Fishing Charter Pricing Calculator

This calculator works backward from your target profit margin to a recommended charter price, rather than just tallying costs. It first sums every direct expense for the trip — fuel (hourly rate × trip length), captain and mate wages (each crew member's hourly rate × hours, with mates multiplied by headcount), bait and tackle per angler, per-trip insurance, plus two fixed line items: a flat $25 dockage/slip fee and a wear-and-tear maintenance reserve of $15 per hour of engine time. Those add up to total trip cost. The charter price is then set so that cost represents (100 − your margin)% of revenue: price = cost / (1 − margin/100).

That's a markup-on-cost formula, not a margin-on-price shortcut, so a 35% target margin means the price is roughly 54% higher than cost, not 35% higher — a common mixup for anyone pricing a service for the first time. Price per person just divides that total by passenger count, and a suggested 18% gratuity is shown as a customary reference figure, not something baked into the charter price itself. The model assumes a full, paying boat — it doesn't discount for partial trips, weather cancellations, or off-season demand softness, and the $25 dockage and $15/hr wear-and-tear figures are generic placeholders that should be replaced with your marina's actual fees and your own maintenance history for a realistic number. Swap in your real dockage fee and maintenance-reserve rate before quoting a customer, since this markup-on-cost price is only as accurate as those two placeholder inputs.