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HVAC

HVAC Technician Utilization Calculator

Split a technician's paid week into billable, travel and administrative hours, and see the utilisation rate your labour pricing should actually be built on.

Your numbers

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Result

Utilisation 60.00%
Weekly labour revenue $3,480
True cost per billable hour $60.67
Unaccounted hours 3
At 24 billable hours out of 40 paid, this technician runs at 60.00% utilisation. Their burdened cost is $36.40 an hour, but spread across only the billable hours it is really $60.67, which is the number your labour rate has to clear. One more billable hour a week is worth $6,960 a year.

Utilisation is not a productivity score and should never be used as one. Travel, restocking, warranty returns, training and genuinely slow weeks all suppress it without anyone doing anything wrong. Its real use is pricing: a labour rate built on paid hours rather than billable hours is structurally too low, because the unbillable hours still have to be paid for.

Open the HVAC dispatch demo

Questions

About this calculator

What is a normal technician utilisation rate?

It varies too widely for a benchmark to be useful: install crews, service technicians and maintenance techs all sit in different places, and a rural territory differs from a dense one. Track your own figure over time; the direction matters far more than the level.

Should travel count as billable?

Only if you actually charge for it. Many residential contractors fold travel into a trip charge or into the hourly rate instead, which is fine, but then it belongs in the rate calculation, not in the billable-hours count.

Why does the cost per billable hour matter more than the wage?

Because you pay for all forty hours and only recover some of them. Pricing off the raw wage, or even the burdened wage, quietly assumes every paid hour earns, and none of them do.

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Where the unbillable hours actually go

Most of the gap between paid and billable is travel and re-dispatch. The demo shows a day's routing and what reordering it does to the driving.