How to Price Add-On Care: Turning Blanketing, Holding, and Meds Into Revenue
Knowing how to price add-on care is one of the fastest ways to recover revenue that boarding barns already earn but rarely collect. Whether you're billing for blanketing, medication administration, or holding for the farrier, a structured pricing model built into barn management software turns daily care tasks into reliable income.
By The Stables Team
The Revenue Hidden in Your Daily Care Routine
Most boarding facilities deliver dozens of small services every week that never appear on an invoice. A groom spends four minutes pulling a blanket, a barn manager holds a horse for twenty minutes while the vet conducts a lameness exam, someone administers an ulcer supplement from the med cabinet. Each task has a labor cost attached. Most never get billed.
This is revenue leakage in its most common form: not missed charges from negligence, but missed charges from a billing system that has no structured way to capture them. A shadow sits between the care your staff delivers and the revenue your business collects, and that shadow grows every month you leave add-on services unpriced.
Pricing these services is not about nickel-and-diming horse owners. It is about making your business financially sustainable so you can keep the lights on, pay your staff fairly, and maintain the standard of care your clients expect.
The five pillars of sound barn business management, revenue capture, faster collection, operational clarity, owner visibility, and a connected care ecosystem, all begin with one step: deciding what your add-on services cost and writing it down.
What Counts as an Add-On Service
Add-on care is any service beyond the base board rate that requires staff time, supplies, or both. Before you can build an add-on care pricing structure, you need a complete list of every service your barn delivers outside the board fee. Common categories include:
Blanketing and unblanketing. In climates with variable temperatures, blanket rotations can happen two to four times a day. Each rotation costs staff time. Most barns charge a monthly blanketing plan fee or a per-application fee for one-off changes.
Holding for the vet, farrier, or bodyworker. Holding a horse safely during a professional appointment requires a trained staff member who cannot be doing anything else during that window. This is a distinct service that deserves its own line on the invoice.
Medication administration. Oral medications, injections, and topical treatments each carry different labor and liability profiles. A primary carer managing a horse on a daily medication protocol is providing a skilled service, not a background task.
Turnout and stall care exceptions. Additional turnout rotations, early stall cleaning before a horse show, and extra shavings all have clear supply and labor costs that should be tracked and billed.
Beauty and grooming services. Baths, mane pulls, clip prep, and leg wrapping before competitions are time-intensive services. Owners may request these for a horse kept as a companion pet or a show competitor. Either way, the barn's time has real value and should be priced accordingly.
How to Price Add-On Care: A Framework That Works
The goal when setting add-on care pricing is to cover your full cost and leave a reasonable margin, without anchoring to what feels socially comfortable to charge. Here is a practical framework:
Step 1: Calculate your true labor cost per minute. Take your barn staff's hourly wage, add payroll burden (employer tax and benefit costs typically run 15 to 25 percent above base wages, a range commonly cited in small business accounting guidance), and divide by 60. This gives you your actual cost per minute of staff time. Blanketing a horse takes approximately three to five minutes including walking to the stall, applying the blanket, and logging the task.
Step 2: Add supply cost. Medications, bandaging material, and supplements have a per-use cost that should be passed through at cost plus a small handling margin.
Step 3: Set prices based on your actual cost structure, not guesswork. Build a structured list of every add-on service your barn delivers. Assign each a price based on the labor-plus-supply model. Your local market gives you a range to check against, but your internal cost data should anchor the number.
Step 4: Review prices against your market without matching them blindly. Look at what other barns in your region charge, but do not price to the lowest common denominator. Facilities that invest in staff, safety, and care quality should price to reflect that value.
Understanding how to price add-on care at each service tier lets you build a menu that is internally consistent and defensible to horse owners who ask why the fees are what they are.
Presenting Your Add-On Rate Sheet to Horse Owners
Add-on care pricing clarity is good for business. Owners who understand what services cost are less likely to dispute charges and more likely to pre-authorize routine services so your staff does not have to chase approvals during busy morning chores.
