Mobile vs Salon Pricing: What to Charge for Drive Time

Every mobile groomer eventually asks the same question: how much more than a salon should I be charging?

Go looking for the answer and you'll find one. You'll find several, actually. One 2026 cost guide puts the mobile premium at 15–30% over a salon visit. Another says 20–30%. A third says 30–50%, and works an example where a $90 salon groom becomes a $120–135 mobile appointment. Aussie Pet Mobile, the largest mobile grooming franchise in the US, publishes no national rate at all — franchisees set their own prices in their own territory.

Those numbers don't disagree because someone did bad research. They disagree because there is no market answer. The mobile premium isn't a percentage you look up. It's the output of your route, and nobody else can run your route.

Our pricing guide covers how to build a base price from your costs and how to price by size and coat. This post is about the one cost that only mobile groomers carry, that never appears on a price list, and that quietly decides whether the van makes money: the driving.

The premium is a subtraction, not a markup

Here's the framing mistake almost every mobile price list is built on.

Groomers treat the premium as something they add — a convenience fee, a doorstep surcharge, a tip for the trouble. Under that logic the number is arbitrary, which is exactly why it feels uncomfortable to charge and exactly why it gets waived for the client who pushes back.

It isn't an addition. It's compensation for a subtraction.

A salon groomer's day is bounded by how fast they can work. A mobile groomer's day is bounded by how fast they can work plus how far apart their clients live. Same eight hours, fewer of them spent with a dog on the table. Industry sources put a mobile groomer at roughly four to seven dogs a day; a salon with a bather and two groomers runs 15–18 appointments through the same day.

You are not charging more for the same day. You are charging more because you sold a smaller day.

Pro tip

Drive time is inventory you can't resell. An empty grooming chair can be filled at 2pm. A 40-minute drive across town cannot be sold to anyone, ever. That's the whole argument for the premium, and it's the version clients accept.

What the driving actually costs

Most groomers price the fuel and stop there. Fuel is the smallest part of it.

Start with the number that's easy to check. As of the week ending 31 August 2026, the EIA put US regular gasoline at $4.07 a gallon and on-highway diesel at $5.60. Worth noting for anyone who budgeted last winter: the EIA's own January 2026 forecast had gasoline averaging $2.92 for the year. The actual price is running about 40% above the forecast your business plan probably used.

A fully built grooming van — water tanks, generator, tub, dryers — is a heavy vehicle. Empty cargo vans return 14–22 mpg; loaded grooming builds are commonly cited at 8–12. Call it 10 mpg on gas, and fuel costs you about 41 cents a mile. Run a diesel Sprinter at 12 mpg and the better economy is almost exactly cancelled by the higher pump price: about 47 cents. Whichever van you drive, fuel is roughly 40–47 cents a mile.

Now the part groomers skip. The IRS sets a standard mileage rate that estimates the total cost of operating a vehicle for business — not just fuel, but depreciation, maintenance, tires and insurance. For 2026 that rate is 72.5 cents a mile for January through June, and 76 cents from 1 July.

Which means fuel is only about half of what a mile really costs you. The rest is the van wearing out.

At 76 cents a mile, here's what a day of driving costs before you touch a dog:

Miles driven in a day	Cost of the driving	Per dog, at 5 dogs a day
40 (tight suburban route)	$30.40	$6.08
80	$60.80	$12.16
120	$91.20	$18.24
200 (rural, spread out)	$152.00	$30.40

Read the last column again. On a $100 groom, the difference between a tight route and a scattered one is 24% of the ticket — gone, before you've paid yourself, bought shampoo, or covered the van.

That is the mobile premium. Not a convenience fee. A cost of goods.

The van is your most expensive employee

There's a second cost that separates mobile from salon, and the insurance market prices it more honestly than most groomers do.

Insureon publishes median premiums for mobile pet groomers who request quotes. General liability runs about $65 a month. A business owner's policy is $80. Workers' comp, $97.

Commercial auto is $245 a month — $2,942 a year.

Your van costs nearly four times as much to insure as everything else you do combined into a general liability policy. The insurance industry has looked at mobile grooming and concluded that the risky, expensive part isn't the clippers or the dogs. It's the driving.

