What Windshield Time Is Costing You Every Week
Windshield time, the hours your techs spend driving between jobs, costs most home services shops $3,000 to $6,000 a year per truck in paid labor that never shows up on a single invoice. Industry averages suggest a residential service tech spends one to two hours a day behind the wheel. Some of that is unavoidable. A good share of it is not, and none of it bills a dollar.
The hour nobody paid you for
You pay a technician for eight hours. He bills you for the jobs he closes. The gap between those two numbers is where the money sits.
Some of that gap is lunch and paperwork. A larger piece is drive time. A loaded technician hour costs most shops $25 to $45 once you count wages, taxes, insurance, and the truck. When that hour is spent on I-35 instead of in a customer's attic, you still pay all of it. The customer pays none of it.
This leak does not show up as a line item. It hides inside payroll and fuel, two costs you already expect to see, so nothing looks wrong. The truck ran. The tech got paid. The books balance. The hour is just gone.
How fast it adds up
Say each truck loses thirty minutes a day to drive time that better scheduling could have prevented. Not all of it, just the avoidable half hour.
Thirty minutes a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, is 125 hours per truck. At $25 to $45 a loaded hour, that is $3,125 to $5,625 a year in paid time you spent moving a truck, not fixing anything. Run three trucks and you are near $9,000 to $17,000 a year, sitting inside a payroll number you never question.
That is only the wages. It says nothing yet about the work those hours could have done.
Where the avoidable minutes hide
The lost time is rarely one big block. It is minutes, scattered, in places nobody watches.
The first call of the day is set across town from where the tech lives. Two jobs in the same zip code get booked three hours apart, so the truck crosses the city twice. A parts run to the supply house turns a forty-minute repair into a two-hour visit. A same-day add-on gets slotted by whoever answered the phone, not by who is closest. None of these feel like a problem on their own. Stacked across a week and a crew, they are a part-time salary you are paying to a highway.
What the recovered hour is actually worth
Here is the part that turns a cost into a number worth chasing.
An hour pulled back from drive time is not just wages saved. It is billable capacity returned. Most residential techs complete four to six jobs a day. Give a good tech back five hours a week and that is room for one more call a day on the busy weeks, at an average ticket that runs a few hundred dollars in most trades.
So the leak has two sides. The wages you already spent on the drive, and the job you never got to because the truck was still moving. Count both and windshield time stops looking like the cost of doing business and starts looking like a job a week you left on the road.
On a free call, we can see if drive time is quietly draining your billable hours. I'll find your first leak on the spot. It takes about three questions.
Book a free discovery callCommon questions
What counts as windshield time?
Any paid hour a technician spends driving between jobs, to the supply house, or back to the shop. It is normal to have some. The question is how much of yours is avoidable, and what that share costs you at your loaded labor rate.
Is drive time really a revenue leak, or just a cost of the trade?
Both. A share is unavoidable and simply part of running trucks. The leak is the avoidable share, the minutes added by scheduling and routing that could have gone the other way. That share is money you can see once someone counts it.
How would I even measure this?
Start with one week and one truck. Log the clock time between each job's completion and the next job's start. The total, multiplied by your loaded hourly cost, is your windshield time bill for that truck. It is usually larger than the owner guessed.
Every hour your best tech spends behind the wheel is an hour nobody paid you for.