A new report from field service software provider Field Promax, analyzing more than 10,000 data points across 300 HVAC companies, found that the average technician's billable time comes to just 5.7 hours out of an 8.8-hour paid workday — leaving roughly three hours per day that contractors are paying for but not invoicing to customers.
Why this number matters more than it might first appear: For a contractor running a crew of 10 technicians, three hours of daily unbilled time per tech is not a rounding error — it is the single largest controllable cost center in a typical service business, larger in aggregate than most material cost fluctuations contractors spend far more energy managing.
Where the time actually goes: Field Promax's analysis identified three specific categories driving the gap. Shop time before and after the workday — technicians spending 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the afternoon at the shop rather than going directly from home to the first job and from the last job home — adds up to roughly 120 unbilled hours per technician per year when multiplied across a standard work calendar. Mixed dispatch boards that combine installation and service jobs without clear daily caps create scheduling inefficiency that compounds across a crew. And unplanned vehicle maintenance and breakdowns, which the report identifies as the single biggest unplanned overhead reducer, eat into productive time unpredictably.
The fix Field Promax recommends are notably simple: separate dispatch boards for install versus service work with a daily job cap per truck — the report suggests a benchmark of two installs and four service calls per truck per day as a starting reference point. A standing 30-minute weekly preventative maintenance window for trucks, treated as non-negotiable scheduled time rather than an interruption. And, where operationally feasible, having technicians start and end their day directly from home rather than routing through the shop.
The dialogue effect: One of the more interesting findings in the underlying research, according to Field Promax co-founder Gomez, is that monitoring utilization data creates a natural feedback loop between dispatchers and technicians — when techs see their own utilization numbers, they begin proactively flagging gaps in their schedule rather than waiting for the office to notice underutilized time. That visibility, more than any single procedural change, is what drives sustained improvement once a contractor starts tracking the metric.
The math on acting on this: Using the report's own example, if a technician earning $30 an hour reduces unbilled time by just 30 minutes daily, that converts to roughly $15 a day in margin. Across a 10-technician crew, that is approximately $39,000 annually in direct bottom-line impact — without adding a single job, raising prices, or hiring anyone new. In a labor market where the cost and difficulty of adding headcount is at a multi-year high, this kind of utilization improvement is one of the few growth levers a contractor can pull without depending on the hiring market at all.
