Typical price per duration

Written by Mariam Burdiladze on 18 February 2026. Posted in Uncategorised.

In this article we will be setting up the most common duration based pricing structure.

We will use cars as an example, but the same can be applied to any other rental objects.

Cars and campers usually have a “base price”, which is based on the booking duration and some special offers (like weekend prices) and those prices can also differ based on season.

In this article, we will take a look at how to set all of this up.

Base price

We start with defining a simple, duration-based pricing foundation.

For this, there are 2 fundamental approaches:

A price can be purely duration-based, as in built upon minutes / hours / days (24-hour cycles).

It can also be simplified into calendar days or nights.

The difference between those two is that the latter approach ignores the actual pick-up and drop-off hours and only counts the individual weekdays (Mondays, Tuesdays, etc.), or nights (Monday – Tuesday, Tuesday- Wednesday, etc.).

We will first take a look at the purely duration-based pricing:

For this, we go to https://app.rentware.io/settings/pricing and click on the Plus sign in the upper right corner.

Here we select “Temporal adjustment”.

We first name the pricing rule (in this case it’s “Fiat 500 | 100€ / day”) and set the Base price to be discarded. This means, that whatever the item itself has as a fallback price is ignored and our pricing can fully apply.

Then we define that from the first hour on the 1-day price applies. Since in our example a day costs 100€, we say 1 | h | 100€ | 0 | h.

So 1 hour costs 100€ and it remains this way until the next line can apply.

We then say on the next line, that starting from 24.1 hours (which means once 24 hours have been exceeded) the price is 200€. We then say in the “Extra per” column 100 per day.

This means when a customer chooses a duration of 25 hours the 2-day price (200€) will apply. Once this second 24-hour cycle has been exceeded (so at more than 48 hours) another 100€ will be added. This keeps going infinitely. If a customer was to choose a timeframe of 31 days, then the price would be 3100€.

You can freely add more lines to define more specific durations. A common case would be a “day and a half price”. If you wanted to say that a duration of 24,5h – 30 hours costs 150€, you could set the second line to

24.1 | h | 150€ | 0 | d

Then add a third line to break into the full 2-day price.

30.1 | h | 200€ | 0 | d

And then a third line to define when to return to the per-day calculation.

48.1 | h | 300€ | 100€ | d.

In order to define a price for a week, you can add a temporal degression. So if for example you wanted to say that starting from the 7th day (the 7th 24 hour cycle) a week price should apply and each consequent day should be cheaper, you could do something like this:

144.1 | h | 680€ | 80 | every extra day

We enter 144.1 hours, because 6 days are 6 x 24 hours = 144 hours. And the seventh day begins starting from the next hour.

Then we say, that the price for a week is 680€ and each extra day should add 80€.

For a per per calendar day or per night pricing the approach is similar but much simpler.

You take the same pricing template, but instead of defining hours, you can simply say:

1 | calendar day | 100€ | 100€ extra | every calendar day.

And the same works for nights.

To add a degression here, we can simply add a line like:

7 | calendar day | 680€ | 80€ extra | every calendar day

Special prices (weekend)

Now that we have a foundation, we can add some special offers. One common example is to offer a weekend special.

For that we can add a new pricing rule (once again plus in the upper right hand corner).

Here we chose “Prices for specific periods”.

This rule allows as to make very specific adjustments.

We first name it (“Fiat 500 weekend” in this example) and add a new adjustment.

We give it a price of 250€ and say that it applies, when the pick-up is on Friday between 16:00 and 20:00 and the drop-off is on Monday between 06:00 and 08:00.

Once we have that, we click on “create” at the bottom of the sidebar.

In this price rule you can enter any combination of days and hours.

Keep in mind, that this rule only applies for time ranges of up to 7 calendar days. So the maximum time range can be for example Monday – Sunday.

Seasonal adjustments

Now we can also add a rule to handle different seasons. If you are for example renting out convertible old-timers you may want to increase the prices in the months of July and August, to account for an increase in demand.

We once again click on the plus and select “Seasonal mark-ups/discounts”.