Why Most Gas Engineers Have Stopped Charging by the Hour

The faster you get at your job, the less you earn. Fix a fault in 90 minutes instead of 3 hours, and on an hourly rate, you've just paid yourself less for being better at your trade. It's called the efficiency trap, and it's one of the big reasons fewer engineers bill by the hour every year. And this is what they're moving to instead. On paper, hourly pricing sounds fair. You trade time for money, and the customer pays you for how long the job takes. But there's a few problems with it. The first is called the efficiency trap. The better you get, the faster you finish, and the less you earn per job. A newly qualified engineer who takes 3 hours to fix a fault makes more than an experienced one who fixes it in 90 minutes. So you're basically being punished for getting better at your trade. The second is customer anxiety. When somebody hears £60 an hour, they've got no idea what they're committing to. Is it 1 hour? 5 hours? They watch the clock the whole job and then start questioning every minute, every merchant run, every on-site phone call. Fixed pricing flips that conversation. And so instead of selling your time, you're actually selling an outcome. A working boiler, a finished install, a passed gas safety check. That's what your customer actually cares about. It also lets them make a clear decision up front with no surprises. And as you get faster, the price reflects the value of your work, not the minutes spent on it. That said, hourly hasn't disappeared completely. For reactive callouts where the scope is genuinely unknown, callout fee plus an hourly rate after that is a fair model that most customers understand. It can also work for unusual jobs that could go several ways. Sometimes being upfront about the unknown builds more trust than padding a fixed quote to cover every scenario. If you want to move towards fixed pricing, start with jobs that you know well. Gas safety inspections, annual services, straightforward installs. Track how long they actually take, what materials you use, and over time you'll build a price book that you can trust. One of the trickiest parts of fixed price quoting is getting accurate quotes out fast. Gas Engineer Software lets you build and send quotes from your phone, even on site. Set up your standard jobs once with our line item templates, and you're not starting from scratch every time. For the full breakdown, including how to handle materials, travels, and the questions customers always ask, head to the link in the description. Thanks for watching, and don't forget to like and subscribe.