SMBDashboardMobile Detailing Numbers: Real Profit Per Job
By Mark Fulton · 2026-09-07 · 16 min read
Mobile detailing profit is decided per job, not per month, and the per job number is your price minus four things most detailers never write down: the product you actually used on that car, the fuel and wear on the van getting there and back, the setup and teardown time that is invisible because it is not washing, and the water and power you carried to the address. Run that subtraction on ten jobs and the answer usually surprises the owner in the same direction: the fast cheap package earns less per working hour than it looks like, and the slow expensive one earns more. You do not need a monthly earnings benchmark to find this out. You need one short record filled in from the driver's seat before you pull away.
The internet is full of monthly income figures for mobile detailers and almost empty of the arithmetic underneath them. It is also inconsistent with itself. Depending on which page you land on, a detailing business runs a 25 to 40 percent profit margin or a 50 to 80 percent one, which is a spread wide enough to mean nothing, and none of those pages disclose how many operators they looked at. So this post does not publish an earnings figure. It publishes the method, using invented example numbers that you replace with yours.
What does a mobile detail actually cost to deliver?
A fixed shop has rent, and every guide about detailing profit starts there, usually to tell you that mobile detailing wins because it has no rent. That is true and it is the least interesting fact about the business. What mobile has instead is a set of costs that move with every job, which makes them much harder to see and much easier to underprice.
Six cost lines exist on every mobile detail:
Product and consumables. Shampoo, degreaser, iron remover, tire dressing, glass cleaner, clay, polish, pads, microfiber wear, and the towels that do not survive. Real money, spent in small amounts, invisible because you bought it three weeks ago in bulk.
Vehicle. Fuel, tires, brakes, insurance, and the fact that your van is depreciating while it sits in a driveway. Mileage is the practical way to carry all of this in one number.
Water and power. Whatever you carry: tank fill, generator fuel or battery cycles, and the pressure washer's own consumption.
Your time, all of it. Not the time your hands are on the car. The clock from leaving the last address to being packed and rolling from this one.
Wastewater handling. This is the line the earnings blogs skip entirely. Wash water carrying soap and road grime is a discharge, and the federal framework that governs it is the EPA's NPDES stormwater program, which exists specifically to keep runoff from washing pollutants into surface waters. Cities implement it locally and the rules have teeth. Austin's utility, for example, states plainly on its wastewater disposal page for power washers and mobile car washes that mobile car wash wastewater may not go into the storm sewer if it contains pollutants or cleaning compounds and has not been treated, that discharging to the sanitary sewer requires collecting the water and hauling it to a permitted fixed site facility, and that unauthorized discharge is a Class C misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $2,000 per day per violation. Check your own city, because the rule is local. Whatever containment you end up using is a real per job cost, and a fine is not a cost, it is a business ending event.
Insurance and licensing, spread per job. Annual money divided by the number of jobs you actually do.
The first four are the ones that decide package margin, and the two that get skipped are time and product. Everything below is about pinning those two down.
How much drive time is hiding in your day?
Take yesterday. Add up the minutes you were on a car. Then add up the minutes you were paid for. They are not the same number, and the gap is the whole business.
Between two details there is: driving, parking and finding the customer, unrolling hoses and running the extension cord, a walk around and a conversation about what the customer wants, then at the end, packing wet gear, wiping down, and dumping or containing water. Forty five minutes of that per job is ordinary. Ninety is not unusual in a spread out service area.
Two separate costs live in that gap, and detailers routinely count neither.
The vehicle cost of the miles. The simplest defensible way to value driving is a per mile rate that bundles fuel, maintenance, tires and depreciation into one figure. The IRS publishes exactly such a rate for business use of a vehicle. Its standard mileage rates page sets the business rate at 76 cents per mile for July 1 through December 31 of 2026, up from 72.5 cents for the first half of the year. You do not have to use the standard mileage method for your taxes to use that number as a sane internal cost of driving, and it is a far better estimate than the fuel receipt alone, because the fuel receipt ignores the van wearing out. How you actually deduct vehicle expenses is a question for your accountant, not a blog.
The labor cost of the time. Forty five minutes of setup and drive at whatever you value your hour is a straight subtraction from the job. On a $90 express wash it is a large fraction of the job. On an $850 coating it rounds to nothing. That single asymmetry is why cheap packages quietly underperform.
The fix is not to stop doing short jobs. It is to know what they earn so you can price them, cluster them, or set a minimum. A detailer who books three express washes across three ends of town has sold six hours and billed three.
How do you cost product per vehicle?
You cannot do this per bottle in real time, and you should not try. Here is the version that takes ten minutes once a month.
Total what you spent on chemicals, pads, towels and consumables in the last month. Divide by the number of vehicles you did. That is your blended product cost per vehicle. It is rough, it is honest, and it is infinitely better than the zero most detailers implicitly use.
