It’s twenty past nine on a Tuesday. A number you don’t recognise, a voice halfway to panic, and water coming through a kitchen ceiling. You could be there in forty minutes. The question you’ve got about ten seconds to answer is what this costs — and if you fudge it now, you’ll be arguing about it at midnight with a wet customer and no leverage.

Most trades get urgent work wrong in one of two directions: turning out at 2am for the normal rate and quietly resenting it, or picking a number out of the air that sounds punitive. Emergency pricing is a system you set up once, in daylight.

What the premium actually pays for

The customer’s instinct is that you’re charging extra because they’re desperate. That’s not it, and you’ll have to explain it, so be clear in your own head what the money is for.

Your own time, outside your own time. The evening you were going to spend at your kid’s match, the Sunday lie-in, the meal you left halfway through. That isn’t labour, it’s your life.
Dropping other work. Turn out on a Wednesday afternoon and the kitchen you were second-fixing stops dead. You work late to catch up, or push the job back a day and apologise to a customer who booked properly.
Working in bad conditions. Diagnosing by torchlight in a loft, lifting boards with three people watching, no merchant open so you’re using what’s on the van. Slower, and easier to get wrong.
Being available at all. Answer the phone out of hours and you’re carrying a quiet tax on every evening — no drink, can’t go far, van stays loaded. The fee pays for the standby that made the callout possible.

Say two of those out loud when someone queries the charge and it stops sounding like opportunism.

Pick a shape: callout fee plus hourly, or one fixed price

Callout fee plus an hourly rate. A set fee covers attendance and the first hour — getting there, diagnosing, making safe. After that you’re on an out-of-hours hourly rate in sensible increments. This is the model for anything you can’t see yet, which at night is almost everything.

One fixed emergency price. A single number covering attendance and a defined outcome: “we’ll stop the leak and leave it safe tonight.” Works when you know the shape of the job from the phone call — an outside tap sheared off, a consumer unit that won’t reset — and you’ve done it fifty times.

	Callout fee + hourly	Fixed emergency price
Best for	Unknown faults, leaks, intermittent problems	A known job you can scope by phone
What you promise	Attendance, diagnosis, make safe	A specific outcome
Risk sits with	The customer	You
Needs from you	Honest time records and a check-in point	Confidence it won’t unravel

Say the number before you get in the van

This is the whole game. A callout charge the customer heard and agreed to before you set off is a bill. The same charge mentioned for the first time on their doorstep at eleven at night is an ambush, and they’ll treat it as one.

Have a line ready you can say calmly, without hedging:

“Right — I can be with you in about forty minutes. Before I set off, so there’s no surprise: the out-of-hours callout is £X, and that covers me getting there, finding the problem and making it safe. If it needs more than an hour’s work after that it’s £Y an hour, and I’ll tell you before I go past the first hour. If it needs parts I haven’t got on the van, I’ll make it safe tonight and we’ll sort the proper repair in the morning. Happy with that?”

Then text it before you drive, so there’s a timestamp:

“Confirming: out-of-hours callout £X (attendance, diagnosis, make safe), then £Y/hr. Parts extra. ETA 10:05.”

Thirty seconds of typing and the money conversation is done before you arrive. It matters for consumer cancellation rules too: work ordered in someone’s home normally carries a cooling-off period, and urgent work the customer has expressly asked you to start immediately is treated differently — so get that request in writing rather than relying on memory. Cancellation rights for work in someone’s home covers the ground; check gov.uk for the current rules. General guidance, not legal advice.

Charge for the diagnosis, not just the repair

The most common way trades lose money out of hours is doing an hour of skilled detective work for free because “I didn’t actually fix anything.”

Finding the fault is the job. An intermittent RCD trip, a leak that’s tracked three metres along a joist before it showed on the ceiling, a boiler locking out once a fortnight — that’s the bit a punter can’t do. Price it as its own deliverable: the callout buys attendance, diagnosis and making safe. Whether the repair happens tonight is a separate question with a separate price.

It also gets you off the hook when the honest answer is “this needs a part no merchant will have until eight” — you’ve still delivered what you charged for. Pricing a job when you can’t see everything goes further on caveating work you haven’t opened up.

Turn the emergency into properly quoted work

An emergency callout is a bad place to sell a big job and a brilliant way to earn one. The customer has just watched you turn up when nobody else answered the phone.

Keep the two apart. Tonight: make safe, charged at the callout rate, invoiced on the spot — card or transfer on the doorstep beats an invoice they’ll look at next week. The real job — the ceiling that now needs replacing, the pipework clearly on its last legs — gets quoted properly, in daylight, itemised.

Don’t price that follow-on work standing in a wet hallway: you’ll guess low to seem reasonable, or high because you’re tired. Take photos, note what you saw with the floor up — information nobody else quoting will have — and send the itemised quote next day. A quoting app built for plumbers makes that ten minutes between calls rather than a Sunday night at the kitchen table.

Setting your numbers

Build the premium up from your own day rate, not someone else’s price list. If you haven’t worked that rate out from your real costs and real billable days, start there — a multiple of a rate that’s already too low just scales up the problem.

A worked example to show the method — these figures are illustrative, yours will differ:

Normal day rate                     £320 / 8hr day  =  £40/hr

Evenings & Saturdays
  Callout fee (attendance + 1st hr)              £95
  Thereafter                                 £60/hr

Nights, Sundays & bank holidays
  Callout fee (attendance + 1st hr)             £150
  Thereafter                                  £80/hr

Parts: at cost + your normal markup, listed separately

Three things to settle at the same time and write down:

Where the bands start and stop. “After 6pm” and “before 8am” are unambiguous. “Out of hours” is not.
How you round part hours. Half-hour increments after the first hour is the usual fair answer. Decide once, say it every time.
Your travel limit. A radius you’ll turn out to at night, beyond which it’s a polite no or a mileage charge. Ninety minutes each way for one callout fee loses money.

Charging fairly without gouging

A premium is defensible. The things below aren’t, and emergency customers talk.

Don’t flex the number for what you see. If the house is nice, the rate is still the rate. Quoting by the look of the driveway earns you a review you can’t answer.
Don’t invent urgency. A dripping tap is not an emergency. If it can wait until Thursday, say so and book it at normal rates — a customer for life, for the price of an evening you didn’t want.
Have a line you won’t cross. An elderly person on their own, a family with no water at all: sometimes the right call is to go, make it safe and charge the normal rate. That’s not a precedent.
Be straight when it’s simple. If the fix took eight minutes because the isolator was shut, charge the agreed fee, say plainly it was a quick one, and don’t pad the time. The fee is for turning out; it needs no theatre.

The takeaway

Decide your out-of-hours bands, callout fee and hourly rate now, before the phone rings, built up from your own day rate. Say the number on the call and confirm it by text before you turn the key. Sell attendance, diagnosis and making safe as the deliverable, then quote the real repair in daylight.

Price it like a professional service rather than a lottery ticket, and out-of-hours work stops wrecking your week and starts filling your diary.

Queezy turns what you found at 10pm into a clean, itemised quote before you’ve had your breakfast. Download it free on iPhone.

How to Price Emergency and Out-of-Hours Callouts