When should a kid raise their prices?

Three signals, and the first one is the one almost everybody misreads.

You are turning work down. A kid saying no because Saturday is already full does not have a scheduling problem, they have a pricing problem. More people want the work than there is time to do it, and price is the only lever that fixes that. This is the clearest signal there is and it usually gets treated as a good problem rather than a message.

You are no longer unproven. The opening price was low because a first customer was taking a small risk on somebody with no track record. Twenty jobs later, with people who book again and neighbors who tell other neighbors, that risk is gone. The reason for the discount expired and nobody sent a notice.

Your costs went up. Gas, supplies, a replacement part. A number that worked when supplies cost eight dollars works less well when they cost fourteen, and most kids never revisit the price after the first time they set it.

There is a quieter fourth signal worth watching for. If saying the current price has stopped feeling like anything at all, that is information. The flinch is uncomfortable and it is also a rough measure of whether a number is ambitious. Complete comfort usually means the number has been outgrown.

Once one of those is true, the move is to raise it on new customers first. It requires no conversation, it tests whether the new number holds, and it makes the harder conversation with existing customers far easier later.