Pricing After-Hours And Emergency Callouts (Stop Doing Them At Day Rates)

It’s 9pm. Phone rings. Someone’s lost power and they’re panicking. You drive out, sort it in 40 minutes, and charge them your normal rate because it felt rude to do anything else.

That job cost you more to deliver and you charged less margin than a Tuesday morning. After-hours work that gets billed at day rates is one of the quietest ways sparkies leave money on the table. Here’s how to price it properly.

After-hours costs you more, so it should cost more

This isn’t gouging. It’s maths. After-hours work genuinely costs you more to deliver:

• You’re paying penalty rates if you’ve got someone with you
• You’re giving up your evening, your weekend, your time with the family
• You’re carrying the cost of being available at all

If you charge the same rate at 11pm Saturday as you do at 11am Tuesday, you’re absorbing all of that yourself. Premium work needs premium pricing.

What the market actually charges

So you’re not pricing in the dark, here’s roughly where after-hours work sits (strongest data is NSW, 2025-26, treat as indicative):

• Standard callout fee: $50 - $100, often covering travel and the first hour
• After-hours, evening: $250 - $400 for the callout and first hour
• Overnight: $350 - $550
• Weekends: $300 - $450
• Public holidays: $400 - $600
• Each additional hour: $150 - $250

The rule of thumb across the trade: after-hours, weekend and public-holiday work runs 1.5 to 2 times your standard rate. If you’re not at least in that band, you’re underpricing.

The reason behind the numbers: penalty rates

If you employ anyone, the premium isn’t optional, it’s what the Electrical Award costs you. Roughly:

• Saturday: time-and-a-half for the first couple of hours, then double time
• Sunday: double time
• Public holidays: double-time-and-a-half
• Weekends and call-backs: often a minimum payment (commonly four hours) regardless of how long the job takes

So a one-hour Sunday job can cost you four hours of double-time wages. If your price doesn’t recover that loading, you’re paying your tradesman more than the customer’s paying you. Your charge-out rate has to carry the penalty rate, run yours through the Hourly Rate Calculator on an after-hours basis and see what it actually needs to be.

Set your tiers before the phone rings

The mistake isn’t charging too little on purpose. It’s improvising a number at 11pm when you’re tired and the customer’s stressed. You’ll always go too soft.

So decide your premium tiers in advance and write them down:

• Standard callout fee
• After-hours rate
• Weekend rate
• Public holiday rate
• Minimum charge

When the phone rings, you’re reading a number off a page, not making one up. The customer in an emergency is rarely shopping on price anyway, they want it fixed, now. That’s exactly when discounting yourself makes least sense.

Don’t forget the margin still applies

Premium rates aren’t a replacement for margin, they sit on top of it. The job still has materials, still has overhead, still needs a proper margin. The after-hours premium covers the cost of being there at that hour. Everything else you’d charge in daylight still applies.

This is all part of pricing the full cost of doing business, not just the hour you happened to be standing in someone’s meter box.

If it costs you more to show up, it should cost them more to call. Set the premium before the phone rings, not after.