Spread over about 240 working days, that's roughly $12 a day, or $2.45 per dog at five dogs a day — before fuel, before depreciation, before the loan on the van itself. And the van is not cheap to begin with: a used cargo van professionally converted commonly runs $30,000–50,000, while pre-built units are quoted at $90,000–115,000 depending on the power system.

What the day has to earn

Now put the two halves together, because this is where the price actually comes from.

The most useful public benchmark for what a single grooming van grosses comes from Aussie Pet Mobile's franchise disclosure. Across 341 vehicles, single-vehicle franchisees averaged $122,806 in annual gross sales, with a median of $134,990.

Work that back. At 48 working weeks and five days a week, $122,806 is about $512 a day. At five dogs a day, that's an average ticket of $102.

That number is the answer to "how much more should I charge," and notice how it was derived. Not from a percentage over the salon down the road. From the arithmetic of a van that has to cover a route, an insurance bill, a fuel bill and a groomer's wage out of five appointments instead of eight.

If your average mobile ticket is $75 because the salon across town charges $65 and you added a bit, you have priced a salon day into a mobile day. The gap comes out of your wage.

Pro tip

Work it from the day, not from the dog. Decide honestly how many grooms your day holds once the driving is in it. Total what the day must produce — your pay, the van, insurance, fuel, supplies, software. Divide. That quotient is your price, and it is not negotiable by what the salon charges.

This is the same move we make for senior and special-needs dogs, where the dog constrains the day. Here it's geography that constrains it. Both times you price the constraint, not the haircut. The revenue calculator will run the division for you if you'd rather not do it on paper.

Route density is worth more than a price rise

Here's the finding that should change how you book, not just how you price.

On a clustered route, groomers report 10–15 minutes between driveways. On a scattered one, 25–45 minutes. Over five appointments that's four gaps — roughly 40–60 minutes of driving on a tight day, versus 100–180 minutes on a loose one.

The difference is up to two hours. Two hours is another dog.

Run that out: one extra appointment a day, five days a week, 48 weeks, at a $102 average ticket is $24,480 a year. Against that franchise average of $122,806, tightening your route is worth about 20% of your revenue — and unlike a price rise, not one client has to agree to it.

So before you raise prices, look at your book:

• Cluster by geography, not by request. Postcode days — north side Tuesday, south side Wednesday — beat first-come-first-served every time.
• Rebook the neighbours together. When a client rebooks for eight weeks out, offer the slot next to a client on the same street.
• Price the outliers instead of refusing them. The client 25 miles off-route isn't a bad client; they're an unpriced one.
• Track your actual miles. Most groomers have never measured a week's driving. You cannot price a cost you don't measure, and you need the log for the IRS deduction anyway.

Your scheduling system should be doing the clustering work — routing appointments by area rather than by whoever called first.

Travel fees, trip charges and radius pricing

Once the base price is right, the outliers need their own structure. Published mobile price lists tend to use one of three models.

Build it into every price. One flat rate covering a defined service area — one Scottsdale operator quotes $75 for an under-20lb dog including drive time within 20 miles. Simplest to quote, and clients never see a surprise. Works only if your area is genuinely tight, because everyone inside it subsidises whoever lives furthest out.

A flat travel fee on top. Typically $10–30, sometimes quoted as high as $30–80 in spread-out markets. A North Texas operator charges a flat $15 travel fee on every appointment. Honest and easy to explain, but it under-recovers on the genuinely long trips.

A radius with per-mile pricing beyond it. A core service area at standard price, then a per-mile charge outside it — one published example charges $2 a mile beyond a 5-mile radius. Note that $2 is well above the 76-cent IRS cost, and correctly so: it's buying back your time, not just your fuel. This is the model that actually scales, and the one to use if your territory is large.

Most operators also set a minimum charge, commonly $70–90, on the reasonable grounds that no journey is worth making for a nail trim.

Whichever you pick, pick one and publish it. A travel fee that appears at the door is a dispute. A travel fee on your booking page is a policy.

What to say when a client asks why it's more

Clients don't object to the mobile premium as often as groomers fear. They object to not understanding it.

