Bow thruster cost: what you will really pay

The short answer

Installed cost by boat length

Nobody publishes these prices. Manufacturers quote through dealers, and dealers quote per boat. The only real prices online are buried in forum threads, where owners tell each other what they got stung for. We collected them, dated every one, and marked the ones too old to trust. Then we priced every tunnelA tube bored straight through the hull below the waterline, with a propeller in the middle of it. It is the conventional thruster. Fitting one is mostly a labor job rather than a hardware one. thruster in our database as a yard job at current rates. That is the table below.

There are three kinds of bow thruster, and each costs a very different amount to fit. An external one bolts onto the outside of the hull. A tunnelA tube bored straight through the hull below the waterline, with a propeller in the middle of it. It is the conventional thruster. Fitting one is mostly a labor job rather than a hardware one. thruster sits in a tube cut through the hull. A retractableA thruster that lives inside the hull and drops down through a hatch when you press the button, then pulls back up. It leaves no permanent hole in the water flow. one drops down out of the hull when you use it and folds away when you don’t. How the three kinds work.

Want a price for your own boat? Answer a few quick questions and we will show you which thrusters fit it, and what each one costs fitted.

Each row runs from the price for a boat at the bottom of its band to the price for one at the top, so a 42 ft boat sits inside the 40 to 50 ft row. The first row starts at 18 ft and the last runs to 65 ft. Every row is figured for a boat about the weight of a trawler.

Each row counts only thrusters that steer her bow at 13 knots or more, no more than 15 percent under a 15 knot breeze, and each model in a price card shows the breeze it steers her in. That is enough to dock with. A windier day calls for more. A lighter boat can get by with a smaller, cheaper unit, and the thruster finder, our free tool that matches a thruster to your boat, works it out for your own boat.

How do these figures compare with what owners paid? We hold 5 reports from owners who had a tunnel fitted or quoted at one end of the boat. Of those, 3 came in under our figure for a boat of the same length. Every one of those dates from 2021 or earlier, before boatyard labor rates roughly doubled. The newest paid job we have is a 42 ft Grand Banks 42C, posted in Aug 2025 at $19,000. That one sits above our figure.

For 6 of the 8 boat lengths, no owner has posted a yard’s price for a tunnel at all. Every report we have is listed, with a link to the post, in what owners paid. If your boat is one of those lengths and you have a quote or a paid invoice, send it in with your name blacked out. It becomes the first row for that length.

One warning applies to any length band, including this one. Length tells you how big the job is. Which line is expensive depends on the hull. On a fiberglass monohull the labor is about half the bill. On a welded houseboat the hull work is cheap, and the battery bank, charger and cable run to two thirds of the total.

What it costs by boat type puts the hulls side by side and shows which line moves. It also names the two hull types nobody has published a price for at all.

Why the forum thread you found is probably wrong

Most of the thruster cost discussion online was written between 2009 and 2016. Yard labor has roughly doubled since. A Florida yard doing thruster work published tiered rates of $70, $80 and $90 an hour in January 2021, depending on the trade. By 2025, owners in the same state were reporting $175 an hour. Published Northeast fiberglass rates had reached $180.

That last row is the useful one. It shows the same kind of yard doing the same job four years earlier, at half the rate. So a price in a 2014 thread still lands well short of 2026 money, even with inflation added, however confidently the thread states it. The labor line roughly doubled, and labor is most of the bill.

What is inside the quote

Here is a 35 foot boat getting one tunnel thruster fitted by a yard, built up from published component prices and current yard rates. No single invoice looks exactly like it. Lay your own quote beside it line by line anyway, because the lines a yard leaves off are as telling as the ones it puts on.

The low figure is every line landing at its cheapest. The high figure is every line landing at its most expensive. Very few jobs come in at either extreme, so the real spread is narrower than $9,641 to $12,807 suggests. Plan around the middle of that range.

What the haul-out line is made of

The boat comes out for most of a week. The hands-on work fits in two days, but the glass around the tube cures between coats, and resin does not hurry for anyone. Plan on five to seven days out of the water. The yard bills that as the lift in and out, the blocking (the stands she sits on), a pressure wash, and a lay day charge per foot per day. Some yards fold the blocking and the wash into the lift price. Some add an environmental fee.

