What to Charge for a Drainage Site Visit

You drove 35 minutes to a house in the older part of town. The homeowner has standing water along the back fence every spring. You spent an hour and ten minutes there — walked the grade with a level, checked three downspouts, dug two hand holes to see what the soil does at eight inches, traced where the neighbor's yard sheds onto theirs.

You went home, sketched a run, priced it, wrote a proposal. Total time in and out: about four hours.

They took your drawing and your diagnosis to a guy with a mini-ex and a cheaper number. That's the day most drainage contractors start thinking about charging for the visit.

A drainage call is diagnostic work, not measurement work

Here's the distinction that matters, and it's the whole argument for charging.

On a patio bid, the homeowner already knows what they want. They want pavers, roughly here, roughly this big. Your visit measures the area, checks access for a skid steer, and confirms the base depth. The scope was decided before you pulled up. You're pricing a known thing.

On a wet-yard call, nobody knows what the job is yet. Not the homeowner, not you. Water is showing up somewhere and the cause could be grade, roof water, soil, a high water table, off-site runoff, or three of those at once. Finding out is the work. We wrote the five-source walkthrough in diagnosing a wet yard in one site visit, and it takes what it takes — usually 45 to 90 minutes on a normal residential lot, longer if the lot is big or the story doesn't add up.

That hour produces something of independent value. It produces an answer. The homeowner can hand that answer to anyone, and the next contractor doesn't have to think.

When your visit produces a scope that didn't exist before you arrived, you're not estimating. You're consulting, and then giving the consulting away in the hope of winning the install.

Find your own number before you decide it's free

Most contractors who give away site visits have never priced one. Do that first, then decide.

Add up what a visit actually costs you. Use your own figures — these are placeholders to show the shape:

• Drive time. Round trip 50 minutes, plus 15 minutes of buffer and parking. Call it 65 minutes.
• On site. 70 minutes for a real diagnostic on a typical lot.
• Write-up. Sketch, notes, pricing the run, building the proposal. 60 to 90 minutes if you're not working from a template.
• Vehicle. 28 miles round trip at whatever your per-mile number is.

That's roughly 3.5 to 4 hours of your time. Now apply your own loaded rate — the number that covers your pay, your truck, your phone, your insurance and your overhead, not your crew's wage. For most owner-operators that lands somewhere in the $55 to $95 per hour range depending on market and overhead, and you should calculate yours rather than take mine.

At $70 an hour and 3.75 hours, one site visit costs $262 plus about $20 in vehicle. Round to $280.

Now the close rate. If you close 1 in 3 drainage bids, every job you sell carries the cost of three visits: $840 of unbilled diagnostic time baked into that job. If you close 1 in 5, it's $1,400.

Run yours:

Substitute your visit cost and your close rate. The number in that last column is what you're recovering somewhere — either in your margin, or nowhere.

That's the real question. Not "should estimates be free," but "am I already charging for this, invisibly, and is it working."

Charge when the visit produces an answer, not when it produces a price

You don't have to pick one policy for every call. Split it by what the visit actually does.

Free visit, no hesitation, when:

• The homeowner already knows the scope. "I need a french drain along this fence line, about 120 feet." You're confirming and measuring.
• It's a repeat client or a referral from one. The relationship already paid for the drive.
• The job is bundled with landscape work you're already bidding on site.
• The lot is close and the visit is 20 minutes. Not everything needs a fee.

Charge when:

• The homeowner can't tell you what the problem is, only what they're seeing. Water in the crawlspace. Grass that won't grow. A soggy corner.
• Two contractors have already been out and given conflicting answers. You're being hired to break a tie, and that's consulting.
• The property is over an acre, has multiple discharge problems, or involves a neighbor's water.
• The drive is over 40 minutes each way.
• They want a report, a drawing, or something in writing they can show a spouse, an HOA or a realtor.

The fee itself tends to run $150 to $400 in most residential markets, and it should be anchored to your arithmetic above, not to what the guy across town charges. If your visit costs $280, a $150 fee still loses money — it just loses less.

Credit it against the job, and put the credit in writing

The credit is what makes the fee land easily. The homeowner hears the number, then hears that it disappears if they hire you, and the objection usually deflates on the spot.

Three ways to structure it:

1. Full credit. The $250 diagnostic comes off the contract price if they book within 30 or 60 days. Simplest to explain. Best when you close well.
2. Partial credit. Half comes off. You keep something for the diagnostic work regardless. Reasonable when the diagnostic itself is substantial — a large property, a report with drawings.
3. No credit, lower fee. A flat $150 consultation, unrelated to whether they hire you. This is the honest version if you're positioning as a diagnostic service and you're fine with people taking the answer elsewhere.

Whichever you pick, the credit has to appear as a visible line on the proposal. Not "I took it off the price" — an actual line item that reads Diagnostic site visit credit -$250, sitting under the subtotal where they can see it.

