The statutory fee per signature is the part that is capped, published, and easy to look up — and on a mobile appointment it is usually the smallest line on the invoice. What actually decides whether the job was worth taking is the drive, the time the drive costs you, and whatever the appointment turns into once you are there. Quoting from the notarial fee alone prices the paperwork and gives the travel away.
Open the free notary trip quote calculator
A 20-mile round trip at $0.70 per mile is $14.00 of mileage. Thirty minutes of driving and a 45-minute appointment at $60 per hour add $30.00 and $45.00. State fees of $15.00 and one witness at $25.00 bring the total to $129.00, comfortably above the $50.00 appointment minimum, so the minimum does not apply. Note the shape of it: $44.00 of that quote — more than the notarial and witness fees combined — is travel the capped fee does not cover. Drop the travel lines and the same appointment quotes at $85.00, and the drive is unpaid.
Everything above assumes you set the price. Much of the work that fills a signing agent's calendar does not arrive that way — a signing service emails a flat fee already attached: $85, refinance package, 45 miles, 138 pages. There is nothing to quote. The decision is accept, counter, or decline, and the fee on the screen is not the number to decide on.
Two costs decide it, and neither appears in the offer. The first is printing. A loan package is printed twice, once for the borrower and once for the lender, so 138 pages is 276 sheets — paper and toner at roughly $0.04 a sheet is $11.04 gone before you leave the house, and the printing itself is half an hour standing at the machine. The second is the drive, which is not the mileage rate you would have billed: 45 miles at about $0.30 a mile in fuel and wear is $13.50 you actually spend.
So that $85 is $85 minus $24.54 of your own money, over an hour of driving, an hour at the table, and half an hour at the printer — two and a half hours. It pays $24.18 an hour. The same $85 for a ten-minute walk-in three blocks away is a different job at four times the rate, and the offer email makes them look identical.
Two figures are worth knowing before you reply. The walk-away fee is what the job costs you in cash whatever your time is worth — $24.54 here, and below it you are paying to work. The fee that pays your rate covers those costs and then pays your entered hourly rate for every minute the job takes: $174.54. An $85 offer sits between the two, which is exactly what "worth taking on a slow afternoon, worth countering on a full one" looks like in numbers.
Note what the same arithmetic says about your print fee. If billing $0.20 a page does not cover the half hour at the printer at your own hourly rate, the fee that pays your rate lands above your quote — a signal that the print line, not the travel line, is the one priced too low.
Test an offer in the calculator
Statutory per-signature fees are set by your state and are the one line you cannot price yourself. Travel, waiting, and convenience charges are generally not capped the same way, but the rules genuinely differ: some states require the travel fee to be disclosed and agreed separately from the notarial fee, and a few regulate it. Check your own state's notary handbook before you publish a rate card.
Price it as separate lines rather than one improvised number: mileage at your per-mile rate, travel time at your hourly rate, the appointment itself at that same hourly rate, any statutory per-signature fees, witness fees per witness, waiting time at its own rate, and an after-hours surcharge if it applies. Add them, then compare the total with your appointment minimum and charge whichever is higher. Statutory notarial fees are capped by your state; travel, waiting, and convenience charges generally are not, but the rules differ by state.
Because the billable part of a mobile appointment is much shorter than the job. A 45-minute signing with a 30-minute round trip is 75 minutes of your day, and the capped per-signature fee covers none of the driving. Quoting from the notarial fee alone prices the paperwork and gives away the travel — which is why an appointment minimum exists: it sets a floor under jobs whose travel and setup cost more than their signatures.
They pay for two different things, so most mobile notaries charge both. Mileage covers the vehicle — fuel, wear, and insurance — and is usually set per mile. Travel time covers the hour of your day the drive consumes, which mileage does not compensate at all: a 20-mile trip through city traffic costs far more of your time than 20 highway miles. Pricing them as separate lines also makes the quote easier to explain to a client who asks why a nearby signing costs less.
It depends almost entirely on the drive and the page count, which the offer does not mention. Take $85 for a 138-page package 45 miles away: printed twice that is 276 sheets, about $11.04 in paper and toner, plus roughly $13.50 of fuel and wear for the round trip — $24.54 of your own money. The job occupies an hour of driving, an hour at the table and half an hour at the printer, so what is left works out at $24.18 an hour. The identical $85 for a ten-minute walk-in nearby pays four times that. Decide on the hourly figure, not the fee.
More than most agents bill for it, because the package is printed twice — the borrower's set and the lender's set — and because the time is invisible. At roughly $0.04 a sheet for paper and toner, a 138-page package printed twice costs about $11.04 in consumables, and printing and collating it is commonly 20 to 40 minutes. Bill printing as a per-page fee rather than folding it into the appointment rate, and check that fee against the time: if $0.20 a page does not cover half an hour of your hourly rate, the print line is subsidising the client.
Quote it in advance as its own rate, usually lower than your working hourly rate, and say up front when it starts — typically after a stated grace period past the appointment time. Waiting for a late signer, a missing witness, or documents that have not arrived is the most common way a booked appointment overruns, and a rate agreed beforehand turns an awkward conversation at the kitchen table into a line the client already accepted.