Anyone who is looking to hire a private investigator will ask the same question all the time. The question that they will want to be answered is how much it costs to hire a private detective. It’s a surprise to many that there is no actual set fee in hiring a PI. This is because in most cases the work the private eye does is different and with the variation the fees will be different. That said there is a baseline or a minimum that is paid to the private investigator for the time he or she spends on the case and there are other factors that raise the price of hiring a private investigator. Here are the costs of hiring a PI:

Case Type

Depending on the case, type the fees that you will be charge will be different. Spousal or marital cases are the most common types of cases that the private investigator gets. These types of cases will be charged differently to a missing person case or a corporate case whereby the private investigator will be forced to use more resources or ingenuity in order to get to the bottom of the case. The more complex the case is the more the PI is more likely to charge you. Simpler cases are the opposite in that they will be much cheaper.

Time Spent

There are some cases that can be solved quickly and there are some that would require a significant time investment. As you have already assumed the cases that take longer are the ones in which the PI will charge you more. This is because most PIs charge per hour for their work and this means that they will spend more time on your case as opposed to another one. Cases like missing persons, are the ones that usually take more time to solve than most other cases this is because the detective will have to retrace all the steps the missing person took in order to find out where s/he is. This by itself could prove to be very time-consuming.

Private Cases Vs Corporate Cases

Naturally corporate cases will be much more expensive than private cases and this is due to the fact that the PI will be dealing with very sensitive information and the corporate case would require much more from the private eye than a personal case. Some of these cases like finding out which of the employees was involved in a crime in the office are more difficult to uncover and require the PI to do more work than s/he expected. Also due to the sensitive nature of the information that they get to deal with means the PI should have more discretion and that would lead to the price being raised.