Flat rate is a price a customer pays for a specific service based on the amount of time deemed necessary to perform the service, which remains constant regardless of the actual time a particular worker needed to complete the service. Flat rate manuals are used throughout the service industry and are based on timed studies of the time it takes to perform a specific job. Flat rate helps provide a uniform pricing menu for service work and helps establish the worth of the performance of a particular job.

The same flat rate for a particular job is paid, even if it takes the worker longer to do the job than the time shown for that job in the flat manual. Because of this, the customer does not have to pay more to a worker who takes longer to do a job than the flat rate time.

A worker who works slower than the flat rate time earns less money over time because the worker's slowness means the worker performs fewer jobs over a given period of time because each job takes longer due to the worker's slowness.

In this case, flat rate serves as an incentive for the worker to learn to perform the job in the flat rate time, so that the worker may perform more jobs in a given time, as the worker is paid per job.

Because flat rate pays a set amount for a particular job, a worker who learns to work faster is rewarded for efficiency.

Because the efficient worker is also paid per job, the worker who performs more jobs in a given time period is paid the set amount for each job.

Because the efficient worker can perform more jobs in a given period of time, the worker is paid more because the worker performed more jobs.

Flat rate is used by the service industry because it does not penalize efficiency. A worker who develops the skill to perform a job faster is not paid less per job as a result, so a fast worker is not paid less to work quickly.

Because flat rate pays at a predetermined price per job, the customer pays the same price whether the worker is faster or slower than the flat rate time.

The worker is paid in accordance with the work performed.

The efficient worker is rewarded for being skilled enough to do the job in less time than the flat rate manual.

The customer benefits from the worker performing the job in less time than the flat rate manual by having the service completed faster.