Ask any field service business owner how productive their technicians are, and you'll usually hear something optimistic: "They do 5-6 jobs a day." That sounds productive. But ask a different question: "What percentage of their paid time is spent on billable work?" The answer is usually much lower than expected.
Technician utilization is the percentage of a technician's available working hours spent on productive, billable activities. Everything else, including driving, waiting, admin tasks, and unproductive gaps, is non-utilized time. And for most field service businesses, driving is by far the largest chunk of non-utilized time.
The Math That Surprises Everyone
Let's walk through a typical day for a field service technician:
- Working hours: 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM (9 hours, minus 1 hour lunch = 8 available hours)
- Jobs completed: 5
- Average job duration: 1 hour
- Total billable time: 5 hours
- Total driving time: 2.5 hours (including drive to first job and home from last)
- Gaps between jobs (waiting, admin): 30 minutes total
That's a utilization rate of 62.5%. Nearly 40% of the day is non-productive. And this is a reasonably busy day. Lighter days with three or four jobs push utilization below 50%.
Now multiply by your team size. A five-person team with 62% utilization is effectively paying for five technicians but getting the productive output of three. The other two person-equivalents are sitting in traffic.
Why Driving Time Gets Ignored
Most field service businesses track jobs completed, revenue per tech, and maybe customer satisfaction. Very few systematically track driving time. There are a few reasons:
It feels unavoidable. "We drive to customers. That's just part of the job." While driving will never be zero, treating all of it as unavoidable ignores the wide variation. A well-routed day might involve 1.5 hours of driving. A poorly routed day might involve 3.5 hours. That difference is two extra billable hours.
It's hard to see. Revenue and job counts are visible in your reports. Driving time is invisible unless you deliberately measure it. Out of sight, out of mind.
Improvement seems marginal. Saving 15 minutes per job on driving doesn't feel significant. But 15 minutes across 5 jobs is 75 minutes. That's enough time for an additional short job, or an hour of reduced overtime.
The Real Cost of Low Utilization
Low utilization costs service businesses in three ways:
Direct vehicle costs. More driving means more fuel, more oil changes, more tire replacements, and faster depreciation on expensive service vehicles. At IRS standard mileage rates ($0.725/mile in 2026), every unnecessary mile costs real money.
Lost revenue opportunity. Every hour spent driving is an hour not spent on a billable job. If your average job generates $150-300 in revenue, two hours of excess driving per tech per day represents $300-600 in lost revenue capacity. That's $6,000-12,000 per month for a five-person team.
Technician burnout. This one is harder to quantify but very real. Technicians who spend three hours a day in traffic are less satisfied, less productive on the jobs they do reach, and more likely to look for a different employer. In an industry with chronic labor shortages, retention matters.
How to Improve Utilization Through Better Routing
The fastest way to improve technician utilization is to reduce driving time. Here's how, in order of increasing impact:
Measure it. Track drive time per tech per day for at least two weeks. Calculate your current utilization rate. This baseline tells you how much room for improvement exists.
Optimize route sequence. Use route optimization tools to reorder the day's appointments into an efficient sequence. This typically saves 15-20% on total driving distance. It's the easiest change because it doesn't affect how appointments are booked.
Consider geography when dispatching. When assigning calls, factor in where each tech already has appointments. Assigning a job to the closest tech instead of the next available tech is a manual form of geographic clustering.
Prevent scatter at booking time. The highest-impact change is using scheduling software that factors in location when customers book. If the booking system guides customers toward times when a tech is already in their area, the schedule builds itself with geographic clusters. Route simulations project this approach can reduce driving by roughly 33%, which can push utilization from 62% to 70-75% without adding a single job to the schedule.
What Good Utilization Looks Like
Perfect utilization (100%) is impossible and shouldn't be the goal. Driving time will never be zero, and some buffer between jobs is healthy for unexpected delays. But most field service businesses have significant room between their current utilization and a realistic target.
- Below 55%: Scheduling is likely random with no geographic awareness. Significant waste.
- 55-65%: Typical range for businesses using standard scheduling tools. Room for improvement.
- 65-75%: Good range for businesses with some geographic awareness in scheduling. Route optimization is likely in use.
- 75-85%: Excellent. Location-aware scheduling, tight routes, and efficient dispatching are all working together.
Moving from 60% to 75% utilization means each technician gains about 1.2 hours of productive time per day. For a five-person team, that's 6 extra billable hours daily, which can translate to 1-2 additional jobs per day without hiring anyone new.
Start with Measurement
If you take one thing from this article, make it this: start tracking driving time. Once you see the number, you'll know whether you have a problem and how big it is. The solutions range from simple dispatcher training to technology-driven scheduling, but the first step is always measurement.
ServiceReach is designed to maximize technician utilization by reducing driving time at the source. Every time slot is scored for geographic efficiency, and your schedule clusters by area automatically. See how it works, or start a free 30-day trial.