Small Engine Shop Rates: Diagnostic, Trip and Minimum

ByWoojoong Kim

Four national cost guides for this equipment price the repair, and LawnStarter’s lists a diagnostic fee and a minimum charge beside it. None of the four says which of those you still owe after the refusal.

Here is what happens at four shops when you bring a machine in, hear the estimate, and say no:

  • Billy’s Small Engine Repair, West Chester PA — “Diagnosis: $40/hr,” against a “Minimum labor charge: $40”
  • Rec World Outdoor Power, Las Vegas NV — “You will be charged $45.00 labor on the final invoice if you decide not to have your equipment repaired”
  • Mowers & Blowers, southeast Wisconsin — “If our repair estimate for your machine is more than you would like to spend on your machine, the $130 minimum service fee still applies”
  • Patrick’s Mobile Small Engine P.M.C.S., Charlotte County FL — a $75 service call for the trip plus $65 to diagnose, per machine: $140

The national average walk-behind mower repair is $125 (LawnStarter, December 27, 2025). At the fourth shop, saying no costs more than the average yes.

Nothing here is hidden — all four publish these figures themselves. They just live on shop pages nobody reads rather than in the cost guides everybody reads.

Fees verified September 2026 from each shop’s published price page. Eight shops across seven states — two of them in the same metro — is a sample, not a survey, and shops that publish prices are a self-selecting group.

What eight shops publish

Shop Where Labor rate Diagnostic / deposit Credited? Minimum Trip or pickup Storage
Billy’s Small EngineWest Chester, PA$75/hr lawn & garden$40/hr diagnosisWaived when any service or repair is made$40$40–$80, priced by drive time$10/day after 10 days
Rec WorldLas Vegas, NV$95/hr$45 deposit, upfrontApplied if you approve; charged as labor if you decline——$5/day after 30 days
Patrick’s Mobile PMCSCharlotte County, FL$105/hr flat hour$65 per machineApplied “if decided to follow through”$140 in effect — “what you can expect if I do not fix anything”$75 service call, each trip—
Mobile Mow & SnowDanvers, MA$115/hrnot published—1 hour ($115)$95 service call—
CSE Mobile RepairLakeville, MN$140/hrnot published—$95 appointment$60 trip, $45 return trip—
Mowers & BlowersSE Wisconsin$130/hr—Minimum “goes towards the cost of your repair” — but still applies if you decline$130——
HDR Small EngineTraverse City, MInot published$47.50 deposit on all equipment leftEntire deposit applied to the bill; if you decline, it “covers the minimum labor and diagnostic time”; refunded on warranty work—$8.00 per mile of one-way distance, 20-mile limit — up to $160—
Matt’s Small EngineSt. Anthony, MNnot published———free within 5 miles—

A dash means one of two things, and the difference matters. On Minimum, Trip or pickup and Storage it is a claim: that shop publishes no such figure anywhere this page could find it. On Credited? it is a dependency — Mobile Mow & Snow, CSE and Matt’s have no diagnostic or deposit to credit in the first place, so there is nothing there to state. Nothing has been inferred into an empty cell either way. HDR publishes a deposit but no hourly rate, which is why it drops out of the arithmetic below.

Labor rate says not published, and that is not the same as not knowable — it is the cell most likely to be misread. Neither of the two shops marked that way is withholding its prices; both publish a flat menu instead of an hourly one. HDR’s cited page is titled menu pricing and quotes work by the job — its handheld service is a flat $81.00 “+ parts and tax” — and Matt’s publishes fixed snowblower packages at $110 two-stage and $95 single-stage. That is why Matt’s, rather than any of the six shops that do post an hourly figure, anchors the only same-market price pair on this page. The two emptiest-looking cells in that column belong to the two shops that will quote you a whole job without a phone call.

