How to price delivery zones and haul-away fees

You have a delivery fee that has not changed in three years and a rule that anything past the county line is "plus a bit." The far runs feel wrong and you cannot prove it, because nobody has written down what a stop costs. Here is how to work that out in an afternoon, draw zones you can defend at the counter, and put a real number on taking the old fridge.

The short answer

Price the route, not the mile. Work out what one stop costs fully loaded — crew time both ways, the truck, the odds of a second attempt — then draw zones around drive time, not map radius. A 25-mile run up the highway can beat a 12-mile crawl across town. Haul-away gets its own line.

What one stop actually costs you

Four things, and you already have every number but one.

1. Crew time, both legs. Not the wage — the loaded rate: wage plus payroll tax, workers' comp and whatever else your bookkeeper adds per hour. Count every minute the crew is not in the store: drive out, door time, drive back. The return leg is the one people forget, and it is half the problem with far stops.

2. The truck. The standing cost — payment or depreciation, insurance, registration, maintenance, tires — divided by the hours a year it is actually out. Plus fuel: miles times fuel price divided by your real loaded mpg, not the sticker figure.

3. The second attempt. Nobody home, doorway too narrow, old unit still plumbed in, elevator booked. A failed stop costs the same as a good one and earns nothing. Count last quarter's, divide by total stops, carry that percentage on every stop.

4. Disposal, if you are hauling away. The processor's fee per unit, the extra door time, and the space the old unit takes on the truck for the rest of the day.

Now the part that decides everything: a stop's cost is the time it adds to the day, not its distance from your dock. A house seven miles out on a road you were driving anyway adds twelve minutes. A house 30 miles out with nothing near it adds the whole round trip, because the truck goes there and comes back empty.

A worked example, with your numbers

These are placeholder inputs, not benchmarks and not market rates. Nobody should read a number off this page and charge it. Replace them with yours.

Say your payroll shows a loaded driver at $27 an hour and a loaded helper at $22 — $49 for the pair. Say the truck's standing cost works out at $11 an hour once you divide the year's truck bills by the hours it runs. That is $60 an hour, or $1 a minute, any time the crew and truck are out. Fuel at 10 mpg and $3.60 a gallon adds $0.36 a mile.

Stop A — seven miles out, on a road you were already driving. Adds 14 minutes and 9 miles. Twenty-five minutes at the door, no stairs, no haul-away.

• 39 minutes × $1 = $39
• 9 miles × $0.36 = $3.24
• Cost: about $42

Stop B — 30 miles out, nothing else near it, last stop of the day. Forty-five minutes each way, 60 miles round trip, 30 minutes at the door.

• 120 minutes × $1 = $120
• 60 miles × $0.36 = $21.60
• Cost: about $142

Then the re-attempt surcharge. If one stop in ten is re-run, every stop carries about a tenth of a stop's cost — $4 on Stop A, $14 on Stop B. So: $46 and $156.

At a $49 flat fee, Stop A is fine and Stop B is a hundred dollars down before anyone looks at the margin on the goods. Run this for four or five real stops from last week and you will know whether your far band is underwater.

Drawing the zones off drive time

Distance bands beat a flat fee because cost scales with time, not with radius. Draw them like this.

1. Export the last twelve weeks of delivery addresses. Real stops, not a guess at where customers live.
2. Get a drive time for each, at the hour you actually deliver — ten on a Tuesday morning, not three in the morning when the map gives you its best case. You want bands, not precision.
3. Group them into bands of one-way drive time from your dock: 0–20 minutes, 20–40, 40–60, beyond 60. Four is plenty; six is unmanageable at the counter.
4. Price each band off the arithmetic above, rounded up to a number a person can say out loud.
5. Write down the zip codes in each band. That is what makes zones usable by staff who are not looking at a map while a customer waits.

When a town straddles a boundary, put it in the band where most of its stops landed and waive the difference for the few on the near edge. Do not split a zip code in a published fee table — you will spend the saving arguing about it.

When a far zone needs its own day, not its own fee

There is a point where no fee fixes a stop, because the problem is the day, not the money: a 90-minute round trip with one delivery at the end burns half a crew-day while your Zone 1 customers wait. Past that point, batch it. "Thursday is the north run." The far zone gets a day rather than a surcharge, with a minimum number of stops before the truck goes; anyone who wants it sooner pays for a dedicated trip at the real number — the whole $156, not the fee.

Threshold, two-person and white-glove

Most delivery pricing arguments are arguments about what was promised. Name the three levels, price them separately, and say which one the customer bought before they leave the counter.

| Level | What you agreed to | Effect on door time | |---|---|---| | Threshold | Off the truck into the first dry inside space — garage, porch, inside the front door. No stairs, no room of choice. | Shortest. One person on small goods; a fridge still needs two. | | Two-person, room of choice | Carried to the room, set in place and leveled. No connections. | Add 15–25 minutes, and a second wage for the whole stop, not just the carry. | | White-glove / install | Unboxed, placed, connected where you are permitted to, tested, packaging removed. | Longest and most variable. Gas, water and electrical work may require a licensed trade in your area — check before you offer it. |

Stairs are their own line. Price per flight and ask at the point of sale. A second-floor walk-up with a turn in the stairwell is a different job from a ground-floor slide-in, and finding that out at the door is how one stop becomes two.