The table is eight yards’ own rate cards, read 30 September 2026, worked for a 35 ft boat. The cheapest column is 5 days out, the most expensive 7. The line above runs from Fairhaven Shipyard’s figure to Oasis Boatyard and Marina’s. Every other estimate on this site works the same cards at your own boat’s length.

Look at the tunnel tube line. A 185mm fiberglass tube, 40 inches long, lists for $209.15. The most expensive tunnel tube VETUS sells, 250mm at 60 inches, is $456.24. Most of what you pay for is the labor of getting that tube into the hull.

Every part the job needs

The worked job above has five parts lines. The makers’ own installation manuals, read on 30 September 2026, give a longer list. Here is every part a tunnel job needs, whether it comes in the box, and what each one costs at one dealer, Fisheries Supply, on that day.

The fitted estimate on the finder and the product pages counts the unit, the yard’s hours and the haul-out. Then it adds one line for the batteries, cable and charger, and a separate line for the other parts in this table that the box does not hold. On a tunnel job that last line is $427 to $2,130 at the dealer’s prices. Each unit’s own line prices the tube for its own tunnel size, so a small tunnel sits lower in that range than a big one.

How the battery gets charged

Every maker wants a cranking-type bank near the motor. Few say how to keep it charged. Max Power and Sideshift name one. Sleipner Side-Power, Quick and Lewmar say nothing about it. VETUS builds a charger into its BOW PRO Boosted units. DockStar carries a pack inside and charges from a wall outlet.

The seven things that blow a quote up

Two boats the same length can quote thousands apart. It is almost never the thruster that explains the gap.

1. Access. The tunnel goes where the tunnel goes, and quite often a holding tank, the floor of the V-berth or a bulkhead is already there. One owner's yard spent as many hours moving a holding tank back two feet and rebuilding that floor as it did on the actual glasswork.
2. A coredA deck or hull built as a sandwich: two skins of fiberglass with balsa or foam between them. Bolts through it must be sealed, or water gets into the core and rots it. hull. The core has to be dug back around the hole and the exposed edges sealed solid. Otherwise you have built a water path into your laminate. Sealing it properly adds hours to the quote.
3. Thick laminate. One documented install hit an inch of solid hull. It got through only with a carbide bit, in two half-inch passes. The large hole saws alone run around a thousand dollars.
4. A fine bow. The tunnel wants to sit as far forward as possible, for leverageThe distance from the point the boat turns about to the place the push is applied. Double the distance and the same push turns the boat twice as hard.. It also has to sit at least one tunnel diameter below the waterline. On a boat with a narrow, sharp bow, the spot that is deep enough is too far back to be much use, or too narrow to take the tube. This is where jobs get expensive or get refused.
5. The battery, done properly. A thruster needs its power close. Running a long cable from the engine room to the bow is the cheap way, and it costs you thrust through voltage drop. Done right, you get a second battery bank forward with its own charger and cable. That is roughly $1,000 to $1,400 in parts, plus the labor to fit them.
6. Boat length, through the cable run. The same thruster costs more to install on a 50 footer than a 35 footer. The heavy cable run is longer, and it often has to go up a size.
7. Joystick integration. Adding joystick control to one documented Grand Banks 42 job cost $4,800 for the hardware and about $5,000 to install. That is roughly three fifths again on a thruster job in that band.

What owners paid

The most useful thread we found is from 2021, and it is useful because the owner of a 35 foot Intrepid did what almost nobody does: he posted the quote, and then he posted what he did about it. Here is how he described the quote.

“Materials $4200 (expected), labor estimate $10k (bit of a shock). I was thinking $10k all in.”

Owner of a 35 ft Intrepid, The Hull Truth, January 2021

He then worked the labor number back into hours. The yard's own published top rate was $90 an hour, so a $10,000 labor estimate meant 111 hours of work. The trade generally does that job in two to four days. Other owners in the thread put it at two days for two men.

Five days later he posted again. He had gone to a different yard and paid $9,200 all in.

Of the 11 rows, only 7 are a job somebody paid for. The rest are declined quotes, or one owner’s view of what the job goes for. Three of the rows come from a single afternoon on a single thread. It is still the best public record we have found. Nobody in this trade publishes prices, so you have little else to check your own quote against.

The cheaper route, and what it costs you

An external unit bolts on instead of being glassed in, and that removes most of the labor. Two makers in this category publish open US prices, so those are the two we can quote precisely.

