Most repair shops set their screen repair prices the same way: look up what the shop two suburbs over charges, knock ten dollars off, and hope the volume makes up for it. It feels safe. It is also how good workshops end up busy and broke at the same time.
Phone screen repair pricing is not a guessing game, and it is not a race. A repair price is three costs and a margin, and once you can name all four numbers you can defend your price to any customer who waves a competitor's Facebook ad at the counter. This guide walks through those numbers the way you would on a whiteboard.
The three numbers behind every repair price
Every screen job you do carries three real costs, whether you track them or not.
- Landed part cost. Not the sticker price on your supplier's site — the price after shipping, after the odd DOA screen you could not return, and after GST treatment is sorted. If one screen in twenty arrives faulty and unreturnable, your real part cost is 5% higher than you think.
- Labour. The honest minutes for the job, at a rate that reflects what a competent technician costs to employ in Australia — not what you would pay yourself in a bad month. Include the retest, the clean-up, and the five minutes at the counter on pickup.
- Overhead per job. Rent, insurance, power, software, marketing and the quiet Tuesday afternoons, divided across the jobs you actually complete in a month. Shops that skip this line are pricing as if the workshop were free.
If you have never calculated the third number, do it once and you will never unsee it. Take last month's total operating costs, subtract parts, divide by completed jobs. That figure — often startlingly large — is what each job must carry before a dollar of profit exists.
A formula you can defend
Here is a structure that holds up, using deliberately round numbers as a worked example rather than a market survey. Say a mid-range screen lands at $60, the job honestly takes 40 minutes of a technician you cost at $45 an hour, and your overhead works out to $25 per completed job.
- Parts, landed: $60
- Labour: 40 minutes at $45/hr = $30
- Overhead allocation: $25
- Break-even: $115
- Margin at 30% on cost: about $35, for a price around $150
Your numbers will differ — that is the point. The formula is not about the answer, it is about being able to say where the answer came from. When a customer asks why you charge $150 and someone on a marketplace listing charges $89, you know exactly what the $89 shop is not paying for. Usually it is the warranty, the part grade, or their own wages.
Where shops quietly lose money
One price for every part grade
An aftermarket LCD and a genuine or premium OLED are different products with different costs, different failure rates and different customer expectations. Selling them at one blended price means your best work subsidises your cheapest. Offer the grades separately, price them separately, and let the customer choose with the trade-offs in front of them. It also changes the conversation from "why so expensive?" to "which option suits you?" — a much better conversation to be having.
Ignoring warranty returns
Every shop warranties its repairs — under Australian Consumer Law you do not have a choice about standing behind your work, only about how graciously you do it. A warranty return costs you a part, labour, and counter time, and earns you nothing. If a part grade comes back on, say, one job in twenty-five, then one twenty-fifth of a full job cost belongs inside the price of every job using that grade. Cheap parts are rarely cheap once their return rate is priced honestly. Track your redo rate per part grade for a month; the number usually settles the genuine-versus-budget argument on its own.
Matching the cheapest competitor
Somebody in your city will always be cheaper. They may be working from a spare bedroom with no insurance, no warranty follow-through and no wage bill. Matching their price means importing their business model without their cost base. Match the shops you actually lose customers to — the ones with a counter, a reputation and a warranty — not the lowest number on a marketplace.
Charge for certainty, not just parts and minutes
Customers are not only buying a screen. They are buying the confidence that the phone comes back today, that the touch works in the rain, that the shop will still exist if something goes wrong next month. Turnaround time, part quality, a written warranty and a professional handover are all things people will pay a margin for — but only if you say them out loud. Put your warranty period on the receipt. Quote a pickup time and hit it. A clear repair ticket and status updates do more for your average sale price than any discount ever will.
Know when to say no
Some jobs should not be won. A severely water-damaged phone with a "just replace the screen" request, a part that is only available at a price the customer will not wear, a repair where the honest quote exceeds the phone's replacement value — these are conversations, not jobs. Quoting honestly and occasionally recommending against a repair costs you a sale and buys you a reputation. The shops that thrive on referrals are the ones that can be trusted to say no.
Review your prices on a schedule, not a vibe
Part costs drift, wages move, and the phones people carry change every year. A price list set in January is quietly wrong by June. Put a quarterly review in the calendar: pull your part costs, your redo rate and your job times, and re-run the formula. If you track jobs in a point of sale built for repairs, the numbers are already sitting there; the review takes half an hour with a coffee. Shops that reprice on data adjust by small amounts often. Shops that reprice on panic adjust by large amounts late.
None of this requires spreadsheet heroics. It requires naming your three costs, adding a margin you can say with a straight face, and reviewing it on a schedule. Do that, and the next time someone asks why you are not the cheapest, you will have an answer better than a shrug — and a business still standing in five years to give it.