How Much Should a Yacht Management Company Charge Per Boat Per Month?

In the market I see, yacht management retainers run $1,500 to $3,000 per boat per month for a 40 to 60 foot vessel, from about $500 for dayboat programs up to $8,000 or more for large crewed yachts, or 5 to 10% of the operating budget. The market range is not your price. Your loaded cost per vessel is.

Most firms skip that second part. They look at what the firm down the dock charges, shave 10% to win the boat, and find out two years later that half the fleet loses money. A healthy service-business margin starts with knowing what each client costs to serve. In this business, the client is the boat.

What the market actually charges

Three pricing structures cover almost every management firm.

The retainer bands track vessel size, because size is a rough proxy for how much attention a boat demands. What the market bears:

None of these is wrong. Each one just pays you for a different thing, and one of them, the one that feels easiest to sell, quietly pays you for the wrong thing.

Which pricing model rewards the wrong thing?

Percent of spend.

Your fee grows when the owner's costs grow. Bigger yard bill, bigger fee for you. That is a conflict of interest sitting in plain sight, and owners eventually see it. The model is easy to sell in year one and hard to defend in year three, right around the time the owner's accountant starts asking why the management fee went up with the engine rebuild.

Fixed retainers have the opposite flaw. They reward efficiency, which is what you want. But most firms underprice them, because they set the number by looking sideways at competitors instead of looking down at their own costs. You cannot guess your way to a defensible retainer.

The modular menu splits the difference, protecting you from scope creep and making the high-maintenance boat pay for being exactly that. The cost is friction. More line items, more conversations, more invoicing. Pick whichever structure you can defend with a straight face in front of the owner's accountant. Then cost it.

How do you price from your loaded cost per vessel?

Count the hours each boat consumes. Every function that touches it: accounting, maintenance coordination, crew admin, on-call time. Multiply by your loaded cost per hour, meaning wages plus payroll taxes plus benefits (what your people actually cost you, not what you pay them). Add an overhead allocation. Add your margin. That is the floor for that boat.

Here is a rough map for one mid-size crewed vessel:

Now hold that against a $2,000 retainer. That boat is not a profit center. It is $500 of gross margin before rent, software, insurance, or your own salary touches it. One emergency haul-out month and it goes negative. If you outsource your own books, you have seen this same logic from the other side; it is exactly how what bookkeeping should cost gets calculated, just with a boat attached.

Run this table for every vessel in the fleet, not the fleet average, because the average is precisely where the losing boat hides.

Find it.

How many boats can one manager actually carry?

Fewer than you think. At 25 hours per vessel, a 160-hour working month caps one manager near six boats. Before drive time. Before the owner who calls at 9pm. Before anything breaks.

That is a full-service number for crewed vessels. Dayboat programs run far lighter, and one coordinator can carry 20 to 40 small boats without breaking a sweat. Math is the method. Hours are yours to measure.

Which means this whole business runs on two numbers: revenue per managed vessel and vessels per manager. Multiply them, subtract loaded cost and overhead, and what is left is the firm. Everything else, the brand, the dockside relationships, the software stack, only matters to the extent it moves one of those two, so raise the first by pricing from cost and raise the second by standardizing the work until a vessel takes 18 hours instead of 25. Track both monthly, per manager and per boat, on one page the whole team can see. When one slips, you will catch it the same month instead of at year end.

Do not raise it by letting managers drown.

Price the hours, not the boat

The market range will not tell you whether a specific boat deserves a number above $2,000. The hours and the loaded cost on paper will, and that is a number you can defend. The firms that struggle here are not underpriced by the market. They are underpriced by their own guess.

Bottom line: price each boat from loaded hours times loaded cost, plus overhead and margin, and let the market range tell you whether you have a pricing problem or a cost problem.

If the fleet is growing and you still cannot see margin per vessel, that is the point where a fractional CFO starts earning the fee. KLYVNT builds per-vessel cost and margin reporting for service firms in exactly this spot. But you do not need us to start. Pull the hours on your three biggest boats this month. One of them is probably costing you money.