Total hours you paid your team for this period, whether or not they were billable.
Hours your team spent performing work that was billed (or could be billed) to a client.
IRONGRID logs hours per job for every team member, so you always have the data to calculate utilization by technician or for your whole crew.
Why utilization rate matters more than headcount
Most contractors think about growth in terms of adding technicians. But improving utilization from 65% to 80% on an existing three-person crew is equivalent to adding roughly half a technician's output, without the payroll cost.
The most common causes of low utilization are fixable with better scheduling and tighter dispatching:
Frequently asked questions
What is technician utilization rate?
Technician utilization rate measures what percentage of your team's paid hours are spent performing billable work. It is calculated as billable hours divided by total paid hours, multiplied by 100. A rate of 75 percent means your technicians spend three quarters of their paid time on revenue-generating work.
What is a good technician utilization rate for contractors?
Most healthy field service businesses target a technician utilization rate between 70 and 85 percent. This range accounts for necessary non-billable time such as travel between jobs, team meetings, training, and administrative work. Rates consistently below 60 percent indicate significant time is being lost to scheduling gaps or non-billable activities.
What counts as billable hours?
Billable hours are the hours your technicians spend performing work that is billed to a client. This includes time on-site completing the job and any time spent on tasks explicitly included in the job scope. Drive time, team meetings, training, equipment maintenance, and administrative tasks are generally non-billable unless specifically contracted.
Why is my technician utilization rate low?
Low utilization is most commonly caused by scheduling gaps between appointments, excessive drive time from inefficient routing, administrative tasks assigned to field staff rather than office staff, unclear crew assignments that cause downtime, and waiting for materials that were not staged before the job.
How does utilization rate affect profitability?
Utilization rate directly affects profitability because labor is typically a contractor's largest expense. Improving utilization from 65 to 75 percent means generating 15 percent more billable hours from the same payroll. This is often the fastest way to increase profitability without adding headcount or raising prices.