If the credit is invisible, they feel like they paid twice. If it's a line, they feel like they got their money back. Same math, completely different conversation. The line item breakdown covers where that belongs in the stack of costs.

Put an expiry on it. Sixty days is fair and it gives your follow-up a reason to exist that isn't "just checking in."

The script matters more than the number

Most leads that die over a site visit fee die because of how it was said, not what it was. Awkward delivery signals that you're not sure it's fair. Say it early, say it flatly, move on.

Say it on the first call, in the first two minutes. Never in an email after they've already booked a time — that reads like a bait and switch.

"Before we set a time — drainage calls work a little differently than a patio quote. I can't price a fix until I know where the water's coming from, and finding that out usually takes me an hour or so on site. Grade, roof water, soil, what your neighbor's yard is doing. So I charge $250 for that visit. You get a written diagnosis and a scope either way, and if you hire me for the work, the whole $250 comes off the job. Does that work for you?"

Four things are doing work in there. It names the difference from other trades. It explains what the hour buys. It says the number without apology. It closes with the credit.

When they push back — and maybe one in four will — the answer isn't a discount:

"Totally fair, and a lot of guys will come out free. The difference is what you get. A free visit is somebody guessing at a number so they can get a contract in front of you. I'd rather find out what's actually wrong, because I've seen people spend eight grand on a french drain when the problem was two downspouts. If you'd rather get a few free opinions first, genuinely no hard feelings — call me if they don't agree with each other."

That last line converts more often than anything else you could say. Homeowners who collect three free opinions and get three different answers come back to the person who offered to actually find out.

The fee only works if everything around it is tight

A paid visit raises what the homeowner expects, and rightly. A few things have to hold up.

Answer fast. Charging is a filter, and filters only work if you're first through the door. A homeowner who waited two days for your call back has already talked to somebody free. Our piece on what happens after 30 minutes covers the delay points.

Deliver something physical. A written diagnosis. What you found, what's causing it, what the fix is, what happens if they do nothing. A page or two. If they paid $250 and got a verbal summary and a number, they'll feel robbed even if your diagnosis was perfect.

Turn the proposal around quickly. The fee bought urgency. Squandering it with a four-day write-up undoes the goodwill. Templates are how you make that fast without cutting corners — see building estimate templates you reuse.

Track which visits convert. Paid visits should close at a much higher rate than free ones — that's the point. If you're not seeing it after twenty or thirty visits, either your fee is filtering the wrong people or your proposal is losing jobs the visit already won.

One honest note on that last point. ScapesHQ keeps the site visit, the proposal, the send history and the signature on one permanent timeline, so you can see which visits turned into signed work. It does not do invoicing or payments — collecting the $250 happens in whatever you use today, and the credit goes on the estimate as a line item you enter yourself. If you want job costing that compares the diagnostic hour against actuals, that isn't built either. Track it in a spreadsheet for now and know what you're looking at before you go shopping for software.

FAQ

How much should I charge for a drainage site visit?

Price it from your own cost rather than a benchmark. Add drive time, on-site time, write-up time and vehicle cost, multiply by your loaded hourly rate, and you'll usually land somewhere between $200 and $350 for a typical residential diagnostic. Most contractors who charge set the fee in the $150 to $400 range depending on market and drive distance.

Will charging for estimates cost me leads?

It costs you some, and that's partly the point. Expect pushback from roughly one in four callers, and expect the ones who pay to close at a noticeably higher rate. Track both numbers for a few months before deciding — the question isn't whether you lose leads, it's whether you lose profitable ones.

Should I charge for a patio or landscape estimate too?

Usually no. If the homeowner already knows what they want and your visit is measuring and confirming access, there's no diagnostic work to sell. Charge where the visit produces an answer that didn't exist before you arrived, not where it just produces a price.

What do I actually hand the homeowner for a paid site visit?

A written diagnosis — what you found, what's causing the water, what the fix is, and what happens if they do nothing. One or two pages is plenty. A verbal summary and a price is what free visits deliver, and it will make a paying homeowner feel shortchanged.

How do I show the credit on the proposal?

As a visible line under the subtotal, worded plainly, like "Diagnostic site visit credit -$250." If you just quietly reduce the price, the homeowner has no way to see the credit happened and feels like they paid twice. Put an expiry on it, sixty days is fair.

The short version

Price one site visit using your own drive time, on-site time, write-up time and loaded rate — most drainage diagnostics cost the contractor $200 to $350. Charge a fee in that range when the visit produces a diagnosis rather than just a measurement, credit it fully against the job as a visible line item on the proposal, and say the number on the first call before you book a time. The homeowners who pay close at a much higher rate than the ones who don't.

Book a walkthrough and we'll look at what your last ten site visits actually turned into.