Five of these cells have been wrong since this table was first compiled, and they failed in three different ways. Two were absences. HDR’s pickup fee was recorded as unpublished; it is published in full, one click from the pricing page cited here. Patrick’s was recorded as having no minimum; the same page prints a $140 floor for a visit that fixes nothing. An absent figure is the only kind of cell that nothing else on the page can contradict, so it is the one worth re-opening the source for.

The other two were figures, and those are worse, because a number reads as though somebody checked it. CSE was recorded at $120/hr with a $90 minimum. The shop publishes $140/hr and $95 — identically on all five of its equipment pricing pages, and identically on a copy of its snowblower page archived in June 2026, so this was never a price rise that went stale. The $90 has never appeared on that site in any form. The lesson is narrower than “verify your sources” and more useful: CSE’s /pricing page, the URL this table cited for two years, is a directory that prints no prices at all — every figure lives one click down, on the page for your machine type. A citation that resolves, looks authoritative and contains nothing to contradict you is the easiest kind to get wrong. This table now cites the page the numbers are actually on.

The fifth failed in a third way, and it is the one a price check cannot find: a paraphrase that dropped a clause. HDR’s Credited? cell read “Entire deposit applied to the bill; refunded on warranty work.” Both halves are exact. But HDR’s deposit policy is four lines, not two, and the third one says what happens if you say no — the deposit then “covers the minimum labor and diagnostic time spent by our mechanic.” Dropping it turned a two-branch conditional into a one-branch promise, and the branch that went missing is the one this page exists to price. Every figure in the cell was right; the cell was still wrong. A number can be checked against the source. A paraphrase of a condition has to be read against it.

LawnStarter’s national ranges — labor $55–$135/hr, diagnostic $35–$90, pickup and delivery $30–$100, and “a minimum repair charge of $50 to $130” — bracket this sample on the diagnostic and on nothing else. Not one shop here publishes a labor rate under $75, so a sample of shops that publish their prices starts $20 above the national floor — and it runs off the top as well, because CSE’s $140/hr sits $5 above the $135 ceiling. Only the diagnostic is genuinely bracketed: every one above sits inside $35–$90, from Billy’s $40 to Patrick’s $65.

Pickup is where the national range breaks, and it breaks at both ends. Matt’s is free within five miles, which cannot appear in a range whose floor is $30. HDR runs off the other end: $8.00 for every mile between you and the shop, to a 20-mile limit, which is $160 at the edge of its service area — 60% above the $100 national ceiling. Two of the eight shops sit outside a range that is supposed to describe all of them, and they sit outside it in opposite directions.

The minimum breaks the same way, and it is the fee this page exists for. Five shops here publish one: $40 at Billy’s, $95 at CSE, $115 at Mobile Mow & Snow, $130 at Mowers & Blowers, $140 at Patrick’s. Two of the five fall outside LawnStarter’s $50–$130, one at each end — and the two ends are not the same kind of number. LawnStarter’s is a minimum repair charge, the floor on a job you approve. Patrick’s $140 and Mowers & Blowers’ $130 are what you owe when you decline, which no national guide prices at all. So the national range and this column are not measuring the same thing on every row, and the row where they diverge is the expensive one.

The reason HDR’s number looks so high is worth having, because it is the same arithmetic every mobile shop is doing quietly. HDR shows its work: the fee is “$2.00 per traveled mile,” and the shop then multiplies your one-way distance by $8.00 because it drives that distance four times — “from our shop to your house to pick up and than back to our shop and than from our shop to your house to drop off and than back to our shop.” A ten-mile customer is a forty-mile job. That is why a transport fee scales so much faster than distance feels like it should, and why the three mobile operators in this table charge a flat service call instead of a mileage rate — Patrick’s at $75 a trip, Mobile Mow & Snow at $95 and CSE at $60 — which is the same cost recovered with the arithmetic hidden. Counting CSE in is not a technicality: the section below turns on its being mobile, because its $60 trip is what makes a mid-range-looking $95 minimum the one that buys the least bench time of any shop here.

