Billable utilization rate calculator: how much of your crew's available time gets billed

Page last updated September 21, 2026 · Benchmarks checked September 21, 2026

Utilization is billable hours divided by the hours your people were available to work. Enter three numbers and this calculator returns the percentage, shows where the rest of the time went, and compares it with published benchmarks from HVAC, plumbing, landscaping and professional services. Those benchmarks disagree with each other, so the page also shows how each one defines “billable” and which figure is closest to yours.

Who this is for

Owner-operators and office managers at HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping and pest control businesses with roughly 2–25 field technicians who already record hours by job, in field service software or a time clock, and want to know what share of paid time earns revenue. It also suits office-based service teams and agencies that bill by the hour, which is why the benchmark table includes professional services figures.

It is less useful if you do not record billable hours yet (track a typical two weeks of jobs and drive time first, then come back), if you want to price jobs rather than measure time (the technician billable hourly rate calculator takes utilization as an input), or if you are measuring office and admin roles whose time is not billable by design. Utilization also says nothing about whether the billed hours were priced well: a crew can bill 80% of its time at a rate that still loses money.

What you will enter

Every input maps to a variable in the formula further down. In plain language:

Total paid hours (H_total)

Every hour you paid for in the period, for one person or the whole crew: regular time, overtime and paid time off. Use the same period for all three numbers, whether a week, a month or a year.

PTO hours (H_PTO)

Paid vacation, sick leave and paid holidays in that period. These hours are paid but nobody was available to work, so the formula removes them. Enter 0 to measure against all paid hours instead, which some benchmarks do.

Billable hours (H_billable)

Hours you charged for, or recovered through the price of the job. See what counts as billable below, then pick one definition and keep it.

Utilization (U_actual)

The result: billable hours as a percentage of the hours people were available to work.

Billable rate (optional, not in the formula)

Your hourly billing rate. It is used only to put a dollar value on the gap between your rate and a target.

Target range (optional, not in the formula)

A benchmark from the table below, or your own range, to compare your result against.

Calculate your utilization

Estimates only, for informational purposes. This is not professional financial, legal or tax advice. Benchmarks are published by third parties, define utilization differently and change; treat them as context, not as a standard you must meet.

Crew view: per-person rates and the crew rate

Add one row per person. The crew rate divides everyone's billable hours by everyone's available hours, so a part-timer with few hours counts for less than a full-timer. That is not the same as averaging the individual percentages, and the two can differ by several points. Use the button under the table to send the crew totals to the calculator above.

What your number suggests

These four bands come from one vendor's guidance (FieldEdge, June 2026), which divides by total paid hours, so enter 0 for PTO to match. Treat them as a starting point for looking at your schedule, not as a diagnosis.

What the published benchmarks say

This table lists every utilization figure we could trace to a named source, with what each one measures. Only two rows are measured averages: SPI Research for professional services and Field Promax for HVAC technicians. The rest are guidance ranges from software vendors and aggregators that do not publish a method or sample size. Pick the row whose definition matches how you entered your hours.

Where the sources contradict each other

• FieldEdge gives both 70–80% and 70–85% as healthy in the same post, and attributes its ranges to a third-party glossary rather than its own data.
• Simpro gives the plumbing average as 55–60% in one section of its KPI guide and 60–70% in another, and describes the denominator as both available hours and paid hours.
• ServiceTitan calls 60–80% strong in its field service metrics guide, while its labor rate calculators treat 30% as good and 50% as extremely efficient. We found no explanation for the gap. Our reading, which is an interpretation and not ServiceTitan's statement, is that the calculators use a conservative planning assumption, so treat those percentages as a pricing input rather than a benchmark.
• SPI Research: Deltek describes 75% as the level SPI considers optimal, while Rocketlane's summary of the same report cites 70%. This page uses Deltek's figure.

We did not verify benchmarks for electrical or pest control businesses, so none are shown. For landscaping we found only a vendor range, not a measured average.

What counts as billable, and which hours to divide by

Most of the gap between two utilization numbers is definition, not performance. Settle these five points before comparing yourself with anyone.

Paid hours or available hours

This calculator divides by available hours, meaning paid hours minus PTO. FieldEdge's formula divides by total paid hours, and the Field Promax figure is measured per working day. The choice moves the result: 1,176 billable hours against 2,080 paid hours is 56.5%, and against 1,960 available hours is 60.0%. Neither is wrong, but they are not interchangeable. If the figure you are comparing with divides by paid hours, enter 0 for PTO.

Drive time

Field Promax counted only drive time recovered through a trip charge or flat-rate pricing as billable, and found about 1.13 hours a day of unrecovered driving on an 8.8-hour paid day. Simpro suggests looking at routing when technicians spend 30% or more of their day in the truck. Decide whether recovered travel counts as billable in your shop, and apply the same rule every period.

Flat-rate and membership work

With flat-rate pricing the customer is not invoiced for hours, so “chargeable on the invoice” needs translating. A workable rule is to count the recorded time on work orders that produced revenue, including on-site time and any travel your flat rate is built to recover. Time on unpaid callbacks, quoting that was not converted, and shop or truck maintenance stays non-billable.