The Sideshift figures are complete kits, including the controller, joystick, harness, fuse and battery switch. The installed column adds yard hours, batteries and cable. It adds nothing for a haul-out, because Sideshift says in writing that these go on with the boat afloat.

A DockStar is the thruster plus a track to suit where it mounts. The unit is $3,950, and the tracks behind the rows in this table are $320 to $620. It is self-contained and is not wired into the boat. So its installed figure is one to three hours at a yard rate, and nothing else. Ask what else comes in the box before you order.

Both makers sell to owners who fit their own. If that is you, the gap between the two price columns is the yard labor you would be doing yourself, on your knees in the forepeak.

The hardware costs more than a comparable tunnel unit, but the install costs a fraction. The clearest evidence comes from one owner who priced both routes on the same 41 foot Formula. He was quoted $25,000 for tunnel thrusters at both ends. He set that against “about $11K” for Sideshift units he fitted himself, four AGMAbsorbed glass mat: a sealed lead-acid battery with the acid held in fiberglass matting. It gives off no gas in normal use and holds its voltage well under a heavy draw. That is why thruster makers name it. batteries included.

The bow took about a day and a half with his wife. The stern took a day with a neighbor’s help (Trawler Forum, August 2025).

One caution before you read it as like-for-like. He never bought the tunnels, because once he took delivery he found they would not fit the hull. So it compares a real bill against a quote that was never tested.

You give up some thrust for the money, and you hang a unit in the water that changes how the bow looks. The retrofit page covers each of those. It also shows which products avoid a hole in your hull and which ones only say they do.

Note what that owner was pricing: both ends. If the stern is part of your plan, do not assume it costs this page's number again at the other end of the boat. The stern is where the machinery already lives, and the owner reports show people routing around it. What a stern thruster costs has those figures, every one dated. It also covers what changes when both ends are quoted together.

How to read a quote you have been handed

Three checks get you most of the way, and all three use the tables above. None of them needs you to know anything about thrusters. They need a calculator and a little nerve.

1. Ask for the quote split into materials and labor.
2. Divide the labor figure by the yard's own hourly rate. More than about 40 hours on a straightforward hull deserves a question. There may be a good answer, like moving a tank.
3. Check the materials line against the tables above. Roughly $3,901 to $5,357 is normal for parts complete on a 35 to 40 foot boat.

What the hardware lists for on its own

The table shows the standard units. Ignition-protectedBuilt so it cannot make a spark that would ignite gasoline fumes. Required for anything electrical in the same compartment as a gasoline engine or tank. versions of the same models list higher, so match the version on your quote before comparing.

The SE100 row shows the effect. It makes 256 pounds of thrust at 12 volts and 220 pounds at 10.5 volts. A volt and a half of sag costs you 14 percent of your thrust.

Thin cable or a tired battery is exactly what causes that sag. That is why the cable and battery line in your quote is not the place to save money. Every comparison on this site uses the full-battery figure, because it is the figure most makers publish.

Lewmar's 185TT Gen2 range works the way Quick's table above does: one housing and a ladder of motor sizes. It tops out at $3,426.99 for 214 pounds of thrust. Defender publishes thrust in pounds for these units, so they sit in the comparison on the same terms as the other brands.

West Marine has effectively left tunnel thrusters. Its VETUS product pages are still live but show no price and no stock. Max Power publishes no US prices itself; its rows in the tables above are the listings at Marinedeal and WMJ Marine. Jet Thruster publishes none either, and its US dealer lists every model as call-for-price.

What this means for your quote

Where this data is thin

There are four gaps in the record.

Hardware prices captured 28 August 2026 to 13 October 2026 from Defender, Fisheries Supply, Quick USA, Hodges Marine, Boat Gear USA and Sideshift, and Max Power’s rows from Marinedeal and WMJ Marine. Owner-reported figures come from dated posts on The Hull Truth, Trawler Forum, Sailboat Owners, Bayliner Owners Club, C-Brats and Sam's Marine.

Labor rates come from the published rate cards of Crocker's Boat Yard and Berkeley Marine Center. The haul-out comes from the published cards of SEA Marine, Albert Jensen and Sons Boatyard, Santa Cruz Harbor boatyard, Berkeley Marine Center, Snead Island Boat Works, Oasis Boatyard and Marina, Causeway Marina Shipyard and Fairhaven Shipyard, read 30 September 2026.