Thumbtack, whose figures are the estimates its customers get from pros on the platform rather than what shops list, puts the technician hourly average at $55 within a range of $38–$89 — the average below every published rate above, and the ceiling below five of the six; only Billy’s $75 falls inside it. A marketplace of independent operators is probably just a different population from shops with a storefront and a price page. That is a reading, not a finding.

Every one of these fees is a conditional, and only one branch gets advertised

On the phone, “we charge $45 to look at it” sounds like one number. It is two. Each of these fees does one thing if you approve the work and something else if you don’t, and shops publish the first branch at the top of the page and the second further down — so a fee sorted by the branch you can see sorts wrong.

Say yes and all five shops that publish what happens to that fee credit it or drop it. Billy’s $40/hr diagnosis is “waived when any service or repair is made.” Rec World’s $45 deposit is applied. HDR publishes it as its own line item: “This entire deposit is applied toward your final repair bill.” Patrick’s $65 estimate fee “will also be applied to the repair if decided to follow through.” Mowers & Blowers’ $130 minimum “goes towards the cost of your repair.” Five shops, five names for the fee, one behavior. Nothing in this sample separates them on the approve branch at all, which is why “is it credited?” — the question every cost guide tells you to ask — is the question that cannot distinguish these shops.

Say no and each of the five keeps something. This is the branch that separates them, and it separates them by 3.5×:

Shop Owed if you decline What the shop publishes
Billy’s$40The $40/hr diagnosis is waived only “when any service or repair is made”
Rec World$45The deposit is charged as labor
HDR$47.50“If you choose not to move forward with the repair quote, the deposit covers the minimum labor and diagnostic time spent by our mechanic.”
Mowers & Blowers$130The minimum “still applies”
Patrick’s$140“IF WE LOOK AT YOUR EQUIPMENT AND WE GIVE YOU AN ESTIMATE ON THE REPAIR OR MAINT AND YOU CHOOSE FOR ME NOT TO DO THE WORK . THERE WILL BE A DIAGNOSES FEE OF $65.00 ADDED” — on top of the $75 service call, which is charged “FOR EACH TRIP TO YOUR ADDRESS NO MATTER THE ISSUE”

HDR’s row is the one to read twice, because its deposit is the one most easily mistaken for a prepayment. Its policy runs four lines and the first two make the $47.50 sound like it is not a fee — money you were going to spend anyway, moved earlier, changing your cash flow and not your total. The third line is what makes it a fee: decline, and the deposit “covers the minimum labor and diagnostic time spent by our mechanic.” The fourth returns it in full on warranty work. Same $47.50, and which of those three things it turns out to be depends on an answer you have not given yet.

So the useful question is not “do you charge a diagnostic fee”, which five of these eight answer yes under five different names, and it is not “is it credited,” because at all five it is. It is “what do I owe if I say no?” That answer runs $40 to $140 on identical work, and it is the one number in this table that none of those four guides states.

The minimum charge is the diagnostic hour

Seven of the eight shops publish a figure you owe before anyone knows what is wrong — a stated minimum at five of them, a deposit or diagnostic fee at four, with Billy’s and Patrick’s publishing both. Six of the seven can be put through the test below; HDR’s $47.50 deposit cannot, because HDR is the one shop here that publishes no hourly rate to divide it by. The six that can look arbitrary: $40, $45, $65, $95, $115, $130. Divide each by that shop’s own hourly rate and they stop looking arbitrary.

  • Billy’s — $40 ÷ $75/hr = 32 minutes
  • Rec World — $45 ÷ $95/hr = 28 minutes
  • Patrick’s — $65 ÷ $105/hr = 37 minutes
  • CSE — $95, but this one does not divide: $60 of it is the trip charge, leaving $35 ÷ $140/hr = exactly 15 minutes
  • Mobile Mow — $115 ÷ $115/hr = 60 minutes, stated outright as a “minimum charge of 1 hr on all repairs”
  • Mowers & Blowers — $130 ÷ $130/hr = 60 minutes

The dollar figures span 3.3×. Expressed in each shop’s own time, four of the six land between half an hour and an hour, and a fifth misses only by two minutes — Rec World’s $45 is 28.