Haul-away, honestly

Charge it as a separate line. Never fold it into the delivery fee: the costs behind it are real, and not the same on every stop.

• Extra time at the door — disconnect, walk out, load. Measure yours; fifteen minutes is a fair opening assumption.
• A second person, effectively always, on anything appliance-sized.
• Space on the truck. An old unit riding around all afternoon is a delivery you could not take.
• The processor's fee. The one number you cannot work out at your desk. Call your scrapyard, recycler or transfer station this week and write down what they charge per unit and what they refuse.

Refrigerant matters, and it is regulated. The EPA's page on stationary refrigeration disposal states that "the final person in the disposal chain (such as a scrap metal recycler or landfill owner) is responsible for ensuring that refrigerant is recovered from equipment before its final disposal" — and that where that handler takes in an appliance with no charge left, they must keep a signed statement naming who recovered the refrigerant and when. The same page says people recovering refrigerant from small appliances to prepare them for disposal "are not required to be certified technicians," while the recovery equipment has to meet the same performance standards as servicing equipment. That is the federal framing; your state, your county and your processor may each want more. Ask your processor what paperwork they need and keep it. This is not legal advice, and no software keeps anyone compliant.

Refuse a haul-away when the unit is still connected to gas, water or a dedicated circuit and you are not licensed to disconnect it; when it will not come out without removing a door or window; when it is wet, moldy or infested; or when your processor will not take that category. Print the "what we will not take" list and hand it over at the counter, not at the door.

Free delivery, priced properly

Free delivery is not a feature, it is a discount out of the same margin as any other. Two cases where it is still right:

1. The stop is already on a route you run, so the marginal cost is door time and little else. Free delivery inside Zone 1, on days you already go there is defensible arithmetic.
2. The margin covers the stop with room to spare and the free line closes the sale. Do that per zone, not once for the whole store.

If you advertise free delivery, publish the zone with it — same sentence, same size type.

What goes wrong

One fee for the whole map — or, worse, none. Free delivery gets promised on the website, in an ad, or by a salesperson under pressure at 6pm on a Saturday, and with no zone limit it is a standing offer to lose money on the customers who cost most to serve. Spot it: tag last quarter's delivery orders by band and write the stop cost next to the fee you actually charged. If the far band comes out negative, you are paying people to sell your worst orders.

Haul-away given away at the door. "Can you take the old one while you're here?" — and of course the driver says yes. Spot it: count the stops where a haul-away was recorded against the orders carrying a haul-away line. The gap is free labor plus a disposal fee you paid.

Zones drawn as circles. A radius treats a river, a rail crossing and a school zone at 3pm as open highway. Spot it: in one band, compare the best and worst real drive times. More than 20 minutes apart and the band is wrong.

The second attempt nobody prices. Three rules cut them: ask about stairs, doorway width and whether the old unit is still connected at the point of sale, not at the door; confirm the day before with a question the customer has to answer; capture proof at the door, so the argument three weeks later is settled by the record rather than by memory.

How UpChannels handles this

Delivery & Routes is an optional add-on you switch on per store. Delivery Routing holds the decisions you just made:

• Zones are zip-code lists with a surcharge. You draw the bands off drive time, then write each band's zip codes into settings with its fee. When a new delivery order's address matches, the fee lands as an ordinary order line staff can see and uncheck — a suggestion, not a lock.
• The route arranger sequences a day's stops in one click, inside UpChannels at no API cost. Windows and per-day capacity are flags for the dispatcher, not hard constraints, so a person still makes the call on a tight day.
• Dispatch is a text message. The driver gets a signed link that opens in their phone browser — no app, no account — so a hired hauler works exactly like your own crew, and the link expires.
• Proof of delivery captures a signature, the signer's name, photos typed as customer-visible or internal, notes, and the time and place of capture. It works with no signal and syncs when the phone finds one.
• Haul-away is recorded on the stop. The driver logs whether it was done and that lands on the delivery record. Be clear on what that is: a record of the work, not a price. The charge is a line you put on the order — UpChannels does not price haul-away for you.
• Customers can book their own window if you run the Customer Portal add-on and switch self-scheduling on, which is off by default. The portal only ever offers your delivery days, windows, lead time, capacity and blackout dates.

The boundary. It holds the zones and fees once you decide them, and keeps the record of what happened at the door. It does not work out what a stop costs you, it does not tell you what to charge, and it gives the customer no automatic arrival estimate — they see the window you set.

Sources and last checked

• US EPA, Stationary Refrigeration Safe Disposal Requirements — epa.gov/section608/stationary-refrigeration-safe-disposal-requirements. Page last updated 23 March 2026; read 12 September 2026.

Disposal fees are local and regulatory references move, so this guide is re-verified quarterly.