Windshield time is the share of a paid day your crews spend driving instead of working. It rarely shows up as a line item, because it hides inside job blocks. This calculator puts a number on it. Nothing you enter is saved or sent anywhere.
The formulas
The calculator uses four lines of arithmetic. You can check every one by hand.
- Drive hours per year = technicians × drive hours per tech per day × working days
- Labor cost of driving = drive hours per year × loaded cost per hour
- Hours freed = drive hours per year × the share you could cut
- Jobs that time could hold = hours freed ÷ average job length on site
"Loaded cost" means everything an hour of a technician costs you: wage, payroll burden, vehicle, fuel and insurance. If you don't know it, start with the wage and add a third. Then refine it.
How to get an honest drive-hours number
Don't guess. Pull a week of job records and, for each technician, add up the gaps between one job's finish and the next job's start. That gap is drive plus slack. If your records separate arrival from start, you can split the two. If not, treat the whole gap as an upper bound. The full method is in windshield time: what it actually costs.
Why the second number matters more
The labor cost is real, but you paid it whether the truck was driving or working. The bigger number is the jobs you couldn't take because the hours went to the road. That's what the bottom row shows: capacity you're already paying for and not selling.
Be careful with the "drive you could cut" input. Some travel is the product: residential service means going to the customer. The avoidable part is backtracking, crossing your own territory twice, and driving created by the order jobs were booked in. That's what travel-time scheduling goes after.
What to take away
- Drive time is a cost you already pay. The bigger cost is the jobs it displaces.
- Measure drive from job-to-job gaps in your own records, not from a benchmark.
- Only the avoidable share of driving is worth chasing: backtracking and phone-order booking.
Common questions
What is a typical amount of windshield time?
It varies too much by trade, territory and density for a benchmark to be useful. Measure your own from a week of job timestamps. See the windshield time glossary entry for the method.
Does this calculator save my numbers?
No. Everything runs in your browser and nothing is sent or stored.
What's the difference between windshield time and drive time?
They're usually used interchangeably. Some companies count only between-job travel as drive time and include shop and supply-house runs in windshield time.