A few principles for presenting your add-on rate sheet:
Use a written service menu with clear descriptions and prices. Include it in your boarding contract and make it available through the owner portal so clients can reference it any time without needing to contact the office.
Group services logically. A blanketing plan, a medication administration plan, and a farrier holding package should each be clearly labeled so owners understand what they are enrolling in. When owners can see the full features of your service offerings laid out in writing, frequently asked questions about billing get resolved before they become phone calls.
Explain that pricing is based on actual staff time and supply costs. When owners understand the care behind the charge, resistance drops. You are not a shop charging for convenience. You are a facility investing real labor into their horse's daily health.
The owner portal is a particularly effective channel for this. When rates, service descriptions, and care logs are accessible in one place, owners can review what was done and why a charge appeared without having to contact anyone.
Capturing Add-On Charges So Nothing Is Missed
Even well-priced services fail to generate revenue if they are never logged. The most common failure point is not billing system design. It is the gap between the moment a task happens and the moment someone records it.
A staff member puts on a blanket at 6 AM and plans to log it later. By 9 AM, three more tasks have happened. The entry never gets made. This is how unbilled services accumulate into meaningful revenue leakage over a billing cycle.
Closing this gap requires two things: a simple log step built into the daily care workflow, and a billing system that pulls logged services into invoices automatically rather than requiring a manual reconciliation step at month end.
Set up your add-on service list as trackable items in your billing system. Each time a service is delivered, it gets recorded against the horse's name and the date. That record becomes a line item on the next invoice. No manual entry, no guesswork, no missed charges.
Use the barn profit calculator to see how much revenue is available when you fully capture the add-on services you already deliver. The difference between current collections and potential collections is often large enough to fund a staff raise or a facility upgrade without increasing base board rates.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I price blanketing without upsetting my clients?
Start by calculating your true labor cost per blanket change, including walk time and task logging. Present the fee as a per-application rate or a flat monthly blanketing plan, and include it in the boarding contract before move-in so there are no surprises. Most owners understand that their horse needs a human to manage its blanket in changing weather. Transparency at onboarding prevents disputes later.
What is a fair rate to charge for holding during a farrier or vet appointment?
Your holding fee should reflect a set window of staff time, typically 30 minutes of a barn employee's undivided attention. Calculate your loaded hourly labor cost, divide by two, and add a small buffer for the disruption to other tasks. Verify your rate against what other facilities in your region charge, but anchor to your own cost data, not the lowest price in your market.
Should I charge per medication dose or set up a monthly medication administration plan?
Both models work depending on the situation. Per-dose billing ties cost directly to service delivered and works well for sporadic needs. A flat monthly medication plan works better when a horse is on a predictable daily protocol, since it simplifies billing for the owner and reduces tracking burden for your team. Offer both options and let the care plan data guide which fits each horse's needs.
What add-on services are boarding barns most frequently underpricing?
Holding for appointments, extra turnout rotations, and emergency after-hours care are the three services most commonly delivered at no charge or below cost. These tasks are high-labor, time-sensitive, and often pull a specific staff member away from other responsibilities. They should carry pricing that reflects that operational reality.
How do I handle pushback when an owner questions an add-on charge?
Present a written service menu before move-in and have it signed as part of the boarding agreement. When owners have agreed to a rate sheet in advance, invoice disputes drop significantly. If an owner pushes back on a specific charge, walk them through the labor time and supply cost behind it. Frequently asked questions about billing are usually a signal that your rate sheet needs to be more visible, not that the rates are wrong.
Turn Every Care Task Into a Line Item That Gets Paid
Add-on care services are already happening at your barn every single day. The question is whether your business is getting paid for them. A clear pricing structure, a simple charge capture workflow, and transparent billing through horse facility software close the gap between the care your team delivers and the revenue you collect. See how Stables connects daily care to accurate invoices so no service goes unbilled.