How Much Is Drive Time Actually Costing Your Trades Business?

Every trade business owner knows the feeling. Your technicians are busy. The schedule is full. Revenue is up. But the margins aren’t moving the way they should.

The culprit, more often than not, is drive time. Not the obvious kind — not the long haul to a regional job that you priced into the quote. The quiet kind: the 25-minute gap between two suburban jobs that could have been 8 minutes with better sequencing. The callback that sends a tech across town because the first visit didn’t have the right parts. The afternoon job that finishes at 3:15 and leaves a technician with 45 minutes of dead time before knock-off.

Individually, none of these look like a crisis. Collectively, across a team of 10–20 technicians, 48 weeks a year, they’re a six-figure problem.

Here’s a simple way to estimate what drive time is costing your business. You don’t need software for this — just your average numbers.

Take the average hourly cost of a technician (wages, super, vehicle, fuel, insurance — the fully loaded rate). For most Australian trade businesses, this lands somewhere between $65 and $95 per hour. Now estimate the percentage of a technician’s day spent driving versus on-site doing billable work. If you don’t track it, the industry average is between 25% and 40%. Multiply it out: a 10-person team at $80/hour, with 35% drive time, across 230 working days, is spending $644,000 a year on windshield time.

Not all of that is recoverable — some travel is genuinely necessary. But if AI-assisted scheduling could reduce drive time by even 15–20%, that’s $95,000–$130,000 back in productive capacity. Not revenue. Capacity. The trucks are already on the road. The techs are already on the clock.

AI scheduling isn’t a magic wand. It’s a pattern recogniser. It looks at your job history, travel times, technician skills, parts availability, and client preferences — and sequences the day in a way that a human dispatcher physically can’t compute at scale.

A good dispatcher is brilliant at managing ten variables. An AI scheduler handles forty. It notices that Job A and Job C are 6 minutes apart but Job B is 35 minutes in the opposite direction. It knows that Tech 3 is faster at split system installs but Tech 7 is closer. It suggests a swap that saves 22 minutes and puts both techs on jobs they’re faster at.

The result isn’t dramatic on any single day. It’s an extra half-job per technician per day, compounded across the team, across the year. That’s where the six figures live.

Three reasons come up repeatedly. First, the existing scheduling software is “good enough” and switching feels risky. Second, the dispatcher knows the area and the clients and doesn’t trust an algorithm to do it better. Third, nobody has actually calculated the cost of the status quo — so there’s no compelling reason to change.

The third one is the most dangerous. Because the money is real whether you measure it or not. And in a market where margins are tightening and labour is expensive, the businesses that find an extra half-job per tech per day are the ones that pull ahead.

Before you buy any software, before you talk to any vendor, calculate your own drive time cost. Use the formula above. Get your dispatcher to estimate the split. If the number surprises you, that’s a signal.

If the number surprises you, it’s worth a conversation. We can walk through your specific operation in 30 minutes and tell you whether AI scheduling would make a material difference.

Key takeaways

Want to know what your drive time is really costing you?

A 30-minute call is enough to estimate what drive time is costing your business — and whether AI scheduling would move the needle.