A single mobile tan at £30, fourteen miles away, leaves you £18.61 — but it costs you 75 minutes door to door. That's £14.89 an hour.
The same tan in your own room leaves you £17.66 in 25 minutes, which is £42.38 an hour. You're not being paid less per tan. You're being paid for one tan and working for three.
The pitch for mobile is that you skip the rent. It's true, and it's the reason plenty of very good therapists never take a room. But rent is the cost everybody can see, and it turns out to be the one that matters least.
Here's the whole thing in pounds.
What the car actually costs
Start here, because it's the number most mobile therapists don't carry and it changed four months ago.
HMRC's mileage rate rose from 45p to 55p on 6 April 2026 — the first increase since 2011. It covers everything: fuel, insurance, tax, servicing, tyres, depreciation. Which makes it the best available figure for what a business mile genuinely costs you, not just what you can claim.
On a fourteen-mile round trip to a client:
14 miles × 55p = £7.70 per tan
Set that against the £8.65 a salon room costs per tan at the same volume, and something surprising happens: the car and the room cost almost exactly the same. Ninety-five pence apart. Every mobile therapist who thinks she's saving the overhead is really just paying it to a different supplier.
One trap in the rate. It drops to 25p after 10,000 business miles a year, and that gap just widened from 20p to 30p. Twelve tans a week at fourteen miles is 8,736 miles — under the line. Twenty tans a week is 14,560 miles, and your average deduction falls to 45.6p while your actual costs don't move at all. If you're near 10,000 miles, that cliff is worth more than any price rise you're considering.
The full model, one client at a time
Same £30 tan, same consumables as a salon — you still use solution, disposables, a tent liner and towels.
| Per tan | |
|---|---|
| Client pays | £30.00 |
| Solution | −£2.14 |
| Disposables, liner, laundry | −£1.10 |
| Card fee | −£0.45 |
| Vehicle, 14 miles at 55p | −£7.70 |
| Left for you | £18.61 |
£18.61 looks healthy. It's the time that ruins it.
Thirty-five minutes driving, and forty on site once you've carried the kit in, set up in someone's bedroom, tanned, packed down and carried it out again. That's 75 minutes — three times what the same tan takes in a room where the tent is already up.
£18.61 ÷ 1.25 hours = £14.89 an hour
An owner-operator in her own room, on the same £30, clears £17.66 in twenty-five minutes — £42.38 an hour. Mobile earns roughly a third as much per hour worked.
Why raising your price won't fix it
The obvious response is to charge more. Run it and see how far you'd have to go: matching £42.38 an hour on a single mobile appointment needs a ticket of about £65.
You know that isn't happening. Which is the useful finding — mobile is not a pricing problem, so a price rise won't solve it.
What does fix it
Stop selling tans and start selling journeys.
The travel is a fixed cost per trip, not per client. Every extra person at the same address is a tan with no driving attached:
| Tans per journey | Vehicle cost each | Minutes each | Earned per hour |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | £7.70 | 75 | £14.89 |
| 2 | £3.85 | 58 | £23.44 |
| 3 | £2.57 | 52 | £27.57 |
Three at one address earns 85% more per hour than one, at exactly the same price per tan. Nothing else available to you moves the number that far.
Which reframes what you're actually selling. Hen parties, bridal groups, prom nights, a street of neighbours who all book the same evening — these aren't a nice bonus on top of the real work. They are the business. The solo appointment fourteen miles away is the thing to price defensively or decline.
Practical versions of the same idea: a small discount for a second person at the same address costs you far less than the travel it saves; grouping bookings by area on fixed days turns three journeys into one; and a minimum booking value for anything beyond a set radius is not rude, it's arithmetic.
The no-show costs you the journey
In a room, an empty slot is lost time. Mobile, you've already spent £7.70 and thirty-five minutes before you find out — and you're standing on a doorstep.
Take 3% of bookings as no-shows and that's about twenty a year on twelve tans a week. An assumption, not a measurement — count your own, because mobile no-shows are worth roughly twice what a salon's are and nobody has published a figure either of us should trust.
The defence is a deposit, and mobile is the clearest case for one in this industry. You are not asking a client to guarantee her attendance. You are asking her to cover your fuel.
Two things about tax that cost people money
You can probably claim the drive from home. HMRC's public guidance tells the self-employed they can't claim travel between home and work, and a great many mobile therapists read that and stop. But HMRC's own manual sets out a separate rule for itinerant trades — someone with no fixed place of business who moves continually between different places. That travel is normally allowable. The test is whether the destinations are unpredictable: unpredictable rounds qualify, a fixed repeating round doesn't. Take advice on your own facts, but don't assume the headline guidance is the whole answer, because for most mobile therapists it isn't.
Choose the mileage rate before you claim anything on the car. Once you claim capital allowances on a vehicle you can never use the 55p rate for it, and you can only switch methods when you change the car. With the rate up 22%, that choice is worth more than it was — get it right on the vehicle you buy next.
These figures are a model, not a forecast. The fourteen-mile round trip, the forty minutes on site and the 3% no-show rate are assumptions — the realistic ranges are 6 to 30 miles, 30 to 55 minutes and 1% to 5%. Substitute your own.