The cost of private investigators might vary as some of them choose to charge you a flat fee and some others choose to bill you on an hourly basis. Depending on the kind of the work, then you will be able to know whether they will charge you on an hourly basis or a flat fee. There are small jobs that won’t require too much time and hence you will be charged flat rate while at the same time there are jobs out there that require a significant investment of time. In such situations the private investigators might want to charge you on an hourly basis.
Here are other items that would influence the cost of hiring a private investigator:
Independent Or Employed PIs
The cost of hiring a private eye will vary whether the person is employed by an investigator firm or the person is freelancing for himself. From the past, we have seen that PIs who are employed tend to charge higher fees than freelancers because the money they make goes to pay their salaries as well as other costs of the firm. They are usually higher as they are able to provide you with services that a freelancer couldn’t and in some cases they could assign more than one private investigator to your problem hence solving the case faster. Freelancers are cheaper as they will be much cheaper resources and in some cases you can haggle and they will provide you with their services at a much lower rate.
Average Private Investigator Fees
There is usually an amount that you will have to pay for the private investigator services. This is the minimum amount that you will need to pay so that they can start looking into your work. Then on top of these fees there are other additional costs which vary depending on the case work for the example you could be told to pay for mileage fees if the PIs will be forced to travel. As the mileage is relative in that they could be traveling long distances and in other occasions they could be going as far. The minimum amount is normally called the base amount and this would cover the actual investigator fees. The amount could be a couple hundred pounds that covers their time, some use of their resources and other fees.
Private Investigator Price List
In addition to what has been mentioned above, there are private investigators who provide you with an itemized list of what they charge in relation to what they do. They could tell you that if they will be involved in spending hours looking at a subject in the night it would cost you a number of pounds while doing it during the day will cost significantly less. This breakdown will give you an idea of how much you will be looking to spend.