Start from cost, not from competitors
Mobile bar prices you see online cover very different things: a dry-hire bar front with no staff, a dry-hire bar with two bartenders, ice and mixers, or a full-service bar that supplies every drink. Copying a headline price without knowing what it includes is how bars end up working weekends for nothing. Build your price from what each event costs you, then check it against the market.
The mobile bar pricing calculator does every step below and keeps your numbers in your browser.
Step 1: costs that belong to this event
These scale with the event and disappear if it is cancelled.
Staff. Count bartenders and barbacks (a rule of thumb is one bartender per 50 guests for a full cocktail bar, one per 75 for beer and wine or dry hire), then pay them for all their hours: service, set-up and pack-down, and travel. A 5-hour wedding with 2 hours of set-up and pack-down and 1 hour of travel is 8 paid hours per person. At $25 an hour, two bartenders cost $400.
Vehicle. Round trip × your cost per mile. 30 miles each way at $0.70 is $42.
Licence or permit. In England and Wales a Temporary Event Notice is £21 when one is needed; in the US, per-event fees depend on the state (California, for example, requires an ABC catering authorization for each catered event on top of the caterer’s permit). Put the real figure in each quote.
Consumables. Cups, napkins, straws, garnish, ice if you supply it. $1.50 a guest is $150 for 100 guests.
Drinks (full service only). Use a shopping list, not a guess: for 100 guests over 5 hours that is about 510 drinks — 47 bottles of wine, 7 cases of beer, 10 bottles of liquor, 13 of sparkling, mixers and 300 lb of ice. At example retail prices that’s about $1,270. The shopping list calculator gives the list.
Step 2: a share of fixed costs
These exist whether or not you work this weekend. Spread them across events:
- Equipment wear = what the kit cost ÷ how many events before you replace it. $6,000 over 100 events = $60 an event.
- Insurance = annual premium ÷ 12 ÷ events a month. $1,200 a year at 4 events a month = $25 an event.
- Overheads (storage, software, website, marketing) = monthly total ÷ events a month. $300 ÷ 4 = $75.
Step 3: margin and card fees
Add it all up — in the dry-hire example $752 — and decide the margin you want to keep. Then:
Quote = cost ÷ (1 − margin − card fee rate)
With a 35 % margin and 3 % card fees: $752 ÷ 0.62 = $1,213, or $12.13 a guest. Profit after costs and fees is about $425.
Margin and markup are not the same thing. Margin is profit as a share of the price; markup is profit as a share of cost. A 35 % margin is a 56 % markup on cost. If you take a “35 % markup” and call it margin, your real margin is only 26 %.
The worked example in full
| Cost | Dry hire | Full service |
|---|---|---|
| Staff (2 × 8 h at $25) | $400 | $400 |
| Vehicle (60 miles) | $42 | $42 |
| Licence / permit | $0 | $0 |
| Consumables | $150 | $150 |
| Drinks, mixers, ice | — | $1,273 |
| Equipment wear | $60 | $60 |
| Insurance share | $25 | $25 |
| Overheads share | $75 | $75 |
| Total cost | $752 | $2,025 |
| Quote (35 % margin, 3 % fees) | $1,213 | $3,267 |
| Per guest | $12.13 | $32.67 |
Every figure here is an example you should replace with your own wages, prices and quotes.
Per guest, flat or hourly?
- Per guest is natural for full service, because your biggest cost — the drinks — scales with guests. Add a minimum spend so a 30-guest party still covers your staff and travel.
- Flat fee suits dry hire: your cost is mostly staff time and travel, which barely changes between 80 and 120 guests.
- Hourly works for add-ons — an extra hour of service — and for corporate events with fuzzy guest counts.
The package menu in the calculator holds a per-guest price and a minimum for each package and quotes any guest count; one click copies the calculated per-guest price into a package.
Break-even and startup costs
Your fixed monthly costs (insurance and overheads, here $400) are covered by what each event leaves after its own costs. In the dry-hire example each event contributes about $525, so one event a month breaks even and every event after that is profit.
Startup is a separate question: how many events until the kit pays for itself? A small dry-hire setup — folding bar ($1,500), coolers, tools, glassware, back bar, card reader, branding, first-year insurance, training and permits — adds up to roughly $6,700 in the calculator’s example list. At $425 profit an event, that is 16 events. A converted trailer or horsebox bar can multiply the startup cost several times; the payback figure tells you how many weekends that costs. All of these are placeholders: get real quotes and put them in the startup table.
Pricing licensing and liability properly
Licensing changes the business model, not just the quote:
- Dry hire usually means the client buys the alcohol and you serve it — cheaper to run, no stock risk, but the licensing position depends on the venue and the jurisdiction.
- Full service means you supply and often sell alcohol, which needs a licence or per-event permit and higher insurance cover.
In the UK, a personal licence lets you give up to 50 TENs a year instead of 5, which matters once you work more than a handful of unlicensed venues. The licensing checklists list the UK rules and US state agencies; dry hire vs full service explains how each package is usually sold.
Checklist before you publish prices
- Every staff hour is paid, including set-up, pack-down and travel.
- Equipment, insurance and overheads are spread over a realistic number of events.
- The margin is a margin, not a markup.
- Card fees are in the price, not absorbed.
- Minimum spend covers a small event’s staff and travel.
- Drinks costs come from a shopping list at your real prices.
- Licence costs and lead times are known for the areas you serve.
Run your numbers in the pricing calculator, print the package menu, and re-check prices whenever wages or drinks costs move.