The explanation that works is the one that's true, and it isn't "fuel is expensive." It's this: you're not buying a groom, you're buying my whole appointment slot. In a salon your dog waits in a crate while the groomer works on two others. In the van there is one dog, start to finish, and then I drive to the next one. A salon day holds eight dogs. My day holds five. The price reflects the five.

That framing does something the percentage framing can't — it sells the thing the client actually wanted. No crate time, no waiting room, no all-day drop-off, no other dogs. They were buying that anyway. Price it as the product rather than apologising for it as a surcharge.

The same principle applies to your add-ons: a mobile van still charges de-matting fees for doodles and pelted coats, and those are separate from the travel structure. Drive time prices the journey. Coat condition prices the work.

If you run a salon, don't copy this

One warning in the other direction, because the mistake runs both ways.

Salon owners occasionally look at mobile rates and conclude they're underpriced by 30%. They aren't reading the same business. The mobile premium exists to fund a structurally smaller day. A salon that raises prices to mobile levels without giving up the volume isn't correcting an error — it's just raising prices, and it should decide to do that on its own merits.

Where salon owners genuinely do underprice is elsewhere: not charging for the hard coats, not charging for the extra hour, not raising rates for three years. The pricing guide covers all three.

And if you're considering adding a van to an existing salon, price it as a separate business with its own arithmetic. The van's day is not your salon's day, and running one price list across both is how salons discover their mobile arm has been losing money for a year.

Frequently asked questions

How much more should mobile groomers charge than salons?

Published 2026 cost guides put the mobile premium anywhere from 15% to 50% over salon pricing, which tells you the figure isn't a market standard. Work it from your own day instead: a mobile groomer typically completes four to seven dogs a day against a salon's eight or more, so your price has to cover a full day's costs out of fewer appointments. Franchise data suggests an average ticket around $100–112 is what a single van needs to hit industry-average revenue.

How much does drive time cost a mobile groomer?

The IRS 2026 standard mileage rate — which covers fuel, depreciation, maintenance and insurance — is 76 cents a mile from 1 July 2026 (72.5 cents for the first half of the year). At that rate a 40-mile day costs $30.40 and a 200-mile day costs $152. Spread across five appointments, that's the difference between $6 and $30 per dog.

Should I charge a travel fee or build it into my price?

Both work. Build it in if your service area is tight, since a single flat price is easier to quote and holds no surprises. Add a separate fee if your area is spread out: flat travel fees are commonly $10–30, and a per-mile charge beyond a set radius — around $2 a mile past five miles is a published example — recovers long trips properly. Whichever you choose, publish it on your booking page rather than raising it at the door.

What is a fair minimum charge for mobile grooming?

Published mobile price lists commonly set minimums of $70–90 per visit. The logic is that the journey costs the same whether you're doing a full groom or a nail trim, so the minimum has to cover the drive plus the slot, not the service.

Why is mobile dog grooming more expensive?

Because the van sells a smaller day. Only one dog is served at a time with no crate waiting and no shared waiting room, and the groomer spends part of every day driving instead of grooming. The van also carries costs a salon doesn't: commercial auto insurance runs a median $245 a month for mobile pet groomers, against $65 for general liability, and a converted van costs $30,000–115,000 depending on the build.

How many dogs can a mobile groomer do in a day?

Commonly four to seven, against 15–18 appointments for a salon running two groomers and a bather. The limit usually isn't grooming speed — it's the gaps. Clustered appointments run 10–15 minutes apart; scattered ones run 25–45 minutes apart, and over a day that difference is roughly one whole appointment.

Is mobile grooming more profitable than a salon?

Not automatically, and route density decides it more than price does. Aussie Pet Mobile's franchise disclosure reports single-vehicle franchisees averaging $122,806 in annual gross sales. Whether that's a good living depends on how many of those miles were necessary — tightening a scattered route can be worth around 20% of annual revenue without raising a single price.

Do I have to charge more for driving further?

You don't have to, but the client 25 miles off your route is either priced or subsidised by everyone else on your book. Pricing them is fairer to your other clients and usually keeps the appointment — most people who live out of the way already know they do.