CSE is the sixth, and it breaks the heading above this section. Its $95 is the only minimum here that is mostly not labor: the shop states the charge “includes the $60 trip charge and up to 15 minutes of labor,” and the arithmetic closes exactly — $140/hr for a quarter hour is $35, and $60 + $35 = $95. So a fee that looks mid-range buys the least bench time of any shop in the table, by a factor of two. Whether that is expensive depends on something the number cannot tell you: CSE is mobile, so the $60 buys a technician standing in your driveway rather than you loading a 200-pound machine into a truck. The minimum is not always the diagnostic hour. Sometimes it is the drive.

One shop carries a different number here than it does in the table above, and the difference is the one worth understanding. Patrick’s charges $65 for the estimate and applies it to the repair “if decided to follow through” — that is the figure in the list. Its $140 in the Minimum column is a different promise: what you owe if you decline.

That comparison only runs at five of the eight shops, and they are not the six listed above. What a shop keeps when you decline is sourced on this page in one place — the table under “Every one of these fees is a conditional” — and it holds Billy’s, Rec World, HDR, Mowers & Blowers and Patrick’s. At four of those five the entry charge and the decline figure are the same number: $40, $45, $47.50 and $130. Patrick’s $65 against $140 is the fifth. CSE and Mobile Mow publish a minimum and no decline term at all, so their $95 and $115 above cannot be read as the cost of saying no — and on CSE that is not a quibble, because $60 of the $95 is the trip charge, which the shop has already incurred whichever way you answer. Matt’s publishes neither. So Patrick’s is the one shop here whose two published numbers are known to differ; it is not the one shop where the entry charge fails to tell you what declining costs.

That is the mechanism. Small-engine diagnosis is a fixed sequence — fuel, spark, compression — and it takes roughly the same time whichever of the three turns out to be the problem. The shop has to spend that time before it knows whether the answer is a shear pin or a dead engine, so the minimum is not a markup. It is the price of the one piece of labor performed before anyone knows anything.

It is also why the minimum is the floor on trivial jobs: a fuel-line clip and a $9.53 shear pin kit still cost $95 at CSE, because the truck rolled and the first quarter hour happened regardless.

Fees the cost guides do not list at all

Four of these appear in none of the national ranges.

Shop supplies. Mowers & Blowers charges $11–$30 for “oil, grease, shop rags, cleaners, solvents and other non-inventory items such as nylon ties, fuel line, and hardware.” A real cost, honestly disclosed, and a line on your invoice you never agreed to.

Rush service. Rec World publishes a $30 rush fee — a flat charge, not a percentage. On this equipment that is seasonal: the reader with a dead snowblower in January is the one least able to wait.

Cancellation. Patrick’s adds $30 to a future visit if you cancel inside its two-day window — a trip charge for a trip that did not happen.

The second visit. CSE publishes a $45 return trip charge — “if a part must be ordered and a return visit is needed to complete the repair, a reduced $45 return trip charge applies” — with one carve-out: “you will not be charged for an additional trip if we need to return because of an error on our part.” This is the fee that quietly makes a mobile repair a two-visit job, and the trigger is not an unusual one. A shop with a parts counter orders the part while your machine sits on its bench; a mobile operator has to drive back. So the same ordered gasket that is invisible on a drop-off invoice is $45 on a mobile one, and it lands on exactly the repairs where the part was not in the van — which is most repairs that are not fuel work. Read it against the $60 first trip: the return is discounted, not waived, so a CSE job that needs an ordered part carries $105 of travel before any labor. It is also the only fee in this table with a published fault condition attached, and that is worth more than the $45: it is the one line here that says who pays when the shop is the one who got it wrong.