Then split it once, because packages differ enormously. A maintenance wash burns soap, a drying aid and a tire dressing. A paint correction burns compound, polish, several pads and a stack of towels, and a coating burns a bottle of product that cost real money on its own. So run the same division three times, once per package type, using the jobs of that type only. Now you have three numbers instead of one, and the expensive package stops hiding behind the cheap one.
Two refinements worth making after a couple of months. Track pad and towel replacement as its own line, because it does not show up until things wear out and then arrives as a lumpy purchase that gets blamed on a slow week. And note when a job needed a second pass, because the difference between a $19 job and a $34 job is usually one vehicle that was filthier than the booking implied, which is a pricing and intake problem, not a product problem.
This is the same discipline as any per job cost tagging, and it is the reason job costing for small contractors leans so hard on tagging at the moment of spending. Detailing is easier than contracting here, because your material spend is a monthly restock rather than a hundred loose receipts. Take the win.
What is your real jobs-per-day ceiling?
Almost every income projection you will read multiplies a job price by a jobs per day number, then by working days, and lands on an annual figure. The jobs per day number in those projections is nearly always the number of cars you could physically clean if they were parked in a row outside your house.
Build yours from the clock instead. Start with the hours you will actually work, subtract the load out at the start and the restock, laundry and cleanup at the end, and divide what remains by your full per job clock, not your on vehicle time.
Here is that arithmetic with example inputs. Every number below is invented to show the shape of the calculation. Substitute your own.
| Input | Your example figure |
|---|---|
| Hours available | 9.0 |
| Load out, restock, laundry, cleanup | 1.5 |
| Hours left for jobs | 7.5 |
| Full clock per express wash | 1.75 |
| Full clock per full detail | 3.9 |
| Express washes that fit | 4 |
| Full details that fit | 1 (2 only if the addresses are close) |
Two things fall out of this that a monthly earnings figure cannot tell you.
The ceiling is set by geography, not by speed. Getting faster at washing a car moves the on vehicle time. It does not move the drive. A detailer who tightens the service area by ten minutes per hop gains more capacity than one who shaves ten minutes off the wash.
The gap you cannot fill is a cost. A cancellation at 1pm is not a free afternoon, it is a paid one. If your day only holds two full details and one cancels, you lost half the day's revenue and kept all of the fixed costs. That is the argument for a deposit policy, and it is an argument you can only make with a number attached.
Which package is quietly losing money?
Now put the pieces together. Two packages, same operator, same van. All figures below are invented for the example.
The inputs the operator picked: product cost per vehicle from last month's restock divided by vehicle count, vehicle cost at the IRS business rate of 76 cents per mile, and a full clock that includes drive, setup and teardown.
| Line | Express wash | Full detail |
|---|---|---|
| Price charged | $90 | $220 |
| On vehicle time | 1.00 h | 3.00 h |
| Drive, setup, teardown | 0.75 h | 0.90 h |
| Full clock | 1.75 h | 3.90 h |
| Round trip miles | 14 | 16 |
| Vehicle cost at 76c/mile | $10.64 | $12.16 |
| Product and consumables | $6.00 | $19.00 |
| Left after job costs | $73.36 | $188.84 |
| Per on vehicle hour | $73.36 | $62.95 |
| Per full clock hour | $41.92 | $48.42 |
Read the last two rows against each other, because that is the whole point.
Measured the way a detailer naturally measures, by the time spent on the car, the express wash is the better job by a comfortable margin. $73 an hour beats $63 an hour, and it feels better too, because you are done and moving.
Measured against the clock that actually runs, the ranking reverses. The full detail earns $48.42 per hour of your working day and the express wash earns $41.92. The fixed 45 to 55 minutes of drive, setup and teardown lands on both jobs equally, and the small job has far less revenue to absorb it.
Nothing here says stop selling express washes. They fill gaps, they win first time customers, and a full day of them beats a half day of nothing. What it says is that the express price was set as if setup were free, and it is not. Three responses are available: raise the express price, set a two vehicle minimum at one address, or cluster express bookings into a single geographic afternoon so one drive covers several jobs. All three are visible only after the subtraction.
The same logic runs upward. If a ceramic coating takes eight hours of clock and $180 of product but bills $850, it is almost certainly your best hour on the calendar, and knowing that changes which service you advertise. This is the mechanism behind pricing generally, covered in how to price your services: a price is defensible when you can name what it covers.
What should you record after every job?
Six lines, filled in from the driver's seat before you leave the address. It takes under a minute, and after two weeks it answers every question above with your own numbers instead of somebody's benchmark.
| # | Line | What it captures |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Date and customer | Repeat rate, and which customers are worth a maintenance plan |
| 2 | Package and price charged | The revenue side, split by package so margins can be compared |
| 3 | Full clock, wheels stopped to wheels rolling | The real cost of the job, including drive, setup, walk around and teardown |
| 4 | Round trip miles | Vehicle cost, at a per mile rate, and the true size of your service area |
| 5 | Product and consumables used | The direct material cost, and which packages burn product faster than priced |
| 6 | One line on what went slow or wrong | The reason a job overran, which is what fixes the next quote |
Lines 3 and 5 are the two everybody skips, and they are the two that decide the margin.
