Your first dozen detail jobs teach you one thing about pricing: you charged too little.
Not a little too little. A lot. Most new detailers working weekends figure out, a few months in, that their effective rate after supplies, fuel, and drive time sits somewhere around $22 to $30 an hour. That is not a side business. That is a hobby with extra steps.
The fix starts with a menu, real numbers on every line of it, and one honest look at what a Saturday pays.
What Your Jobs Actually Cost You
Before you price anything, know your cost floor: what a job costs before you pay yourself a cent.
Materials on a real full detail run $15 to $35 once you count actual consumption. Soap, iron remover, clay, microfibers, interior cleaner, tire dressing, quick detailer for the final wipedown. Most detailers hand-wave this as "just supplies." That is how they end up subsidizing their customers.
If you work mobile, add fuel and drive time. A 20-minute round trip can eat $8 to $15 in gas and vehicle wear before you count the driving itself as unpaid labor. Your DA polisher, vac, and pressure washer wear out too; put $5 to $10 a job toward replacing them.
Add it up and a solo mobile detailer's real floor, not counting his own time, usually lands at $40 to $60 a job. Every dollar below that comes out of your pocket.
Quote the Menu, Not the Clock
Here is the stance, plain: quoting detail work by the hour is how this trade underbids itself. A customer cannot see the difference between your hour and the hour of a kid with a shop vac, so hourly quotes race to the cheapest hour. A menu price for a finished result does not. Keep $65 an hour in your back pocket as the floor for oddball custom work, and sell everything else as a line item.
Here is a working menu, drawn from 2026 side-work rate data for this trade:
- Express wash & wax: $90
- Full interior detail: $130
- Complete detail, inside and out: $220
- Clay bar & paint polish: $280
- Paint correction: $400
- Ceramic coating: $650
- Interior shampoo & extract: $150
- Pet hair removal: $75
- Odor / ozone treatment: $90
- Headlight restoration: $80
- Engine bay clean: $60
- Wheel & tire dressing: $40
Notice what that list is. It is not three vague packages. It is every condition problem a car can show up with, priced as its own line. That structure is what makes the next part work.
The Same Saturday, Priced Twice
Take a hypothetical Saturday: three cars booked, all "full details," all quoted the old way at a flat $120 because that number felt fair on the phone.
Old way: $120 + $120 + $120 = $360 for roughly ten hours of work. Call it $30-and-change an hour before supplies come out of it. You already know this Saturday. You have lived it.
Now price the same three driveways off the menu.
Car one, a commuter sedan in decent shape: complete detail, inside and out, $220. Done.
Car two is the one that wrecks flat pricing. An SUV with a golden retriever's worth of hair worked into the carpet and a smell the owner stopped noticing months ago. Line it out:
- Complete detail, inside and out: $220
- Pet hair removal: $75
- Odor / ozone treatment: $90
- Job total: $385
Car three, an older sedan where the owner mostly cares about the inside, plus headlights gone yellow: full interior detail at $130, headlight restoration at $80. Total $210.
New Saturday: $220 + $385 + $210 = $815. Same three cars. Same soap, same hours, same driveways. The difference is $455, and not one of those lines is padding. The dog hair alone will cost you 45 minutes and a pack of razor blades.
Condition Pricing Is the Price, Not an Upsell
Plenty of detailers treat pet hair or heavy soil as something to absorb quietly, because charging for it feels awkward. Flip that. A trashed interior is a different job than a clean one, and your menu already says what each piece costs. When you quote, walk the car first, name what you see, and read the lines off: "Interior shampoo and extract is $150, pet hair removal is $75 on top of the detail." Customers who watch you inspect the car before quoting rarely argue. They just watched you price it like a professional instead of guessing.
Vehicle size still matters on the core details. An interior on a Civic runs about 2.5 hours; the same work on a Suburban runs four or more. Put a $50 to $75 step between sedan, mid-size SUV, and full-size truck or van on your detail lines. The add-on lines stay flat, because dog hair costs the same to fight in any vehicle.
The Highest-Margin Line on the Menu
Ceramic coating at $650 has margins nothing else on your list touches. Product cost for a quality consumer-grade coating runs $50 to $150, so the gross margin before your labor sits around 75 to 90 percent.
You do not pitch it cold. The moment is right after paint correction, when the customer is standing next to a $400 finish they can see their reflection in. "I can protect what we just did. The coating holds this look for a couple of years without waxing, it is $650, and I can do it today while everything is prepped." Correction plus coating is a $1,050 day for one car, and the prep work overlaps almost completely.
Headlight restoration at $80 and engine bay cleaning at $60 are smaller tickets, but they close on sight. Point at the yellowed lens while you walk the car. Half the time the owner has been meaning to deal with it for a year.
Raising Prices on Existing Customers
If you have been the $120 guy, you are not stuck there. Give your regulars 30 days' notice with a specific number: "a complete detail on your car is $220 starting September 1." Not a vague heads-up about rising costs. A number and a date.