And one fee that is listed nationally but not the way shops sell it. The two shops here that price transport by the trip rather than by the visit do not use the same unit as each other: Billy’s prices it by drive time — $60 round trip within 10 minutes, $80 for 10–20 minutes, one-way at $40 and $60 — while HDR prices it by distance, at $8.00 a mile. Deliver the machine to Billy’s yourself and you pay only the return leg, so the low tier is a $40 job, not $60. There is no equivalent move at HDR, because its rate is already tied to a road distance you cannot change. Neither unit is the “pickup and delivery” line item a national cost guide reports, and a customer twelve minutes from Billy’s and ten miles from HDR is quoted $80 by both for reasons that have nothing in common.

Where this advice inverts

Everything above says the fixed fees dominate. On a small bill they do. On a large one the hourly rate catches up with them — later than the usual warning implies, once the hours come from the manufacturer’s book rather than a guess.

Published rates in this sample run $75/hr to $140/hr — a 1.9× spread. Briggs & Stratton’s flat-rate schedule allows at most 2 hours for crankshaft work, and nothing in the vertical single-cylinder section a mower engine falls under runs longer (see the book-time explanation in the master cost table). Two hours at $75 is $150; at $140 it is $280. That $130 gap is nearly three times Rec World’s deposit and more than three times Billy’s minimum.

Three limits on that $130, and the third is the one that decides how much of it you can act on.

It is a distance, not a choice. The two rates it is drawn from are West Chester PA and Lakeville MN — a thousand miles apart. Six shops here publish an hourly rate and no two of them are in the same market, so nothing in this column measures what shopping around is worth where you live.

Its two ends are different businesses. This page has already sorted its own sample: three of these shops are mobile operators who drive to you, three are places you bring the machine. The $75 floor and the $140 ceiling fall on opposite sides of that line — Billy’s is a shop, CSE is a van. Sort the rates by service model and the spread narrows in both halves. Over the same two hours the three drop-off shops run $150 to $260 and the three mobile operators $210 to $280 — gaps of $110 and $70, against the $130 you get by comparing across the line. Mobile is dearer on average, $120/hr against $100, which is the cost of the driveway rather than the bench. The 1.9× is partly a measure of what kind of repair you are buying.

The other four rates do not rescue it either way. Sorted, the six run $75, $95, $105, $115, $130, $140 — consecutive gaps of $20, $10, $10, $15 and $10. There is no cluster with an outlier hanging off it, so the $130 is not an artifact of two extremes; it is a genuinely even spread, and the median shop is at $110. That is the finding, and it cuts against the tidy version of this section: every step from one shop to the next costs $20 to $40 on a two-hour job.

What the same-market pair says, and the caveat it has to carry. The one same-market pair in the sample publishes packages instead of rates: Matt’s in St. Anthony and CSE in Lakeville are both Twin Cities, and their two-stage snowblower service is $110 against $129.95 — 1.18× on the sticker, and about 1.3× once CSE’s parts are added and set against the plug and oil Matt’s has already included. That pair is a shop against a van as well, so it prices convenience alongside the work. And the 1.3× rests on a question CSE’s page does not answer: its $60 trip charge is printed in the repair section, not on the maintenance card (re-read September 2026), and nothing says whether a tune-up visit carries it. If it does, CSE’s published all-in of $140–$150 becomes $200–$210 against Matt’s $110 — which includes free collection inside five miles — and the shoppable spread is not 1.3× but about 1.8×, indistinguishable from the cross-country figure it is supposed to contrast with. So: read the 1.9× as the spread between snow-belt cities, and treat the ~1.3× as a floor on the local spread rather than a measurement of it. The phone call that settles it is one question long — does the tune-up price include the trip?

