Technician Utilization Formula for Trade Shops

Technician utilization is billable hours divided by available hours, times 100. If a plumber is on the clock for 40 hours and 26 of them go on jobs you bill for, utilization is 65%. The math takes ten seconds. The hard part is agreeing on what counts as billable, what counts as available, and what to do with the answer.

This guide is for owners and office managers of small plumbing, HVAC and electrical shops. It gives you the formula, the related productivity and efficiency formulas people often confuse with it, a ranges table, and a practical way to collect the numbers from the field.

TL;DR

• Utilization = billable hours ÷ available hours × 100. Decide once what “available” means in your shop and never change it mid-year.
• Productivity and efficiency are different metrics. Productivity compares time worked to time clocked in. Efficiency compares flat-rate or standard hours to time actually worked.
• Sustainable utilization for the trades sits well below 100%. Published benchmarks cluster roughly between the high 50s and the high 70s, and anything pinned above 80% usually means no buffer for overruns and emergencies.
• Utilization is not profit. Pair it with revenue per technician per day and job costing.
• The numbers are only as good as your timeclock and job data. Capture them in the truck, not at the end of the week.

Table of Contents

• The technician utilization formula
• Utilization, productivity and efficiency are not the same thing
• What is a good utilization rate in plumbing, HVAC and electrical?
• Utilization is not profit
• How to measure it without a spreadsheet war
• Where the idle hours usually hide
• Our perspective: measure to protect the day, not to squeeze it
• Tracking utilization in MEPflow
• FAQ
• Sources

The technician utilization formula

The standard version:

Utilization rate (%) = billable hours ÷ available hours × 100

Two definitions carry all the weight.

Billable hours are hours on work a customer pays for: diagnosing a no-heat call, rough-in at a new build, swapping a panel, replacing a water heater. Drive time, parts runs, shop cleanup, callbacks you do not charge for and training are not billable.

Available hours are the hours you pay the technician to be ready to work. Most shops use clocked-in hours minus paid time off, holidays and scheduled training. Some use a flat 40. Either is fine as long as you use one consistently, because the trend matters more than the absolute number. The Averan Advisors productivity calculator makes the same point: hours that are available but not billed are the gap you are trying to see.

A worked example

Take one HVAC technician over one week.

Utilization = 27 ÷ 40 × 100 = 67.5%.

The other 13 hours are not wasted. Some went to drive time, some to supply house runs, some to waiting on a customer who was not home. The point of the number is to ask which of those 13 hours you can shrink and which are simply the cost of doing service work.

Run it per technician, per trade and per week

A shop-wide average hides problems. One technician at 85% and another at 45% average out to a respectable 65% and tell you nothing. Calculate it for each technician each week, then look at the shop as a whole once a month. If you run more than one trade, keep plumbing, HVAC and electrical separate, since their patterns differ.

Utilization, productivity and efficiency are not the same thing

Search for this topic and you will find the three terms used interchangeably. They measure different things, and mixing them leads to bad decisions.

The productivity and efficiency definitions follow NetSuite’s explanation of technician productivity, which treats them as distinct measures.

If you searched for a technician productivity formula, the answer is the middle row. If your question is whether a tech is fast, the answer is the bottom row.

An efficiency example

Your pricebook says a standard water heater swap is 3 hours. A plumber finishes it in 2.5 hours. Efficiency on that job is 3 ÷ 2.5 × 100 = 120%. Another plumber takes 4 hours: 75%.

Efficiency only works if your pricebook has defensible standard times. If your times are guesses, efficiency is a guess too. That is one reason a per-trade pricebook matters beyond quoting.

Why you want all three

A technician can have high utilization and low efficiency: busy all day, slow on every job. Another can have high efficiency and low utilization: fast, but sitting idle because dispatch left holes in the schedule. Utilization tells you about the schedule. Efficiency tells you about the work. Productivity tells you about the day around the work.

What is a good utilization rate in plumbing, HVAC and electrical?

No single number fits every shop, and be wary of anyone who offers one with great confidence. Here is what published sources say.

The roll.forge.ops write-up also reports median utilization of 63% for HVAC, 61% for plumbing and 66% for electrical, and describes a sustainable band of about 58% to 78% depending on trade and market density. Treat those as directional, not as a grade. They come from one vendor’s data and your market may differ.

Why 100% is the wrong target

Every trade shop has jobs that run long. The crawl space is worse than it looked. The breaker panel has corrosion. The customer wants one more thing looked at. An emergency call comes in at 2 p.m. If every hour is already booked, each surprise pushes the rest of the day back, customers wait, and technicians rush.

That is why the benchmarks above flag the high 70s and low 80s as a ceiling rather than a goal. A schedule with deliberate slack is not a lazy schedule. It is a schedule that survives contact with real houses.

Seasonal and mix effects

HVAC shops swing with weather. In a heat wave, utilization climbs because the phone never stops, and a short stretch above the usual band may be fine. The problem is staying there for weeks. Electrical shops with a mix of service calls and larger projects see wider variance, because project days can be long and billable while service days have more travel. Compare each trade to its own history first and to outside ranges second.

If you are scheduling around recurring work, a steady base of maintenance visits helps smooth the dips. Our 30 day preventive maintenance scheduling pilot walks through how to start.

It also helps to see how other trades think about sustainable load. This commercial plumbing maintenance schedule guide shows how planned recurring visits can be laid out ahead of time, which is exactly the kind of predictable work that fills quiet gaps in a technician’s week.

Utilization is not profit

Owners often read a high utilization number as proof the business is healthy. It is not. A technician can be billable 75% of the week on jobs you underpriced, or on work where materials and overhead ate the margin.

