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Pricing your work

What should a private chef charge?

Search that question and every page you get back is written for the person buying. They tell a client what to expect to pay; not one of them helps a chef work out what to ask for. This is the other page — a method for building your own floor, so the number you say on the phone is one you can defend.

Build your floorSee the client-side estimator
Start here, not with the market

your floor is the number below which the job costs you money.

Most chefs price the hours a client can see. The hours a client cannot see are usually the larger half, and pricing them at zero is how a booking that felt like a good night turns out to have paid below minimum wage. Total these six, and you have a floor.

Menu design and the back-and-forth

Writing a menu around a client’s allergies, preferences and budget, then revising it after they read it. It happens before you are booked and it happens for inquiries that never book at all.

Sourcing and shopping

The shop itself, plus the specialist trip for the one ingredient the main shop did not have. Count the driving.

Travel, both ways, with the load

Time and mileage, doubled — and the return leg is with dirty equipment at midnight. If your event runs past transit, it is a cab.

Setup, service and cleanup

The only hours most chefs count. They are usually well under half the total, which is the whole reason a per-hour rate quoted on service time alone will not clear your costs.

Food at real cost, not shelf cost

Price the yield, not the packet. Trim, bones, the half-bunch of herbs you bought for six leaves, and the spoilage on anything you bought early. Add the consumables nobody itemizes: oil, salt, foil, containers.

Equipment, laundry and wear

Knives, pans, transport boxes, chafers and linen do not last forever, and every booking spends a little of them. So do your whites and your insurance.
Then add margin, and treat it as a cost too. A floor is what the booking costs you. A price is a floor plus the money that pays for the quiet weeks, the inquiries that never book, your own time off, and the tax that comes out of all of it. Pricing at your floor is working for free with extra steps.
What private chefs make, after tax
Why per-head is the wrong shape alone

a dinner for two is not a fifth of a dinner for ten.

Most of your cost does not scale with guests. The menu design, the shop, the drive, the setup and the cleanup are close to identical for four covers or twelve. Only the food and some of the service time actually multiply. A flat per-person rate therefore overcharges large parties and badly undercharges small ones — which is why marketplace listings routinely pair a per-person rate with a minimum spend.

A real listing, read 26 August 2026

One chef’s listing on a US marketplace advertised from $50 per person, minimum spend $300. A table of four does not pay $200. It pays $300 — which is $75 a head, half as much again as the advertised floor. Another listing on the same site read from $250 per person with a $3,000 minimum. The advertised number is a starting point for a full table, not a rate.

Set your own minimum on purpose. It is the mechanism that stops a dinner for two consuming the same day as a dinner for ten while paying a fraction of it.

Context, not a recommendation

what other people charge, and whose market that is.

Use this to sanity-check the floor you built, never to replace it. Read the third column before the second one: these figures are 2 to 4× apart in places because they describe genuinely different transactions, not because the market cannot make up its mind.

Published US private chef pricing by source and by the population each one measures.
SourceFigureWhose market this isGroceries
Take a Chef (marketplace)US bookings 2024–2026$167 per guest, medianThat platform’s own completed US bookings, skewed toward occasion dining. Not a national median.Included
yhangry (marketplace)read 26 Aug 2026$130 per person average; $227 in NYCThat platform’s own reported averages, published with no sample size and no date attached.Included
Private Chefs Inc. (placement agency)16 Jun 2026$65–$120+ per hour; roughly $600–$900+ per eventUltra-high-net-worth placements brokered by an agency that earns a placement fee. The top of the market, not the middle.Billed separately
Care.com (household employment)19 Aug 2026$24.20–$31.05 per hour, postedAdvertised household-employment wages — employee-style in-home cooking, not what an independent bills as a business.Add $60–$200 a week
A chef in Massachusetts (direct)15 Jul 2026$450 a week for 3 meals; $550 for 5One named chef’s published weekly meal-prep pricing, covering menu design, shopping, prep, packaging, labeling and cleanup.Shopping included; ingredient cost not stated
A chef in Houston (direct)21 Apr 2026$1,500 for up to 3 guests; $2,000 for 4–10One named chef’s flat event fee, in a sponsored article. Over $500 a head at the small end — the direct spread is enormous.Billed at cost, receipts shown
A chef in Ohio (direct)read 26 Aug 2026From $100 per person; $150 for four coursesOne named chef’s published per-person floors, with event minimums attached.Billed separately
The groceries column is why the figure column cannot be compared straight across. An all-in $167 a head and a $150 a head plus receipts are different products with different margins. There is no industry standard on this — there is a split, with marketplaces generally including and agencies generally billing separately, and nobody has measured which is more common.
The gap nobody closes

your listed price is not what reaches your bank.

Between the number on your listing and the number in your account sit commission, payment processing, the timing of grocery reimbursement, and the bookings that fall through. None of the marketplace cost guides ranking for this question publishes its commission rate or what the chef actually receives, and one competitor advertises “0% platform fee for the first year” without stating the standard fee that implies. The one platform we found that does publish a rate takes 20%, and instructs chefs to quote a fee inclusive of it — which is at least honest about the direction that pushes prices.

