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A fee schedule reads as one number — "$65 a serve" or "$40 a serve plus mileage" — and that number is the one thing it does not tell you: how much the job actually pays once you count what it takes to close it. Two real-shaped schedules below, run through the same arithmetic, end up in very different places.
Base fee $65, covering two attempts and ten miles. This job took three attempts and a 20-mile round trip, no rush, no skip trace, plus the standard $10 affidavit fee — about 54 minutes of drive, on-site, and paperwork time combined.
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Gross revenue | $96.70 |
| Vehicle cost | $3.60 |
| Fixed job cost | $5.00 |
| Net profit | $88.10 |
| Effective hourly rate | $97.89/hr |
| Profit margin | 91.1% |
Add-on revenue alone (the extra attempt, mileage, and affidavit fee) already covers this job's cost, so the break-even base fee is negative — this client would still be worth serving for even at a $0 base rate, on this job's numbers.
Base fee $25, covering one attempt and five miles — cheaper-looking on the flyer. This defendant took six attempts and needed a skip trace after the first address turned out to be stale, plus an 80-mile round trip on a $0.15/mile add-on that does not come close to the $0.22/mile it actually costs to drive. Two hours of drive time, ninety minutes on-site across six attempts, and eighteen minutes of paperwork.
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Gross revenue | $76.25 |
| Vehicle cost | $17.60 |
| Fixed job cost | $8.00 |
| Net profit | $50.65 |
| Effective hourly rate | $13.33/hr |
| Profit margin | 66.4% |
$50.65 and a 66.4% margin look fine in isolation. They are not the number that matters here: this job took 3.8 hours of your day, one attempt short of a full workday's worth of driving and knocking, and paid barely above minimum wage for it. A server who only tracks per-job profit, not per-hour, keeps taking these.
$40 separated these two base fees, and $84.56/hr separated what they actually paid. The lowball client's low per-attempt and per-mile add-ons meant a hard-to-find defendant and a long drive were the server's problem, not the client's — the flat fee never adjusted for either. Run your own numbers before you accept the next job from a client whose fee schedule you have not checked against a realistic attempt count and drive distance.
Because none of its costs disappeared -- vehicle cost and this job's fixed-cost share apply no matter which client you serve for. Only the attempts, address quality, and distance changed, and together they cut the effective hourly rate from $97.89/hr to $13.33/hr, which the flat base fee alone never shows.
Compare effective hourly rate, not the base fee. The solid schedule pays $97.89/hr on this job; the lowball schedule pays $13.33/hr for a harder version of the same job -- a $40 gap in base fee hides an $84.56/hr gap in what the job actually paid.