Utilisation rate measures the share of a technician's available hours spent on billable or productive work, and most field service organisations operate at roughly 75 to 85%, with pacesetters nearer 90.2%. Chasing a higher number than that tends to backfire. The goal is a sustainable band that keeps engineers productive without squeezing out the slack your business needs for same-day callouts and genuine emergencies.
TL;DR:
- Separate billable utilisation from schedule utilisation and wrench time; exclude leave and training from available hours, and report travel separately from on site labour.
- Calculate schedule utilisation as committed booked hours divided by available working hours, multiplied by 100; exclude proposed and cancelled bookings, then verify against job timestamps.
- Treat 75 to 85% as a starting band, not a universal target; compare teams only after standardising travel, productive time, leave, and overtime.
- Review utilisation above 90% as a capacity warning, while tracking first visit resolution, revenue per technician, and SLA compliance to catch service failures.
- Improve first visit resolution and appointment confirmations before tightening schedules; add realistic travel buffers to preserve emergency capacity and reduce wasted visits.
Table of Contents
- What counts as utilisation, and why the definition matters
- Why utilisation matters, and where it misleads you
- How to measure utilisation step by step
- Setting realistic benchmarks for your trade
- Practical ways to lift utilisation without burning out your team
- What good reporting looks like on a dashboard
- The trade-off every manager eventually faces
- See your own utilisation numbers clearly with Curcle
- FAQ
- Sources
What counts as utilisation, and why the definition matters
Field service teams use three related but distinct measures, and mixing them up is the fastest way to get a meaningless number.
- Billable utilisation: billable hours divided by total available hours, the figure most relevant to profitability.
- Productive or "wrench time": time spent actively working on a job, excluding travel and admin.
- Schedule utilisation: booked hours divided by available working hours, the version used on most dispatch boards, including Dynamics 365's schedule board.
Most organisations exclude paid time off, training and cancelled jobs from the available-hours denominator, and separate travel from on-site labour rather than blending the two, since modelling realistic sellable visits matters more than spreading costs across a theoretical full day.
Why utilisation matters, and where it misleads you
Utilisation tells you how full the schedule is, not whether the work being done is any good. A technician can be fully booked and still deliver poor first-time fix rates or low revenue per visit, which is why productivity and efficiency need to be tracked as separate measures rather than assumed from a single percentage.
Pushing utilisation past the mid-80s removes the slack you need to absorb same-day requests, and practitioners warn this tends to raise the risk of SLA breaches and engineer burnout rather than profit. Watch these alongside utilisation:
- First-time fix rate, which shows whether jobs are actually being resolved.
- Revenue per technician, which ties utilisation back to profit.
- SLA compliance, which shows whether capacity is tight enough to cause missed response windows.
Pro Tip: Treat a utilisation figure above 90% as a flag to review capacity, not a result to celebrate.
How to measure utilisation step by step
Your schedule board, timesheets and mobile app timestamps between them hold everything you need: booked hours, actual job duration, and which bookings were confirmed versus only proposed.
Dynamics 365's schedule-board logic only counts committed bookings toward utilisation, excluding proposed or cancelled ones, which is the cleanest rule to borrow for your own reporting.
A repeatable process looks like this:
- Pull total available working hours per technician for the period (shift hours minus approved leave and training).
- Pull total committed booked hours for the same period, excluding proposed or cancelled jobs.
- Divide booked hours by available hours and multiply by 100.
- Cross-check against timesheet or mobile app timestamps to confirm booked time matched actual time on site.
- Repeat weekly or monthly, using the same rule set each time so the trend is comparable.
Schedule board utilisation is calculated as total booked hours divided by total available working hours, multiplied by 100, and this single formula underpins most dispatch-board reporting in field service platforms.
Worked example: a technician has 38 available hours in a week and 32 committed booked hours.
Setting realistic benchmarks for your trade
Most field service organisations report billable utilisation around 75 to 85%, with the strongest performers reaching about 90.2%. Those figures are a useful anchor, but treat them as a starting point rather than a scoreboard.
- Two companies reporting "80% utilisation" may be measuring completely different things if one includes travel and the other does not.
- Benchmarking only works once everyone agrees what counts as productive time, travel, PTO and overtime, a standardisation step that's easy to skip and expensive to ignore.
- Internal benchmarking, comparing your own technicians, regions or job types against each other using one fixed formula, usually tells you more than any external comparison.
