exit: haul-away is labor plus the recycler fee, plus refrigerant recovery on any sealed system. The customer who was told the truth about a fourteen-year-old dryer calls you about the refrigerator, and that is the whole return on the invoice you did not write.

What is a published repair price worth to me?

A sanity check and nothing else. Published figures for a washer or refrigerator repair swing by more than double between markets, and they move with drive distance, brand mix, freight, and season. None of those are visible in the number.

Reverse your own last five invoices instead: subtract landed parts, divide what is left by the technician hours on the ticket including drive, and see whether the result clears $91.44 with room on top. Then look at your approval rate, because a yes on nearly every quote is a pricing signal rather than a compliment.

What has to be recorded for any of this to hold?

Four things per call: technician hours including drive, landed part cost with freight and any core, the model and serial, and the diagnostic policy as it was stated. Rates rebuilt from memory come out low every time, and a warranty callback without a serial number is an argument you lose.

Keel is an iOS app that keeps that record where the work happens, entirely on the device — no account, no bank connection, no cloud, no login, and an App Store privacy label reading Data Not Collected. Photograph the distributor counter ticket and the freight slip and Apple Intelligence reads them on the phone, so the $242.50 on Job B is filed against the job instead of curling up in a door pocket. Every parts run and every second visit logs as mileage under IRS mileage log requirements. The invoice goes out from the driveway in about a minute with your own numbering, your logo, your brand color, the part number and serial typed into the description, and a payment link the customer scans as a QR code — the rest of collecting is in how to get paid for appliance repair work. Freeboard shows cash minus tax reserve, minus committed invoices, minus a buffer. Free covers unlimited invoices, receipts and mileage; Keel Pro is a one-time $249.99 Lifetime purchase, not a subscription.

Frequently asked questions

Does the diagnostic fee go toward the appliance repair?

Only if you say so in writing, and you have to say the same thing on the phone, on the estimate, and on the invoice. Full credit, partial credit, and no credit are all defensible policies with different economics. Full credit means declined calls are your only paid diagnostics, so the fee has to at least cover the average call cost — $145.39 in the example above.

How do appliance repair techs price parts?

By sourcing difficulty, not by one fixed multiple. A part on the van earns the highest multiple because you pre-paid to make it a one-visit fix. Freight parts carry freight plus a second trip. Authorized-channel assemblies are priced by what you can actually obtain. Remember the arithmetic: a 38 percent markup returns only a 27.5 percent margin.

Should I charge for the second visit when a part has to be ordered?

Decide before the quote leaves your mouth and put it in writing either way. If the return trip is included, the repair price has to carry two drives — in the example that is 3.10 technician hours, not 1.45. If it is billed, name the amount on the original estimate. Silence on this line is the second most common dispute in the trade.

When should I tell a customer to replace an appliance instead of repairing it?

When the quoted repair reaches roughly half the delivered price of a comparable new unit, and always before ordering parts. An $885 repair on a dryer that lands new for $760 is not a close call. Charge the diagnostic anyway, offer paid haul-away, and recover the refrigerant first on anything with a sealed system.

What should an appliance repair diagnostic fee cover?

The drive both ways, the meter and tech-sheet time, model and serial capture, and a written finding the customer keeps whether or not they proceed. Size it against your cost per completed call rather than against a competitor’s advertised number. Below that figure, every declined call is paid for by the customers who did say yes.

How do I check my repair prices against my market?

Reverse your last five invoices: subtract landed parts, divide the remainder by technician hours including drive, and compare that to your loaded hour. Published repair ranges vary by more than double between markets and hide drive distance, brand mix, and freight, so use them only to catch an order-of-magnitude error, never to set the rate.

---

This article is general information, not professional or tax advice.