So on a cheap job, ask about the fees. On a labor-heavy job — crankshaft or connecting-rod work, an engine pull — ask about the rate as well, but know where the crossover sits. The entire fee spread on this page — $0 to $160, from Matt’s free pickup to HDR at the edge of its service area — is still larger than the $130 that two hours of rate difference decides. At a $65/hr spread the rate only overtakes it past about two and a half hours, longer than any single operation the book times on a mower engine — so the job where the rate question wins outright is the engine pull, which Briggs declines to time at all. Neither question is the one to skip. And storage is not in that spread at all, because it is bounded by a date rather than by a price: Rec World’s $5 a day runs until the machine is declared abandoned, which is about $370. Note which way this table actually points, because it is not the way the warning is usually given: Billy’s waives the $40 diagnostic and posts the lowest rate in the sample, so there is no trade to make there. The trade is at Mowers & Blowers, whose $130 minimum goes toward your repair if you approve the work, attached to a $130/hr that is the second-highest rate here. Read that credit against the decline column above before calling it generous, though: the same $130 is charged in full if you decline, more than three times what saying no costs at Billy’s. It is not the worst outcome in the table, and the shop that beats it is the one this page could easily have called generous — Patrick’s, whose $65 estimate fee is “applied to the repair if decided to follow through,” bills $140 to look and leave. Crediting a fee on a yes tells you nothing about what a shop does with a no. On both branches at once the most forgiving fee here is still Billy’s $40 — waived if you approve, and the smallest bill in the sample if you don’t. And the shop that actually costs you that $130 on a long job is CSE, at $140/hr — which publishes no diagnostic fee at all, and so never appears in the warning cost guides give.

The trip charges invert the same way. Mobile Mow’s $95 service call and Patrick’s $75 look like the worst numbers in the table, and they are the best deal available to anyone who cannot lift a 200-pound two-stage snowblower into a truck. They are not an extra fee — they are a substitute for the $30–$100 pickup charge, minus the truck.

The clock that starts when you say no

Two of the eight shops charge for storage, and none of the four national cost guides mentions that the fee exists.

Billy’s: “After 10 days from notification that your item is ready, a $10/day storage fee may incur.” Rec World: “$5.00 Per Day. All repairs left 30 days past being declined (or) being notified of repair completion.”

The gentler of the two compounds faster than it looks. Decline a Rec World estimate and leave the machine and storage begins on day 31; by day 90 that is 60 chargeable days, $300 — on a machine you already judged not worth fixing, and more than the $230 floor for a new gas push mower. Day 90 is not an arbitrary stopping point, either. It is the day Rec World’s own procedure mails the certified letter.

Both shops publish what happens after that, and only one of them publishes the mechanism. Rec World gives the whole procedure: the certified letter goes out when the machine is “still here 60 days past this date” — day 90 — and 14 days after you receive it the equipment “will be assumed abandoned” and “will be scrapped out or sold for the cost of the repairs, storage and certified letter.” Billy’s publishes the outcome and the interval but not the notice step: “If we don’t receive a response within 30 days, the item will be sold/scrapped to reclaim lost profit.” That sentence sits in the same FAQ answer as the storage clause above it, under the same question, so the 30 days runs from the same notification the $10/day does — which is what makes the arithmetic below computable rather than assumed.

That disposal date is what actually caps the fee, and it caps the two shops in the opposite order to their daily rates. Billy’s meter runs from day 11 to day 30 and then stops, because the machine is gone: 20 chargeable days, $200. Rec World’s runs from day 31 to roughly day 104 — about 74 days, $370 — with the exact endpoint depending on when the letter is signed for. So the shop charging half the daily rate is the one that can bill you the larger total, by about 1.85×, and it is the same procedural care that does it: the certified letter and the 14-day reply window that make Rec World the fairer of the two are what keep its meter running two and a half months after Billy’s has stopped. The shop that has to write to you first is the one that charges you for the wait.

