Registering your utilization rate: how to measure and improve installer and fitter time
In short
Utilization rate is billable hours divided by realistic available hours, and the denominator matters as much as the numerator. When your rate is low, the fix is almost always scheduling and job data, not asking engineers to work harder.
- Utilization rate is billable hours divided by realistic available hours - the available-hours denominator matters as much as the numerator.
- A healthy rate for most installation teams sits between 65% and 80%; set seasonal targets rather than a single annual number.
- A rate below 60% almost always points to scheduling gaps, travel time, or admin overhead rather than a lack of effort from your team.
- Pull utilization data per engineer, not just as a team average - the individual outliers at both ends are where decisions need to be made.
- Track utilization alongside first-time fix rate; high utilization with poor fix rates means a busy but inefficient team, not an efficient one.
Utilization rate shows what percentage of each installer's day produces revenue. This guide explains how to calculate it correctly, set realistic targets by season and role, and improve a low rate through scheduling and job data rather than working your team harder.
The utilization rate tells you what percentage of each installer's or fitter's working day produces revenue. The formula is straightforward: divide billable hours by total available work hours, then multiply by 100. A field engineer who completes 32 hours of billable work in a 40-hour week is running at 80%. For most field and workshop teams, a rate between 65% and 80% is a realistic and healthy target. Rates above 85% tend to push into burnout territory and leave no room to absorb emergency calls or unplanned work; rates below 60% almost always signal a scheduling or administrative problem rather than a performance one.
Why the Available-Hours Figure Is the Part Most Businesses Get Wrong
Getting the numerator right - billable hours - is the easy half of the calculation. Most businesses have some record of hours charged to jobs. The denominator is where the measurement goes wrong, and a flawed denominator produces a number that looks meaningful but cannot be compared to any benchmark or used to make a real decision.
Available work hours are not the same as contracted hours. They should exclude paid breaks, scheduled leave, training days, and mandatory administrative meetings. What remains is the time in which an engineer could, in principle, be on a job. That is the correct baseline.
If you use gross contracted hours in the denominator, you inflate the denominator and deflate the rate. A team running well at genuine 70% utilization appears to be running at 58% if you divide by 2,080 contracted hours instead of the 1,700 or so hours that represent realistic working capacity after holidays, bank holidays, and mandatory non-billable time. The result is a number that looks alarming and is also wrong. Decisions made from it - hiring, target-setting, pricing - will be based on a false picture.
The cleanest approach is to define available hours per engineer per week as total scheduled hours minus paid breaks, then multiply by working weeks in the period. Exclude any week or day where an engineer was on training, leave, or a non-billable site activity that was planned in advance. That gives you a denominator you can defend and compare.
How to Measure and Improve Your Rate
Define what counts as billable time for your team
Before you track anything, write down what billable means in your business. For most installers and fitters, billable time is time spent on a customer job that is charged to the customer - either directly on a time-and-materials basis or as part of a fixed-price job that includes a labour component. Travel to and from site is where definitions diverge. Decide whether travel is billable, non-billable, or billable only within a certain radius, and apply that definition consistently. The definition itself matters less than applying it uniformly across every engineer every week. Inconsistency means your averages are meaningless.
Establish a realistic available-hours baseline for each engineer
Calculate each engineer's available work hours separately rather than using a team average. An engineer who works part-time, is in training for two weeks this quarter, or covers an on-call rota on weekends has a different available-hours figure from a full-time engineer on regular hours. Lumping them together produces an average that misrepresents both. Set up a simple record for each person showing their contracted hours, scheduled leave in the period, and any planned non-billable commitments. Update it each week.
Pull billable hours from your job records, per engineer
Aggregate reporting at team level hides the variation that tells you where the problem actually sits. One engineer running at 45% and another at 85% produce an average of 65% that looks unremarkable and obscures two very different problems. Pull the billable hour figure per engineer for each week, and look at the individual distribution before you look at the team total. The outliers on both ends are where the action is.
Calculate the rate and set targets that reflect your work pattern
Divide each engineer's billable hours by their available hours for the same period, multiply by 100. Compare that figure to the target range for your type of work. For most installation and fitting teams, a healthy operating range is 65% to 80%. Research from TSIA across field service organizations puts most businesses between 75% and 85%, with top-performing organizations reaching around 90%. For smaller trades businesses with more variable demand and longer travel between jobs, a realistic ceiling is often lower - your actual achievable rate depends on your service area geography and job mix. Set seasonal targets rather than a single annual number. Demand-driven businesses often see utilization at 80% to 85% during peak season and 55% to 65% in slower months. Treating a natural off-season dip as a performance failure demoralizes a team that has no work to go to. The target should reflect what is actually achievable given the work in the diary, not an abstract benchmark from a busier period.