Line 3 gets skipped because detailers time the wash. It is the satisfying number, the one you compare with other detailers, and it is the wrong one. Time the whole stop. Start the clock when you arrive and stop it when you are packed and rolling. If that feels like too much, use the odometer trick instead: note the time you leave one address and the time you leave the next, and the difference is that job's full clock including its drive.
Line 5 gets skipped because product feels like a monthly problem, not a job problem. It is both. Do the monthly division described above and write the resulting per package number on line 5 rather than weighing bottles. Once a month you refresh the number. On the job you just copy it in.
A note on how the record is kept. It works in a notebook, in a notes app, or in a simple money log where each entry carries the customer name. What matters is that it is one place and that it survives week six. Adding fields you do not need is the fastest way to kill it, which is the same conclusion reached in tracking business expenses without accounting software. Six lines is already at the upper limit of what gets filled in on a wet driveway.
After ten to fifteen jobs you will have enough to sort by package and read the two things that matter: money left per job, and money left per hour of full clock. Both will be different from what you assumed, and the gap between them is the price change you have been putting off.
Frequently asked questions
How much profit is in a mobile detail?
There is no honest industry figure, and the ones published widely contradict each other badly enough to be useless. You will find the same business described as running a 25 to 40 percent margin on one page and a 50 to 80 percent margin on another, with no sample size disclosed on either. Rather than pick one, run the subtraction on your own last ten jobs: price charged, minus product used, minus miles at a per mile vehicle rate, minus your own time at a rate you would pay someone else. Do it per package. Your real answer will be inside two weeks of records and it will be specific to your prices, your service area and your product costs, none of which a national average knows anything about.
Should I charge for travel?
Charge for it somehow, but not always as a visible line. The cost is real and it does not disappear if you decline to invoice it. Three ways to cover it, in order of how well they usually go over: build it into the package price and set a service radius, which is invisible and easiest to sell. Set a minimum job value inside a radius and a surcharge beyond it, which is fair and explainable. Or add a flat travel fee to every invoice, which is transparent but tends to trigger price shopping on the fee itself rather than the service. Whichever you pick, price it from your actual miles, and note that at the IRS business rate of 76 cents per mile a 30 mile round trip is about $23 of vehicle cost before you count a minute of your time.
How many cars can one detailer do in a day?
Take your working hours, subtract load out at the start and restock and cleanup at the end, then divide by your full per job clock rather than your wash time. For most solo mobile operators that produces a smaller number than expected, because the drive, setup and teardown add most of an hour to every stop regardless of package. The bigger lever is not working faster, it is booking tighter. Two jobs at one address, or three in one neighborhood, remove entire drives from the day and lift the ceiling more than any speed gain on the car itself.
What are the main costs in mobile detailing?
Product and consumables, the vehicle, water and power carried to the site, your own time including everything that is not washing, wastewater handling, and insurance and licensing spread across the jobs you actually do. Of those, the two that most often go unmeasured are time and product, which is why they are the two emphasized lines in the record above. Wastewater is the one that gets ignored entirely and should not be, because whether you can legally let water run to a storm drain is set by your city, not by convention, and the penalties in some jurisdictions run into thousands of dollars per day per violation.
Sources
- Internal Revenue Service, Standard mileage rates, for the 76 cents per mile business rate covering July 1 through December 31, 2026, and 72.5 cents for the first half of 2026
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, NPDES stormwater program, on the permitting framework covering stormwater discharges and preventing runoff from carrying pollutants into surface waters
- Austin Water, Wastewater disposal for power washers and mobile car washes, for the storm sewer prohibition, the collect and haul requirement for sanitary sewer discharge, and the Class C misdemeanor penalty of up to $2,000 per day per violation
Every price, time, mileage and product figure in the package comparison and the day capacity table is invented for illustration. They exist to show how the arithmetic behaves, not to state what a detail costs or what a detailer earns. The only figures here taken from a source are the IRS mileage rate and the Austin penalty, both linked above. Anything touching deductions, vehicle expense method or licensing is a question for your accountant and your city, not a blog post.
Log your next detail before you pull away
Start with the job you are on today. Enter the price in the money module of SMBDashboard with the customer attached, add the product cost as a second entry, and put the full clock and the round trip miles in the note. Do that for two weeks and the money module will show you profit per package instead of a monthly total you cannot act on. It is free, there is no account to create, and your data stays in your browser unless you turn on Pro sync. The free tier holds 25 customers, 200 money entries and unlimited tasks, which covers a real fortnight of detailing rather than a demo. Pro removes the caps and adds CSV export, recurring entries and your own branding on the printed report, at $48 every six months, about $8 a month, or $149 once. If you want the summary on paper at the end of each week, the printable weekly business report prints the same numbers on one page.