Drive Time vs. Wrench Time for Electricians: The Numbers That Determine Job Profitability
A service tech leaves the shop at 7:00, makes four stops, and is back at 3:30. The timesheet says 8.5 hours. It does not say how many of those were spent driving and how many were spent on the tools.
If you cannot see where your crew's hours are going -- drive time, setup, wrench-on-wire -- you cannot price jobs right, and you cannot explain a labor line to a customer who asks. The split between drive time and wrench time is one of the most useful numbers in your business, and it only exists if somebody records it.
What Is Wrench Time for Electricians?
Wrench time is the percentage of a shift an electrician spends on direct installation -- hands on tools, work getting done. Your ratio depends on job type, territory, and how well materials are staged.Everything that is not installation still takes time: travel, material runs, waiting on inspectors, tool staging, and paperwork.
The share left over for installation is your wrench time ratio. A ratio below 50% means less than half the hours you pay for are producing direct install output, and the rest has to be carried as overhead or billed with an explanation.
Wrench time is a job-level metric, not just an employee-level one. A foreman might show 65% wrench time on a commercial panel job but 35% on a scattered residential service route. Both numbers matter for bidding accuracy and crew scheduling decisions.
Tracking it consistently -- by job type, by crew, by time of year -- is the foundation of accurate cost estimating and real labor productivity benchmarks that hold up across your portfolio.
What Counts as Drive Time on Electrical Jobs?
Drive time is any period when a crew member is in transit between the shop, job sites, or supply runs -- moving between locations, not generating installation output.Drive time typically includes shop-to-first-job travel, between-site movement on multi-location days, mid-job supply runs when materials were not pre-staged, and trips to permit offices or inspection queues.
It does not include on-site movement between work areas, loading and unloading at the job site, or time spent staging materials at the truck. Those fall under setup or installation depending on your classification system.
The distinction matters beyond payroll. Drive time is the most predictable and reducible non-wrench category. Inspector wait times, change order delays, and weather shutdowns are harder to control. Drive time is a scheduling problem -- which means it is solvable with the right route planning and crew assignment decisions.
Most electrical contractors undercount drive time because they only track hours at the job site. Shop departure and return times go unrecorded. That gap accumulates fast across a 250-day work year.
How Much Drive Time Are Electrical Crews Losing Per Day?
It depends on territory size and route sequencing, and the only number that counts is your own. As example arithmetic, 60 minutes per tech per day at a $75/hr loaded rate over 250 workdays is $187,500 a year of labor for a 10-person crew.Here is the same example arithmetic at different crew sizes, 250 workdays a year. Swap in your own crew, minutes, and rate:
| Crew Size | Drive Time/Day | Loaded Rate | Daily Cost | Annual Cost |
| 5 techs | 60 min/tech | $75/hr | $375 | $93,750 |
| 10 techs | 60 min/tech | $75/hr | $750 | $187,500 |
| 15 techs | 45 min/tech | $75/hr | $844 | $210,937 |
That cost does not disappear. It gets buried in overhead, absorbed by jobs that appeared profitable on paper, or contributes to bids that consistently underprice similar work in future estimates.
Should Electricians Bill Customers for Drive Time?
Yes for T&M service work when contracts allow it. No for fixed-price project bids -- but you should still track drive time internally to improve future estimates.The right approach depends on your contract structure:
T&M service calls: Bill drive time at a reduced rate (50-75% of your labor rate) or as a flat trip charge. Customers on service contracts expect it. Hiding it means you are absorbing the cost, not eliminating it. Fixed-price commercial projects: Do not itemize drive time to the customer, but track it rigorously. If actual drive hours exceed your bid assumptions by 20%, your next similar bid needs to price that in. Historical drive data by job type is some of the most valuable estimating intelligence you can collect. Multi-site days for the same GC: When a crew moves between two project sites owned by the same customer or GC, that transit time is typically billable. Get it in the contract explicitly before mobilization.Unresolved drive time billing is a common source of T&M margin erosion. If your crew starts the clock at the shop and you only bill from when tools hit the job site, you have already conceded the drive from the shop on every visit before anyone turns a screw.
How Do You Track Drive Time vs Wrench Time?
Two time entries per job stop: one for travel (clock in leaving shop, out at arrival), one for on-site work (clock in at site, out at departure). One extra tap per tech per stop.The simplest method that works in the field:
- Travel entry: Clock in when leaving the shop or previous site, clock out when arriving at the job site
- Work entry: Clock in when starting on-site work, clock out when leaving
The time breakdown per job looks like this:
- Travel: 0.75 hrs
- Setup: 0.25 hrs
- Install: 5.5 hrs
- Load-out: 0.5 hrs
How Does Drive Time Data Feed Into QuickBooks Job Costing?
Each time entry goes to QuickBooks as a separate TimeActivity record, so drive and wrench time arrive as distinct lines. Getting them onto the job's cost report takes one more step in QuickBooks: assigning the customer or job to each entry.When techs log separate travel and on-site entries, QuickBooks receives two time records per job visit: one for drive labor, one for installation labor. Once each record is assigned to the job in QuickBooks, your job cost P&L shows the split, so when a job runs 25% over on labor, you can tell whether it was travel-heavy or install-heavy.
That distinction changes your response entirely. Travel overruns are a scheduling fix. Install overruns mean the scope was wrong or the crew hit field conditions that need to be priced into the next bid.
When an admin clicks Sync to QuickBooks, FieldTimesheet sends each finished entry as a QuickBooks TimeActivity record with the date, worker name, hours and the note. No retyping of hours. The sync does not attach the QuickBooks customer or job, so that is set in QuickBooks. Inside FieldTimesheet, the job labor report shows the hours by job; it covers labor only, not materials or subcontractor costs.
For contractors running T&M billing, that split also makes it easier to support invoices. A customer questioning a labor line can see installation time versus travel time as separate, timestamped, GPS-verified entries.
What Is a Good Wrench Time Ratio for an Electrical Crew?
A good ratio is one that is rising on your own jobs. Set the target from your own tracked hours, by job type, rather than from a published benchmark. A ratio that sits below 50% month after month usually points to a scheduling, routing, or materials staging problem.The ratio will differ by work type, and that is expected:
- Residential service: lowest of the three (more drive, more scattered stops)
- Commercial project: higher (crew stays on-site, less travel overhead)
- Industrial: often highest (large single-site projects, material pre-staged)
Once you have accurate wrench time data by job type, you can build bid templates that reflect actual field performance rather than optimistic assumptions.