Yes, publish something. You do not have to post a full price list, and for a lot of work you cannot, but a page with no number anywhere on it leaves the reader holding the one question they came with. Publish the numbers you can stand behind, and say plainly what moves them.
Why they are hunting for a number
The person reading your site is not always shopping for the cheapest bid. Some of them are working out whether they can pay at all, before they let a stranger into the house.
The Federal Reserve Board released its Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2025 on May 13, 2026. The survey behind it was fielded in October 2025. It found that 63 percent of all adults said they would cover a $400 emergency expense using only cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement. In the same survey, 12 percent said they would be unable to pay the expense by any means.
A dead water heater is not a purchase anyone planned for. Neither is a roof leak found in February. A number on your page lets that reader decide something instead of stalling.
Here is the limit of that evidence. The survey measures household finances across the whole country. It says nothing about your website, and it does not prove a posted price gets you more calls. Nobody has that number for your business, and anyone who says otherwise is guessing.
The three numbers nearly any trade can publish
It is easy to get stuck trying to price every job. You do not have to. Three things stay true for months.
- Your trip or diagnostic fee, and whether it comes off the bill if they hire you.
- How you charge. Flat rate per job, or hourly plus parts, and what the first hour covers.
- A range for the five jobs you sell most, with a low end and a high end.
A range is not a quote, so label it as one. Name the job the way a homeowner says it, give your low and your high, then give the reason the high end happens. Old venting. A code upgrade. A second story. No attic access.
That last line does most of the work. It tells the reader you are not hiding anything, you are describing real work.
Then put a date beside it. “Prices as of August 2026” is honest, and it tells you when to look again. Material and labor costs move. A range you wrote three years ago is advertising a price you would no longer accept, and it is a number an AI answer can repeat long after you meant to change it.
A price on your site is an ad, and it has to be real
The Federal Trade Commission’s Guides Against Bait Advertising sit at 16 CFR Part 238, published in the Federal Register at 32 FR 15540 on November 8, 1967. Section 238.0 opens: “Bait advertising is an alluring but insincere offer to sell a product or service which the advertiser in truth does not intend or want to sell.” A footnote to the part says that advertising here “includes any form of public notice however disseminated or utilized.” Your website is a public notice.
Section 238.3 is the part to read with your own price page open. It opens: “No act or practice should be engaged in by an advertiser to discourage the purchase of the advertised merchandise as part of a bait scheme to sell other merchandise.” It then lists six acts that get weighed in deciding whether an ad was a real offer. Refusing to sell on the advertised terms. Talking down the job you advertised, by acts or by words. Paying your crew in a way that pushes them off it.
That is the trap sitting inside a “$49 drain cleaning” headline you have no intention of honoring. Either you will do the work at that number, or it does not belong on the page.
This is not legal or tax advice. Your state adds its own rules on top of the federal ones. California, for one, tells a licensed contractor to include the license number in all forms of advertising, in the form the state registrar prescribes, at Business and Professions Code section 7030.5. Ask your own state contractor board, or your own attorney, before you post a price you are unsure about.
The federal fee rule does not cover home service work
The FTC’s Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, 16 CFR Part 464, was published in the Federal Register at 90 FR 2166 on January 10, 2025, and took effect on May 12, 2025. Read its scope before you read its rules.
Section 464.1 defines a covered good or service as two things: “(1) Live-event tickets; or (2) Short-term lodging, including temporary sleeping accommodations at a hotel, motel, inn, short-term rental, vacation rental, or other place of lodging.” That is the entire list. Plumbing, roofing, HVAC and electrical work are not on it. You can go and read that definition yourself in about a minute.
That is a fact about scope, not a free pass. Section 464.4 of that same rule says it does not override a state law that gives a consumer more protection than the rule does, so your state rules still stand. So does the FTC Act itself, which at 15 U.S.C. 45(a)(1) declares “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce” unlawful. If you add a fuel surcharge, a card fee, or a weekend rate, put it on the page next to the price rather than on the invoice at the end.
This is not legal or tax advice either. Your own state may cover fees the federal rule leaves out. Ask your own state contractor board, or your own attorney, before you decide a fee can wait until the invoice.
When to leave the number off
Some work cannot be priced from a keyboard. A sewer line replacement. A full roof. A service and panel upgrade. The real number is behind the drywall, under the shingles, or in whatever the inspector says on the day.
For those jobs, publish how you price instead of what you charge. What the visit costs. How long the estimate takes. What you need to see. Whether the estimate is free or paid, and what happens to that fee if they hire you. That answers the same worry without a figure you cannot hold to.
Two more cases. If you are the most expensive shop in town on purpose, put the reason in the same paragraph as the number. If your costs swing with the season or the supplier, publish a range and a review date, not a fixed figure.
You also do not need to buy anything to do this. Adding a price line is a text edit on a page you already own. If the thing stopping you is that changing one paragraph takes a support ticket and a week, pricing is not the problem, and how the site is built is the thing to look at.
What to do next
Work through it in order.
- List the five jobs you sold most last year.
- Pull the invoices and look up what you actually charged the last three times for each. Use the paperwork, not memory.
- Write a low, a high, and one line on what pushes a job to the high end.
- Publish your trip fee, whether it comes off the bill, how you charge, and whether you ask for a deposit.
- Put the range on the service page for that job, beside your phone number, rather than on a separate price page.
- Date the page, and set a reminder for six months out.
Then watch what changes. Fewer calls is not automatically a loss. If the people who do call already know your trip fee and called anyway, your close rate matters more than your call count, and working out whether your site gets you calls is its own piece of work. Whether that price sits beside a form or beside a phone number is a separate decision, covered in contact form or phone number.
This site publishes its own plan prices in full rather than making anyone ask. Same reasoning, applied to itself.