The roll.forge.ops analysis suggests that revenue per technician per day is a more actionable operational metric than utilization alone. The formula is simple:

Revenue per technician per day = total revenue from a technician’s jobs ÷ days that technician worked

Use it next to utilization:

The next layer is job costing: what did labor, materials and overhead actually cost on each job, and what was left. Our guide to simple job costing for plumbers covers that, and electricians will find the same logic in our piece on field service software for electricians.

How to measure it without a spreadsheet war

The formula is easy. Collecting clean inputs is what fails shops. Here is a process that works for a 2 to 30 truck operation.

1. Define the buckets. Write down which activities count as billable, which as non-billable and which as excluded (PTO, training). Put it in one paragraph and share it with the team.
2. Make technicians clock to jobs, not just to the day. If the timeclock only records start and end of day, you can compute available hours but not billable ones. Job-level time is what gives you the numerator.
3. Capture drive time separately. Drive time is usually non-billable, and it is often the biggest lever. Knowing it is separate from on-site time tells you whether the problem is routing or work.
4. Close out jobs the same day. Hours entered on Friday from memory are fiction. Notes, photos, materials and status should land from the truck.
5. Review weekly. Look at each technician’s rate, the shop average and the biggest gap between available and billed hours.
6. Change one thing at a time. Tighten routing, then check. Adjust the dispatch buffer, then check.

The reason offline capability matters here is simple: crawl spaces, basements and rural job sites lose signal. If the app cannot save hours, photos and materials when there is no coverage, techs will write things down later, which is how data goes wrong. We cover that in mobile field service software for 2 to 30 truck shops.

Where the idle hours usually hide

When utilization is lower than you want, the gap is rarely laziness. Look here first.

• Scheduling gaps. A 90-minute hole between two calls is too short for another job and too long to ignore. Better sequencing closes it. See how to reduce field service scheduling time.
• No-shows and lockouts. A technician arrives, nobody is home, and the hour is lost. Text reminders and arrival notifications cut this. Our post on text appointment reminders covers the setup.
• Supply house runs. Trucks that are not stocked to a plan make unplanned trips. A per-trade pricebook and materials lists on the job help.
• Paperwork after hours. If techs finish invoices and estimates at the kitchen table, that is unpaid time or lost data. Invoice from the job.
• Territory design. Zones that force long drives will cap utilization however well you dispatch. NetSuite’s piece notes that scheduling gaps can come from territory design or administrative overhead that could be streamlined.

For a broader plan, see how to improve field service efficiency in seven steps.

Our perspective: measure to protect the day, not to squeeze it

MEPflow was built by a master plumber, a master electrician and an HVAC technician in Rogers, Arkansas, and they run it on their own trucks. That shapes how we think about this number.

We have all stood in a crawl space watching the clock while the next customer waits. We know a utilization percentage can turn into a stick if an owner reads it carelessly. A technician who spends an extra hour finding a hidden leak did the right job, and a dashboard that punishes that will teach people to rush.

So we would use the formula in three ways. First, to find schedule holes the office can fix, not to grade technicians. Second, to confirm there is breathing room in the day, because a schedule at the ceiling is a schedule that breaks on the first overrun. Third, next to job costing, so you see whether billable hours made money.

We also think the number should cost the field nothing to produce. If a technician has to do extra data entry to feed your metrics, the data will be bad and the morale will be worse. The timeclock, job status, materials and photos should all come from the same app the tech already uses to do the job, with the office seeing the same data on the desktop side.

— Jonathan

Tracking utilization in MEPflow

If you are still running on spreadsheets and a whiteboard, or switching from another field service tool, MEPflow puts scheduling and dispatch, timeclock and payroll, job costing, invoicing and customer texting in one app. Technicians work from the phone in the truck, it works offline and syncs when signal returns, and the office runs the same data on the desktop. Every feature is on every plan, and plans differ only by crew size. See the MEPflow home page for the overview and pricing for plan details.

You can Create your company account online. Free signup is capped at 5 customers and has no trade tools. If you want the 14-day trial with the full product, call 866-808-4996 to book it. We import your existing customer and job data for you, and billing is month to month with no contract.

FAQ

What is the formula for calculating technician utilization?

Divide billable hours by available hours and multiply by 100. If a technician has 40 available hours and bills 26, utilization is 65%. Define “available” and “billable” once and keep them fixed so trends are comparable.

How is technician productivity calculated?

Productivity is usually hours worked divided by hours clocked in, times 100, as NetSuite describes it. It is separate from efficiency, which compares flat-rate hours produced to hours worked. Track both if you want to know whether the day is full and whether the work is fast.

Is 100% utilization the goal?

No. Sources such as roll.forge.ops put the ceiling for trade services around 78% to 82%, since above that there is no buffer for overruns. Sitting there constantly tends to hurt service quality and wear out your people.

Does utilization count drive time as billable?

Usually not, unless you charge a trip fee that you treat as billable time. Most shops count drive time as non-billable but track it separately, since it often shows whether the loss is in routing or on the job. Whichever rule you choose, apply it to every technician.

How often should I calculate it?

Weekly per technician, then monthly for the whole shop. Weekly catches scheduling problems while you can still fix them. Monthly smooths out one-off weeks and seasonal swings.

Sources

• Measuring & Improving Technician Productivity, NetSuite
• Technician Productivity Calculator, Averan Advisors

Recommended

• 9 Field Service KPIs for 2–30 Truck Shops, Each With One 30 Day Action
• No Retyping: Estimate to Invoice Workflow for 2–30 Truck Shops
• 2–30 Truck Shops: Two Changes That Raise First Time Fix Rate