Overtime and shared jobs

Overtime hours go in paid hours, and in billable hours when they were spent on billable work. For jobs worked by two or more people, count each person's own hours against their own record; that keeps the crew rate consistent with the per-person view above.

Seasonality

A peak-month rate compared with an annual benchmark overstates your position, and a slow-month rate understates it. Measure a full year, and look at months separately for planning. GreenMargins makes a similar warning about overhead per hour: do not calculate from busy-season hours only.

Worked examples

Example 1: one technician, one year

An HVAC technician is paid for 2,080 hours (40 hours for 52 weeks), 120 of them paid time off, and billed 1,176 hours. All numbers here are illustrative.

What five more points is worth: 5% of 1,960 available hours is 98 hours, which at a $100 billable rate is $9,800 a year for this technician. Simpro's plumbing guide puts the same five-point gain at about $10,400 a year for a $100-an-hour technician. That figure equals 5% of 2,080 hours at $100, which is our arithmetic and not Simpro's stated method, and the difference from $9,800 is the PTO hours in the denominator.

Example 2: a crew of three, one month

Two full-time technicians and one part-timer, none with PTO in the month.

The average of the three percentages overstates the crew by 3.3 points because Tech C's 90% comes from only 80 hours. It also hides the real finding: Tech B is far below the others and is worth a look at their schedule and job mix. The crew view above lets you load this example.

How utilization changes the rate you need to charge

Hold your costs constant and the hourly rate needed to recover them varies with 1 ÷ utilization. Moving from 60% to 70% cuts the required rate by 14.3% (0.60 ÷ 0.70 = 0.857). Pricing from a 30% assumption instead of 60% would double the required rate for the same labor and overhead. That is why the definition matters as much as the number.

In the technician billable hourly rate calculator, available annual hours are multiplied by utilization (E_utilization, a value from 0 to 1) to get the hours you can bill, and your labor and overhead costs are divided across them. The decimal shown next to your result above is that same number. Check how that calculator defines available hours; if it already excludes time off, use the rate from this page with your PTO entered.

Crews, drive time and landscaping

Crew utilization is measured in person-hours, so a lost hour costs as many hours as there are people in the truck. If a three-person crew loses 40 more minutes a day to driving between properties, that is two person-hours a day (3 × 40 minutes) that were paid and cannot be billed. Route density, load-out time and equipment downtime all show up in the crew rate before they show up anywhere else.

Measuring it needs hours recorded by crew and by property, not just by day. If you are choosing landscaping software partly to track crew time and job costs, see Aspire vs Jobber for landscaping, which compares a commercial-focused platform with a residential-focused one.

Where operators and vendors say to look first

These suggestions come from the sources above and have not been tested by us. They are ordered roughly by how directly they act on non-billable time.

• Drive time (Field Promax). Group each day's jobs by neighborhood, cap drive time between appointments at 30 minutes, place the first and last jobs near each technician's home, and start billable time when the truck arrives rather than when the technician opens the system.
• Shop time (Field Promax). Cutting 15 minutes from both the morning and afternoon shop visit is roughly 120 hours per technician per year, assuming about 240 working days.
• Truck stock and maintenance (Field Promax). Standardized truck stock lets any technician take any call, and a 30-minute weekly truck maintenance window is listed as the biggest unplanned-overhead reducer.
• Room for same-day work (Field Promax). Blocking about 5% of each day for same-day demand, instead of booking 100%, is suggested to reduce overtime and give flexibility.
• Map a week (Simpro). If utilization is below 65%, map each technician's day hour by hour for a week, and look at windshield time, callbacks and jobs running twice as long as estimated.
• Callbacks (FieldEdge). A callback uses labor twice and often produces little revenue, so track callback trends alongside utilization.

Methodology and sources

The calculator uses this formula, taken from the site's implementation plan:

The crew rate applies the same formula to summed hours: total billable hours across everyone divided by total available hours across everyone, where each person's available hours are their paid hours minus their PTO hours. The comparison box uses your result rounded to one decimal place. The dollar figure is the hours needed to reach the bottom of the target range multiplied by the billable rate you entered, and is shown only when you enter a rate.

What it leaves out: what the hours were billed at, whether jobs were priced profitably, callbacks that produce billable hours without revenue, overtime cost, and whether demand existed to fill more hours.

Benchmarks were gathered on September 21, 2026 by searching for published utilization figures for the trades and for professional services. We read the Deltek, ACHR News, FieldEdge, Simpro, Runn and GreenMargins pages, recorded what each one says its number measures, and show conflicts instead of choosing between them. Measured averages that state a sample size are given more weight than ranges from vendor blogs, and the two are labeled differently.

The full SPI Research report is gated and the Field Promax report was not available to us, so both are cited through the summaries below. Vendor sources sell software that measures utilization, which is a reason to treat their target ranges as guidance.

Sources

Frequently asked questions

What to read next

• Technician billable hourly rate calculator: turn your utilization into the hourly rate you need to charge.
• Aspire vs Jobber for landscaping: how a commercial-focused and a residential-focused platform compare for crew-based work.

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