A scheduling report says your technicians ran at 96% utilization last month. Revenue per technician was flat. Both things are true, and the reason they are both true is that the report is not measuring what its name suggests.
Utilization is one of the most quoted numbers in field service and one of the least standardized. Before it can be useful, you have to decide which of three different questions you are actually asking.
The three formulas
They share a shape — some measure of productive time over some measure of available time — and they differ in what goes in each half. The differences are not academic. On the same technician in the same week, these three commonly land thirty points apart.
1. Board utilization (schedule density)
Assigned hours ÷ Available hours
This is what most scheduling software reports by default, and it is the number that says 96%. It asks: how much of the technician's day has something on it?
It is genuinely useful for one purpose — spotting holes in the schedule — and useless for almost everything else, because an assigned block includes travel, setup, waiting for a customer to answer the door, and the job itself. A day can be 100% assigned and half productive.
2. Billable utilization
Billable hours ÷ Available hours
This asks: how much of the day did we actually charge for? It is the number a CFO wants, because it maps to revenue.
Its weakness is that it blames technicians for commercial decisions. Warranty work, callbacks, goodwill visits and unsold estimates are all real work that a technician performed and cannot be charged for. A technician doing three warranty calls looks terrible on billable utilization and did nothing wrong.
3. Productive utilization (wrench time)
Hands-on job hours ÷ Available hours
This asks: how much of the day was spent doing the work? Travel out, waiting out, shop time out.
This is the number that tells you whether your scheduling is any good, because it isolates the thing scheduling actually controls. It is also the hardest to capture, since it needs arrival and departure timestamps per job rather than a single "completed" flag.
All three numbers are correct. Only one of them is a scheduling problem.
Deciding what counts as "available"
The denominator does as much damage as the numerator. Common mistakes, in rough order of how much they distort the result:
- Counting a 40-hour week when nobody works 40 productive hours. Paid lunch, morning shop time, end-of-day paperwork, vehicle checks. If those are paid and not job time, either exclude them from available hours or accept that your ceiling is well under 100%.
- Including PTO and holidays in available hours. A technician on vacation is not underutilized. Available hours should be scheduled working hours.
- Ignoring on-call. If someone is compensated for being reachable overnight, decide deliberately whether those hours are in the denominator. Whichever you choose, keep it consistent — the trend matters more than the absolute value.
- Mixing apprentices and senior techs into one average. An apprentice riding along is a training cost, not a utilization failure.
Rule of thumb: if your utilization number is above roughly 85%, check whether travel is inside the numerator. It usually is. A number in the high nineties almost always means you are measuring the calendar.
How to calculate a number you can actually act on
Here is the version worth building, once, properly.
- Define available hours as scheduled working hours minus PTO, holidays and any paid non-field time you have decided to exclude. Write the definition down. Put it next to the report.
- Capture four timestamps per job: dispatched, arrived, work complete, departed. Most field apps already collect these; the reporting layer usually throws them away.
- Compute wrench time as arrived-to-complete, summed across jobs.
- Compute travel as departed-to-next-arrived.
- Compute idle as whatever is left over.
- Report all three percentages side by side, every week, per technician and per team.
Reporting all three is the part people skip, and it is the part that makes the number useful. A single percentage tells you something is wrong. Three percentages tell you what is wrong:
| Pattern | What it means | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| High board, low productive, high travel | Jobs booked in an order that creates driving | Booking and territory logic |
| High board, low productive, high idle | Crews arriving before they can start, or waiting on access, parts, or customers | Job prep, parts staging, confirmation calls |
| Productive close to billable | Good scheduling, pricing or warranty issue | Commercial side, not dispatch |
| All three low | Not enough demand, or capacity misread | Sales pipeline, not the board |
What to do about a low productive utilization
If the gap is travel, you have a booking problem before you have a routing problem. Jobs promised on separate phone calls, none aware of the others, produce days that cross the same territory twice — and no dispatch reshuffle fixes that after the fact. The structural remedy is to compute the drive at the moment the slot is offered, from where the truck will actually be at that hour, and to stop offering times the drive makes impossible. Travel becomes a scheduled, visible quantity instead of something absorbed inside an appointment block.
If the gap is idle, it is usually not scheduling at all. It is parts not staged, customers not confirmed, or access not arranged. Those are process problems with process fixes, and they are often faster to solve.
What to take away
- "Utilization" names three different metrics — board, billable and productive — that can differ by thirty points on the same technician.
- Board utilization measures the calendar. Productive utilization measures the technician. Only the second one tells you whether scheduling is working.
- Define your denominator explicitly and publish the definition alongside the number.
- Report all three together: the pattern between them identifies the cause, where any single number cannot.
- Above roughly 85%, assume travel has been counted as productive until you have proven otherwise.
Common questions
What is the formula for technician utilization rate?
The standard formula is billable hours divided by total available hours, expressed as a percentage. The complication is what counts as billable and what counts as available — changing either definition moves the result by twenty or thirty points, which is why two companies quoting utilization rates are often not discussing the same thing.
What is a good technician utilization rate?
There is no universal benchmark worth chasing, because the number depends entirely on your definitions, your trade, and your service radius. A rural HVAC company and an urban plumbing company will never have comparable figures. Track your own trend over time and be suspicious of any reported rate above roughly 85 percent, which usually means travel is being counted as billable.
Why is my utilization rate high but profit flat?
Almost always because the utilization measure is counting assigned calendar time rather than hands-on work. A schedule that is 100 percent assigned can be 50 percent productive once travel and waiting are separated out. Recalculate with drive time excluded and the picture usually changes.