Route density, call-out radius and job mix all shift what a realistic number looks like for your business, so a rural multi-site contract and a dense urban patch should never be judged against the same target.
Practical ways to lift utilisation without burning out your team
Most utilisation gains come from removing friction rather than squeezing more hours out of the same day.
- Raise first-time fix rate by equipping technicians with job packs, pre-visit diagnostics and the right parts before they leave the depot.
- Tighten appointment confirmations so fewer slots are lost to no-shows or late cancellations; automated booking and reminder tools, such as those covered in this guide to appointment booking automation, can cut this kind of missed-slot waste.
- Optimise routes and travel windows rather than scheduling jobs purely by time slot, an approach worth testing through a controlled route optimisation pilot.
- Build in realistic job durations and travel buffers, and match jobs to the right skill level so simple callouts aren't absorbing a senior engineer's day, following the discipline covered in this engineer scheduling checklist.
- Use mobile checklists and data capture on site so paperwork doesn't spill into the next job and inflate non-billable time back at the office.
Pro Tip: Fix first-time fix rate before you touch the schedule. A missed fix costs you two visits' worth of travel and admin for one job's worth of revenue.
Priority based scheduling also helps here: assigning urgency levels to jobs rather than treating every booking as equal reduces SLA breaches while keeping utilisation inside a sustainable range.
What good reporting looks like on a dashboard
A dashboard built for utilisation needs more than one number. The useful ones break utilisation down by role, show booked hours against productive hours, isolate travel time, and tie first-time fix rate to individual jobs so a dip in utilisation can be traced to a cause.
- Utilisation by role or skill level, since a senior electrician and an apprentice should rarely be measured against the same band.
- Booked versus productive hours, which separates a full schedule from a genuinely productive one.
- Travel time as its own line, so route inefficiency doesn't hide inside "available hours".
- Job-level first-time fix contribution, linking individual visits back to the utilisation trend.
Reducing the admin behind these numbers matters as much as the dashboard itself. Automated timestamps, consistent status mapping and serial-number tracking that cuts equipment lookup to minutes rather than site-wide searches all remove the manual entry that otherwise corrupts a utilisation figure before it's even calculated.
The trade-off every manager eventually faces
Utilisation targets are easy to set and hard to hold once a busy month hits. The managers who do it well treat the 75 to 85% band as a design constraint, not a stretch goal, and protect the slack that keeps SLAs intact and engineers from burning out. Start with the cheapest fix available, usually first-time fix rate or appointment confirmations, before touching schedules or headcount.
— Luke Herridge
See your own utilisation numbers clearly with Curcle
We built our reporting around the same measurement discipline covered above: booked versus productive hours, first-time fix tracking, and job-level detail that shows where non-billable time is actually going. Serial-number tracking and mobile data capture cut the admin that otherwise distorts a utilisation figure before it reaches a dashboard.
- Our Professional plan, from £249 per month, includes the reporting and mobile features described in this guide.
- Compliance tracking and job records sit in the same system, so utilisation reporting doesn't need a separate spreadsheet.
If you want to see how this looks against your own schedule board, take a look at our product tour before booking a demo.
FAQ
What does "employee utilisation rate" mean?
Employee utilisation rate is the share of an employee's available working hours spent on billable or productive work, calculated as billable hours divided by total available hours. In field service, this usually means committed booked hours divided by available shift hours after excluding leave and training.
What is field service management?
Field service management covers the scheduling, dispatch and tracking of technicians who carry out work at customer sites, such as repairs, installations or compliance inspections. It typically includes job scheduling, route planning, mobile data capture and reporting on metrics like utilisation and first-time fix rate.
What is utilisation of equipment?
Equipment utilisation measures how much of an asset's available operating time is actually spent in productive use, rather than sitting idle or under maintenance. It's calculated the same way as technician utilisation, actual use divided by available time, multiplied by 100.
What is capacity utilisation?
Capacity utilisation measures how much of an organisation's total available capacity, whether that's technician hours, equipment time or facility throughput, is actually being used for productive output. A business running near its practical capacity limit will show a high capacity utilisation figure, though pushing it too high removes the slack needed to handle unplanned demand.
Sources
- Top Field Services Questions Answered: Insights from TSIA Intelligence | TSIA
- Schedule board utilisation (Microsoft Dynamics 365)
- Field-Service Economics: Travel, Labour and Capacity | Margin101