What to charge for farm calls in 2026

Farrier pricing knowledge lives in online conversations. Someone posts their rates, asks "should I charge less?", and fifty peers weigh in. Out of those conversations a consistent picture emerges: real price bands by region, a warning against being the cheapest, and one glaring blind spot. Almost nobody prices the drive. Equine vets charge a farm call on every visit; farriers mostly eat the miles or bury them in the trim price. This post pulls the scattered numbers into one framework, with the travel math out in the open.

Don't be the cheapest

Start with the advice that shows up in nearly every conversation. A newer farrier charging $55 trims and $150 full sets asked a community of farriers whether cutting prices would win more clients. The most experienced voices said the opposite. One put it plainly: being cheaper than the established names is fine, but you don't want to be the cheapest, because the bottom of the market gets you the worst horses and the worst clients.

The cautionary tales run both directions, though. One farrier reported losing half his book to a five-dollar increase, while another described six years of deliberate jumps, from $50/$110/$150 out of school to $70/$150/$210, losing only a few clients each time. The pattern in the successful raises: announce a cycle ahead, raise new clients first, and let longtime clients keep the old rate for a stretch. Surprise is what burns books, more than size.

The going rates

Numbers farriers and owners reported across these conversations, useful as calibration rather than gospel:

• Trims: $50 to $100, with $60 the most quoted figure. One owner in a very high-cost area pays $60 every four weeks; another in a rural area pays $65.
• Full sets: $150 to $300 in most regions. Florida owners describe roughly $100 a hoof. Rural Virginia, $280 cash price for a draft cross. Boarded in the Bay Area, $395. Saddlebreds in Kentucky at the start of show season, $685.
• Travel, on the rare occasion it appears at all: one client reported paying $60 per horse plus a $20 travel charge, the only clean travel line item in the whole sweep.
• For comparison, equine vet farm calls run $100 to $300 before any treatment.

Some farriers already price from their costs without calling it that. In a conversation about starting rates, one noted gas at $5.79 a gallon in his area as context for his $60 trim, and a veteran said fuel and rasp costs have always dictated his trim price.

Price the stop, not the horse

Here's the math the trim price has to survive. A client an hour away is a three-hour commitment: an hour out, an hour of work, an hour back. Ninety rural miles in a truck getting 15 miles to the gallon is six gallons of fuel. At a $60 trim, that stop pays under $20 an hour before tools, insurance, or the truck note, for one of the most skilled and physical jobs in the horse world. The same drive to a barn with six trims waiting is a completely different business.

Which is why the unit of pricing should be the stop, and one rule covers every case: charge for the visit, then for each horse. In practice that gives you three tools, all of which exist in the wild separately:

1. A call fee by distance. Free inside your home radius, a flat fee for the next band, a bigger one beyond it. Vets normalized this decades ago, and the fee is why your area still has an equine vet. State it on your price list and it stops being an argument.
2. A stop minimum. Two-trim minimum beyond 30 minutes, or a flat visit minimum that one horse alone doesn't meet. This replaces the current industry practice, which is quietly ghosting the far-out single horse rather than naming its price.
3. A barn discount. Several farriers mention discounting multiple horses at one location. A dense stop costs less to serve, so you can pass some of that savings along, and the discount gives owners a reason to organize barn days for you.

Owners handle this better than farriers fear. The fuel-and-hours math above came from an owner, explaining to other owners why the price went up. And when someone balked at a $300 farm call in a conversation about vet pricing, the room explained emergency pricing to them. A practicing horse vet added that the bill was generous. What earned less sympathy was a professional working 70-plus-hour weeks for $65,000 and quitting the field over it, which is where under-charging leads. The equine world is losing mobile professionals to that math; a clear fee is how you avoid becoming one of them.

Put it in writing

The step that makes all of this usable: publish it. A one-page price list, with trims, fronts, and full sets, the call-fee bands, the stop minimum, and the barn discount, ends the era of quoting from the truck by feel. It also changes the scheduling conversation, because a client choosing between "the $25 call fee" and "joining the Thursday barn run for free" will build your route for you.

Crowfly's role here is the drive-time half. It knows the distance between every stop on your calendar, which means you can see what a booking request costs before you accept it, and offer the day you'll already be out that way. The prices are yours to set. Just make sure the windshield hours are in them somewhere, because right now, for most of the trade, they're a donation.