You will lose a few bargain hunters who were leaving the moment anyone went $5 cheaper anyway. Your good regulars stay, because what they are buying is the guy who shows up, does what he said, and hands the car back better than the dealership would.
New customers always pay the current menu. Cut a side deal once and you have taught that customer, and everyone they talk to, that your prices are a starting bid.
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Spend one week tracking every job: hours door to door, materials, amount charged. Divide. If the number is under $60 an hour, reprice your next Saturday off the menu above and run the comparison yourself.
Detailing is one of the better side trades going. Low overhead, steady demand, and real upside once the high-margin lines are on the menu. The math is the easy part. Charging it is the habit. More on running the business side is in the detailing trade hub.
Ready to send menu-priced estimates a customer can approve from their phone? Start your free 14-day trial — no card.
FAQ
How much should I charge for a full auto detail?
A complete inside-and-out detail runs $220 for a sedan at current side-work rates, with a $50 to $75 step up for mid-size SUVs and another for full-size trucks and vans. Condition add-ons ride on top: $75 for pet hair removal, $90 for odor treatment, $150 for shampoo and extraction. Price the condition, not just the vehicle.
What is a good hourly rate for mobile detailing?
Use $65 an hour as your floor for custom work, and check your effective rate on menu jobs by dividing what you kept by hours door to door. New detailers who quote flat "full details" at $100-120 usually discover they net $22 to $30 an hour once drive time and supplies get counted honestly.
Is ceramic coating worth adding to a detailing menu?
Yes, and it should be your closer after paint correction. At $650 with $50 to $150 in product cost, the margin beats everything else you offer, and the pitch lands best when the customer is looking at freshly corrected paint. Correction plus coating turns one car into a $1,050 day.
How do I raise prices on regular detailing customers without losing them?
Give 30 days' notice with a specific number and date: "a complete detail on your car is $220 starting September 1." A jump from underpriced to menu price sheds a few bargain hunters and keeps nearly every regular who hires you for reliability rather than price.
The Menu Is Half the Job. Here's the Other Half.
A menu nobody approves is a price list in a drawer. The sections above settle what to charge. What's left is getting the number said yes to, collected, and coming back every month.
Quoting Sight Unseen Without Guessing
Half your quotes come by text from someone whose car you've never laid eyes on. Don't guess a total. Quote the structure instead: "A complete detail runs $220 on a sedan. Condition work like pet hair or odor gets priced as its own line when I walk the car." Now the walk-around isn't a surprise surcharge — it's exactly what you said would happen.
If they push for a hard number anyway, give the honest range the menu already implies. The detail is $220, and condition lines run $40 to $150 each. Let it sit. Anyone who won't book without an exact total on an unseen car was going to argue in the driveway too.
Put the Condition Lines on the Estimate as Checkboxes
The awkward part of condition pricing was never the price. It's saying the price out loud. So stop saying it. Write the estimate with the core detail as the base and the condition work as optional lines — pet hair removal at $75, odor treatment at $90, headlight restoration at $80 — each one something the customer can check or uncheck on the approval page while the total updates.
A checkbox can't be pushy.
You named what you saw, priced each piece, and let the owner decide at their own kitchen table. Most people keep the lines that fix something they were already embarrassed about, the dog hair and the smell, and drop what doesn't matter to them. Either way you end up with an approved, signed estimate instead of a haggle.
Big Days Deserve a Deposit
Correction plus coating is a $1,050 day, and it's one car holding your entire Saturday. A no-show on a $90 wash costs you an hour. A no-show on a blocked-out coating day costs the weekend. When the estimate gets approved, take a deposit right there — your call how much, and waive it for the regulars you trust. A customer with real money down doesn't ghost you at 7 a.m. Deposits on the big lines and none on the small ones reads as professional, not paranoid.
The Wash Water Belongs in the Cost Floor
One line most detailing price guides skip: in many cities, soapy or oily wash water can't run down the street into a storm drain. Local rules often want it captured, reclaimed, or routed to landscaping or the sanitary sewer — confirm what your city expects before you build a mobile route. If your area calls for a capture mat or a reclaim setup, that gear is a real cost, and it goes in the floor next to the fuel and the pads. Priced into every job, not eaten quietly.
When the Menu Works, Sell the Repeat
Everything above prices one Saturday. The harder problem is November, when the phone goes quiet — and the fix is sitting on the same menu. Why Mobile Detailers Should Sell Plans, Not Washes takes these exact menu lines and turns them into standing monthly work: which plan tiers to offer, why the pitch lands best while the customer is still admiring wet paint, why route density decides whether recurring work actually pays, and how fleet accounts change the math. If this page set your prices, that one builds the floor under your winter. And once members start stacking up, put the repeat visits on a schedule instead of carrying them in your head.
For the rest of it, the detailing pricing playbook puts going rates, price drivers, and what belongs on the paperwork in one place, and the live detailing demo runs the whole thing — menu, optional lines, money math — on a seeded detailing business, no signup.
