How much does unbilled drive time actually cost you in a year?
Most solo electricians and contractors can tell you their hourly rate without thinking. Far fewer can tell you how many hours a year they spend driving between jobs, unpaid — and that number is usually the bigger one.
The hour nobody bills
Every job has two costs: the hour you spend doing the work, and the time it took to get there. The first one is on every invoice. The second one almost never is.
That gap is easy to miss because it never shows up as a single, obvious number. It's twenty minutes here, forty there, spread across a month of jobs that all felt productive in the moment. By the time you'd notice the pattern, the year's already over.
One electrician who tracked this for a full year found roughly that much in unbilled small-parts runs and trip time across forty-three jobs — money spent on real work that simply never made it onto an invoice.
Why this number is bigger than it feels
The math is straightforward once you actually run it. Say you average 25 minutes of unpaid drive time per job, across four jobs a day, five days a week. That's roughly 8.3 hours a week of windshield time nobody pays you for — over 400 hours a year.
At even a modest hourly rate, that's not a rounding error. It's closer to a part-time employee's worth of hours, given away for free, every single year.
Pricing guides for the trade increasingly flag this directly: when a job is meaningfully farther away than your average call, that distance either needs to be priced into the rate or absorbed as a loss — there's no third option. Most contractors quietly choose the second one, year after year, without ever deciding to.
The three places it usually hides
- Drive time between back-to-back jobs. The most obvious one, and still the most commonly unpriced.
- Supply runs mid-job. A forgotten part means a trip to the supply house — paid for in time, never in the invoice.
- Estimates that never close. Time spent driving to quote a job that goes nowhere is a real cost with no offsetting revenue at all.
Finding your actual number
The fix isn't complicated — it's just rarely done, because it requires looking at a full month or two of real job data side by side, not just a gut feeling about "yeah, driving's a pain." Once you do that, the number usually surprises people in one direction: it's higher than they expected, not lower.
If you're not currently tracking job-by-job time and distance, even a rough reconstruction from memory and old invoices is enough to get a useful estimate — it doesn't need to be perfect to be informative.