Ours goes in your arithmetic as an input rather than a boast: ChefLynk takes 0% of your price. You set your quote and keep all of it. The client pays a service fee on top, which is what funds the platform and never comes out of yours. Their card is charged at checkout and the money is held in escrow before you start work, releasing 24 hours after your event’s scheduled start — 48 hours for each of your first three bookings.

See how our plans work
Write it down before it happens

who pays for the food when a client cancels?

Not one of the pricing pages we surveyed covers deposits, cancellation windows, or who absorbs the cost of groceries already bought. It is the single most expensive thing to work out for the first time while it is happening. Decide these three in advance and put them in writing before you take a booking:

  • A deposit, taken at confirmationIt is the difference between a booking and an intention. Size it so that losing the rest of the fee still leaves your unrecoverable time covered.
  • A cancellation windowA date after which the deposit is not returned. Set it by when you start turning other work away, not by what sounds generous.
  • A separate rule for ingredientsGroceries are the part people forget. They are already spent, frequently non-returnable, and a policy that only protects your time leaves you personally funding someone else’s change of plan.
Straight answers

the pricing questions chefs actually ask.

What should I charge for my first private chef booking?
Work out your floor before you look at anyone else’s prices. Add up every hour the booking will actually take — menu design, shopping, travel both ways, setup, service, cleanup — and multiply by what your time has to be worth. Add food at real yield cost, not shelf price. Add mileage and a share of equipment, insurance and laundry. That total is the number below which the booking costs you money to accept. Your price is that floor plus the margin that makes it a business rather than a hobby. Only then compare against the market, and only to sanity-check, because the published figures describe platforms and populations rather than you.
Why can’t you just tell me a per-person rate?
Because the honest answer depends on inputs only you have. Two chefs quoting $150 a head can be earning completely different amounts once one of them is driving 40 miles each way and buying the groceries. The published figures also disagree by more than they agree: one marketplace reports a $167 median per guest while a household-employment platform posts $24 to $31 an hour, and those are not competing claims about one market — they are measurements of different transactions. A per-person rate handed to you without your costs in it is a guess wearing a decimal point.
Should groceries be included in my price or billed separately?
There is no industry standard, and anyone who tells you there is has looked at one half of the market. The split is structural: marketplaces generally fold groceries into an all-in per-person price, while placement agencies and many direct-booking chefs bill them separately at cost. One agency states flatly that groceries and ingredients are billed separately from the chef’s fee; one Houston chef bills at cost with no markup and shows clients the receipts. What matters is that a $167 all-in rate and a $150-plus-groceries rate are different products, so never compare them as though they were the same number — including when you are benchmarking your own.
What does a minimum spend actually do to my rate?
It quietly raises it for small parties, and it is the most misread number in marketplace listings. A listing reading “from $50 per person, minimum spend $300” — a real pair of figures read on 26 August 2026 — does not charge a table of four $200. It charges $300, which is $75 a head. The advertised floor only becomes your real rate once the party is large enough to clear the minimum on its own. If you set one, set it deliberately: it is the mechanism that stops a dinner for two costing you the same day’s work as a dinner for ten while paying a fifth as much.
How much do platforms take?
Most do not say, which is itself worth knowing. None of the marketplace cost guides ranking for this question publishes its commission rate or what the chef receives, and one competitor advertises “0% platform fee for the first year” without ever stating the standard fee that implies. The one platform we found that does publish a rate takes 20%, and instructs chefs to quote a fee inclusive of it. Ours is stated so you can put it in your own arithmetic: ChefLynk takes 0% of your price. You keep your whole quote, and the client pays a service fee on top of it that never comes out of yours.
What happens if the client cancels after I have bought the food?
That is the question nobody covers, and the answer has to be in your terms before it happens rather than negotiated afterwards. Decide three things in advance and write them down: a deposit that is taken when the booking is confirmed, a cancellation window after which the deposit is not returned, and a separate rule for ingredients already purchased. Groceries are the part people forget — they are a real cost you have already incurred, they are frequently non-returnable, and a policy that only covers your time leaves you paying for someone else’s change of plan. On ChefLynk the client is charged at checkout and the money sits in escrow before you start work, so the awkward version of this conversation happens against funds that already exist.
Should I count on tips?
No. Plan your price so the booking is worth taking without one. The only figure we could source is one marketplace’s guidance that guests who choose to tip usually leave around 10 to 20% of the total, and that is advice it gives clients rather than a measurement of what clients do. No independent US survey of private-chef gratuity exists. There is also a wrinkle worth noticing: where the total already includes your ingredient cost, a percentage of “the total” means something different from a percentage of your fee.
Check us

every figure, and whose market it came from.

Marketplace listings rotate and rate guides go stale without being re-dated — two of the sources below are years older than they look, and we say which. Dates are when we read them.

publish the number you worked out.

Price per guest or as a set price for the whole event, set your own minimum, and keep 100% of it. The client sees the price before they inquire, so you are not negotiating from zero.