Guide
How do I calculate what drive time and callbacks cost my HVAC business?
Drive time cost is unbilled drive hours per tech per day, times technicians, times working days, times your loaded hourly labor cost. Callback cost is callbacks per year times the labor, parts and truck cost of one return visit.
Neither figure appears on a P&L. Both are sitting inside your payroll line, which is why a full schedule can still produce a thin month.
What goes wrong
Filled is not the same as productive. A tech can be paid for eight hours and bill for five. The rest goes to windshield time and to second trips for jobs that should have closed the first time.
No report adds this up, because payroll records hours paid and the field system records jobs done. The cost lives in the difference between them. It is a routing and information problem, not a technician problem.
The drive time formula
- Find unbilled drive hours per tech per day. Take paid hours, subtract hours on site, breaks and shop time.
- Multiply by the number of technicians.
- Multiply by working days in the year.
- Multiply by loaded hourly labor cost: wage plus payroll taxes, benefits and truck cost per hour.
The result is what you pay each year for hours spent between jobs. Some drive time is unavoidable. The recoverable part is the gap between what you have and what a tighter route would need.
The callback formula
- Count jobs completed in the year.
- Count return visits that could not be billed. Divide by jobs completed for your callback rate.
- Price one callback: tech hours including the drive, times loaded hourly cost, plus parts and the truck.
- Multiply callbacks per year by the cost of one.
Add the job that tech could have run instead, if your board is full. That lost slot is often the larger number.
A worked example
This uses the Profit Map shown on our field services page. The client is real and anonymized as Summit Comfort Systems, an HVAC operation with 14 technicians.
- Unbilled drive time averaged 2.3 hours per tech per day. Across 14 techs, that is 32.2 paid hours every working day spent between jobs.
- Priced across the year, the map identified $310K in unbillable windshield time.
- The callback rate was 11% of all jobs completed.
- Priced the same way, callbacks and second trips came to $180K a year.
Those two lines sit inside an identified gap of $420K–$910K for that operation. The range matters. Not all of it is recoverable, and the map says which part is.
You can see the sample spread here. The field services Profit Map.
What the fix looks like
For drive time, the fix is usually routing jobs by geography rather than by the order they were booked. For callbacks, it is usually a parts pre-check before the truck leaves, and a look at which job types and which causes repeat.
Both are changes to how the work moves, inside software you already own. See process optimization.
When this isn't worth doing
If your techs already bill most of their paid hours, and callbacks are rare, the number will be small. Run the formulas once, confirm it, and spend your attention elsewhere.
It is also not worth chasing drive time in a territory so spread out that the routes cannot get shorter. The answer there is pricing for travel, not routing.
Questions owners ask
What is a normal callback rate for an HVAC business?
There is no single number that fits every shop, and we would rather not quote one. Measure your own rate by job type. The useful comparison is this quarter against last, and one job type against another.
How do I measure drive time if my software does not report it?
Take paid hours per tech from payroll and subtract on-site hours from your field system. What is left, less breaks and shop time, is close enough to start.
Is all drive time wasted?
No. Some travel is the cost of doing field work. The recoverable part is the travel a better job order would remove.
Why do these costs not show on my P&L?
Because they are inside the labor line. Payroll shows hours paid, not hours billed. You have to compare two systems to see the gap.
Prove the gap. Then close it.
The Profit Map runs these numbers on your own dispatch and payroll data, and prices the recoverable part. Or book a call and bring your callback count.