But one storage fee in this sample is capped by nothing at all, and it is at the shop whose repair meter stops soonest. Billy’s publishes a second $10/day charge, at the same rate, under a different heading: “any machine that is on consignment for more than 10 days is subject to a $10 per day storage fee until sold.” Not until a disposal date — until sold. It is the only charge anywhere on this page with no terminating condition a customer can compute, and it is attached to the one transaction where you are waiting on a buyer rather than on your own decision. The commission beside it sets the scale: consignment runs “20% of total sale price” with a “MINIMUM charge of $150.” Those two terms cross at $750 — under that sale price the flat $150 binds, so on anything cheaper the headline 20% is not the rate you pay. A new 22-inch Recycler lists at $499, so no used walk-behind reaches the crossover at all and the percentage is effectively a riding-machine rate — and that inference now has a used price behind it rather than a new one, because HDR’s own list prices a used self-propelled walk-behind at $240, against used riders at $650 to $1,900. The storage catches the commission sooner still: fifteen chargeable days, day 25, and it has matched the entire $150 minimum. This is one shop’s price list, and it is the only one in this sample that publishes consignment terms — so it is not a market rate, it is the only published one. It is not, however, the only shop here that takes consignments: HDR’s used-equipment list carries a “Consigned Used Echo SRM-225 Stick Hedge Trimmer $250.00” among its own stock, with no rate stated anywhere on that site. Two of the eight do this and one of the two prices it. Billy’s has one more clause that decides more than the rate does: “Offers that are greater than 75% of agreed asking price are accepted subject to our discretion. Any offers less than 75% need to be presented before the machine owner before accepting.” The asking price is therefore not the sale price, and the owner is consulted only below 75% of it. Together those terms price the exit that what an old mower is worth could previously only bound.

That is the fee to watch. The diagnostic is $40 to $65 and you hear about it on the phone. The storage clock starts the moment you stop thinking about the machine, and on a repair it is the only charge here that grows while you do nothing — until a disposal date stops it. On a consignment nothing stops it.

What the shop hours get spent on

Sources: shop price pages published by Billy’s Small Engine Repair (West Chester, PA) · Rec World Outdoor Power (Las Vegas, NV) · Patrick’s Mobile Small Engine P.M.C.S. (Charlotte County, FL) · Mobile Mow & Snow (Danvers, MA) · CSE Mobile Repair (Lakeville, MN — the rate, trip charge and minimum are printed on each equipment pricing page, not on the /pricing index) · Mowers & Blowers (SE Wisconsin) · HDR Small Engine Repair (Traverse City, MI) · Matt’s Small Engine Repair (St. Anthony, MN). National ranges: LawnStarter (updated December 27, 2025, re-read August 29, 2026 — labor, diagnostic, transport and the minimum repair charge) and Thumbtack. Book time: Briggs & Stratton Time Analysis Repair Guide, form MS-6341 (8/04) — a dealer form Briggs does not publish online, read here as a full transcription; its provenance and limits are set out in the master cost table. Every shop page above was re-read on September 1, 2026. Billy’s consignment clauses — the 20%, the $150 minimum, the second storage fee and the 75%-of-asking-price rule — and HDR’s used-equipment list were re-read on September 6, 2026. Rec World’s page carries its own Last Up-dated 7/13/26 line, so its figures had not moved since before this table was compiled. The four national guides behind the opening lines are LawnStarter, Thumbtack, HomeGuide and Bob Vila, each read in full on September 11, 2026 and searched for what a declined estimate costs. None says it. LawnStarter prints the $35–$90 diagnostic and the $50–$130 minimum without saying which survives a no, and HomeGuide names one shop that diagnoses free and another whose minimum is $36 walk-behind and $72 riding. Until that day the lede said “every cost guide”, a claim over guides this page had not read.

Every shop figure above is that shop’s own published price. All eight were re-read on September 1, 2026, and HDR’s deposit policy was re-read in full on the same date — the last two, Billy’s and Rec World, on a second pass that day, both unchanged. CSE’s row was corrected at that re-read, from $120/hr and a $90 minimum to the $140/hr and $95 the shop actually publishes. Published rates change without notice and none of these is a quote for your machine. Where this page names a job, it times or prices it and stops there; the procedure is for your machine’s manual and a servicing dealer. Fees verified September 2026; next scheduled review December 2026.

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