Diagnose where the lost hours are going
A utilization rate below your target is a symptom, not a cause. The cause is almost always one of three things: scheduling gaps (engineers sitting between jobs with no work to go to), travel time absorbing the hours that should be billable, or administrative work pulling engineers out of the field. Research by Skedulo found that close to 75% of field service technicians report spending too much time on paperwork. On a 15-person team, even 45 minutes of avoidable admin per engineer per day erases roughly 50 billable hours a week - a figure that translates to substantial lost revenue across a year. To identify which category applies to your team, ask each engineer to log non-billable time by type for two to four weeks: travel, waiting (for access, materials, or instructions), admin, and idle. You do not need sophisticated software to do this; a simple daily log works. The distribution will tell you where to act first.
Fix scheduling before you look at anything else
Scheduling is where utilization lives or dies. An engineer sitting idle between jobs is not underperforming - the dispatch process has let them down. The most direct fix is geographic clustering: group jobs in the same area on the same day rather than routing engineers across a wide territory for a single call followed by a distant one. Accurate job duration estimates are equally important. If your team consistently underestimates how long a job type takes, gaps open in the schedule that are hard to fill at short notice. Track actual job duration against estimated duration over three months and use the real figures to update future scheduling. A job record for each completed job is the data source that makes this possible - if you have no record of how long jobs actually took, you are estimating blind.
Reduce the admin overhead that eats into field time
Every form an engineer fills in by hand is time away from the next job. Digital job records, site sign-off captured on a phone, and pre-populated service sheets that pull from the original job rather than requiring re-entry all recover time that would otherwise disappear into paperwork. The goal is not to eliminate all non-billable time - QA checks, travel, and handover documentation are legitimate parts of the job - but to eliminate the friction that makes necessary tasks take longer than they should. Engineers who spend 90 minutes a day on administrative work lose effectively a full working day each week to tasks that generate no revenue and add no quality.
Track utilization alongside first-time fix rate, not in isolation
Utilization rate and first-time fix rate are companion metrics. A high utilization rate next to a poor first-time fix rate does not mean the team is efficient - it means engineers are busy but returning to jobs repeatedly, which consumes more hours than a single correct visit would have. According to Aquant's 2025 Field Service Benchmark Report, the median first-time fix rate across field service industries is around 75%, with the top 20% of organizations achieving 86% and the bottom 20% at 53%. A business at 85% utilization with a 55% first-time fix rate is running hard and losing money on rework.
Track both figures per engineer, not just as team averages. One engineer might post strong utilization and strong fix rates - that is the target profile. Another might post strong utilization and weak fix rates - that engineer is busy but ineffective and needs a different response. A third might post low utilization and strong fix rates, pointing to a scheduling issue in their territory rather than a performance problem. Aggregate data cannot distinguish between those three situations. Individual-level data, reviewed through project tracking, can.
What a Low Rate Usually Tells You
The instinct, when utilization is lower than expected, is to conclude that engineers need to work more hours or take on more jobs. That is almost never the right diagnosis. The hours are usually there. The issue is that too many of them are being consumed by travel between poorly sequenced jobs, by admin that could be automated or simplified, by waiting for information that should have been in the job record before the engineer left the depot, or by return visits that would not have happened if the job had been set up correctly the first time.
The fix, in most cases, is better job data and better scheduling - not asking people to work harder. A 65% utilization rate on a team where engineers have good job information, well-sequenced routes, and minimal admin burden is a more profitable position than a 75% rate built on an exhausted team doing repeat visits and spending evenings on paperwork. Reporting across your job history is what makes that distinction visible - without it, you are managing to a number without understanding what it is actually measuring.
The businesses that manage utilization well do not obsess over the percentage. They obsess over the quality of the data that goes into the calculation, and they use that data to make specific decisions about scheduling, job information, and skills matching rather than general decisions about effort.
Sources
- What Your Field Service Data Is Actually Telling YouFieldMotion · accessed 2026-10-07
- How to Improve Technician Utilization RatesYourRadar · accessed 2026-10-07
- Field Service KPIs: Formulas and BenchmarksVSight · accessed 2026-10-07
- Utilization Rate: Benchmarks and Worked ExamplesZigaflow · accessed 2026-10-07