How to price car detailing jobs by vehicle size

Flat pricing costs you money on exactly the jobs that take the longest. A mud-caked lifted F-250 with pet hair should not pay what a clean commuter Civic pays. The fix is a vehicle-tier model: a small set of size classes, each with its own base price.

How many tiers?

Four covers almost every shop:

1. Sedan / coupe — your baseline.
2. SUV / crossover / small truck
3. Truck / lifted / 3-row SUV
4. XL / van / commercial

More than four and customers can’t self-select correctly; fewer and you’re back to eating the difference on the big ones. If you do a lot of exotics or fleet work, add a “call for quote” option rather than a fifth tier.

Setting the steps

Start from the labor time each tier actually adds, not a round percentage. A rough pattern that holds up:

• Tier 2 is +20–30% over sedan.
• Tier 3 is +45–60% over sedan.
• Tier 4 is +70–90% over sedan.

Example, full detail:

Tier	Price	Step
Sedan	$160	base
SUV	$200	+25%
Truck / Lifted	$245	+53%
XL / Van	$290	+81%

Sanity-check each cell against your slowest real job in that class. If the number wouldn’t cover that job plus your target margin, raise it.

Add-ons are flat, not tiered

Pet hair, sap and tar, engine bay, clay bar, odor treatment — price these as flat amounts on top of the tier price. They vary by condition, not vehicle size, so tiering them just confuses the quote.

Make the tier the customer’s choice, then verify

Let the customer pick their tier when they book — with plain descriptions and an example vehicle for each. Keep the right to re-tier on arrival if the vehicle clearly doesn’t match, and note that in your terms. In practice, mis-selection is rare when the labels are concrete (“Truck / Lifted — full-size pickup, or anything with a lift kit”).

Lock the math so it can’t drift

Once the table exists, the price for a given tier + service + add-ons should be the same every single time, no matter who books it. That’s easier to guarantee when the price is computed from your rules server-side instead of typed out by hand on each quote.

The short version

Use four tiers, set the steps from real labor time, keep add-ons flat, and let the customer pick their tier with a verify-on-arrival backstop. Then hold the pricing steady so the worst truck of the day is never under-quoted again. The car detailing booking software page shows how this model runs automatically on a booking link.