How many hours can you actually bill

Why everyone guesses this wrong

Because unbilled hours don't feel like work. They feel like the gaps between work \u2014 the drive, the wait at the counter, the twenty minutes on the phone with someone who never booked. You don't experience them as hours, so you don't count them as hours.

Then someone asks what percentage of your time is billable and you say eighty, because eighty feels about right for someone working as hard as you are.

Actually count it and the answer is usually between fifty and sixty-five for a one-truck operation. That's not a sign you're inefficient. It's the shape of the job. Trade work has travel built in, quoting built in, and a supply chain that doesn't deliver.

The damage isn't the hours themselves \u2014 it's what believing the wrong number does to your pricing. If you set your rate assuming forty billable hours a week and you're really billing twenty-nine, you've underpriced everything by around a third, permanently, while working flat out.

The formula

What to do about each leak

Not all unbilled time is the same. Some of it is waste you can remove, some of it is the cost of doing business and belongs in your rate, and a small amount is genuinely billable if you decide to bill it.

• Driving. Rarely removable, but often reducible \u2014 by tightening your service area, batching jobs by geography, or refusing the ones ninety minutes out. Whatever's left goes in your rate, or gets billed as a trip charge.
• Quoting. The expensive part isn't the quote, it's the site visit for a job you don't win. If you're winning fewer than half, either you're quoting the wrong work or you're being used for a price check. Qualifying on the phone is the fix.
• Parts runs. The most fixable of all. A stocked van, a standing order, and a supplier who'll pull it before you arrive turn three hours a week into one.
• Admin. Also fixable, and the usual cause is batching \u2014 letting it pile up until Sunday, when it takes twice as long as doing it at the end of each job.
• Callbacks. These aren't overhead, they're rework. They belong in a different bucket and they usually trace back to a job that was quoted too tight.
• Waiting and weather. Partly unavoidable. But if it's large, look at what you're waiting for \u2014 it's often a supplier or a builder whose delays you're absorbing for free.

Questions people ask

What's a good billable percentage?

For a solo operator doing residential service work, sixty percent is solid and seventy is excellent. Below fifty is a signal that something specific is wrong rather than that you're just busy \u2014 usually travel, or quoting work you don't win. Larger outfits with a dedicated office person often run higher for the field staff and count the office separately.

Shouldn't I just bill for more of it?

Some of it, yes \u2014 trip charges and diagnostic fees are normal and defensible. But you'll never bill for quoting, and you'll never bill for bookkeeping. The realistic goal isn't to bill everything, it's to know your real number and price against it.

Does this change once I hire someone?

Yes, and usually not the way people expect. Your own billable percentage tends to drop, because supervising and scheduling come out of your hours. Theirs starts low and climbs. That's worth modelling before you hire rather than after.

Do I really need to track it, or is estimating enough?

Estimating gets you a number that's directionally useful and almost always too optimistic. Tracking for two weeks \u2014 just tallying, not timing to the minute \u2014 gets you a number you'll actually believe when it tells you something uncomfortable. Two weeks is enough.