Guide
Scheduling software says 5 or 6. The maths on drive time, admin and load-up says 3 to 4. Here's the bottom-up calculation so you can plan your day and your pricing around reality.
Booking software slices an 8-hour day into neat 90-minute slots and tells you that's 5 jobs. It's not lying, exactly. It's just ignoring everything that isn't the job itself: driving, loading the van, quoting, writing notes, chasing payment. For a one-man band with no dispatcher and no apprentice fetching parts, that ignored time is the biggest line item in your day.
If you want a number you can actually plan around, you have to build the day from the bottom up rather than dividing 8 hours by an average job length.
Start with what you actually have, then subtract the fixed costs of running solo before a single wrench turns.
None of this is wasted time. It's the cost of not having a dispatcher, a bookkeeper or a second van. But it has to come out of the 8 hours before you calculate how many jobs fit.
Here's the calculation in one line:
Billable hours = (Shift hours − Fixed daily overhead time) ÷ (1 + Drive ratio)
Where:
Then: Jobs per day = Billable hours ÷ Average job length (on-tools time only).
Take a plumber with an 8-hour shift and an average job of 90 minutes on-tools (diagnose, fix, test, clean up).
Round it and you land on 3-4 jobs a day, not 5. Push the admin estimate down to 15 minutes a job and load-up down to 25 minutes, and you might squeeze to 3.7. Add a longer drive between two far-apart calls, or a job that runs over because the part wasn't on the van, and you're back to 3.
| Factor | Effect on jobs/day |
|---|---|
| Tight service radius, jobs clustered by postcode | +0.3 to +0.5 |
| Rural or spread-out patch | −0.5 to −1.0 |
| You quote and invoice on paper, no app | −0.3 to −0.5 |
| Well-stocked van, rarely a supply house run | +0.2 to +0.4 |
| Complex diagnostics (older properties, no two jobs alike) | −0.5 or more, job length varies too much to average |
| Simple, repeatable job type (drain clears, install swaps) | +0.5 to +1.0 |
The honest range for most one-man plumbing, electrical or HVAC businesses is 3 to 4 completed jobs a day. Five is achievable only on a good day with short jobs and short drives. Six is a schedule-app fantasy unless every call is a quick fix five minutes from the last one.
Once you know your realistic job count, the next question is whether it pays the bills. Take the revenue you need out of the business each working day and divide by your job ceiling.
Required average ticket = Daily revenue target ÷ Jobs per day
Say you need $700 a day gross to cover your own wage, van, insurance, tools and a margin for slow weeks. At 3.5 jobs a day:
$700 ÷ 3.5 = $200 per job, on average
Now compare that to what you're actually invoicing. If your average ticket sits at $150, three things are true: you're short by $50 a job, roughly $175 a day, and no amount of hustling to squeeze in a fifth job fixes it, because the drive-and-admin maths above says a fifth job usually isn't there to squeeze. The fix is pricing, not speed. That might mean raising your hourly rate, charging properly for diagnostic time, or being firmer about minimum call-out fees.
If you haven't worked out what your hourly rate should actually be to hit that $700 target, the hourly rate calculator walks through it with your own overhead numbers rather than a guess.
The $700 in the example above isn't arbitrary. It should come from your break-even number: what it costs you to open the van doors each day, including your own pay, before you make a cent of profit. If you haven't worked that figure out, start with the break-even calculator. Everything above that line, spread across 3-4 jobs, is what funds growth, slow weeks and eventually hiring help.
The daily average hides a common problem: some jobs are quietly unprofitable even when the day as a whole looks fine. A $180 job that took 2.5 hours instead of 90 minutes because of a parts run or awkward access is dragging your effective hourly rate down, even if your invoice total looks normal. Running individual jobs through the job profitability calculator shows you which job types are actually worth the slot they take, and which ones you should be pricing higher or turning down.
Three to four completed jobs a day is the honest ceiling for most solo tradespeople, once you account for the drive time and admin that scheduling software leaves out. Chasing a fifth job by rushing usually costs more in comebacks and mistakes than it earns. The more reliable lever is your average ticket: know your daily revenue target, divide by your real job count, and price to that number rather than to what feels "fair" or what the competitor down the road charges.
The Small Business Operations Kit ($19) turns guides like this one into fill-in-once worksheets: rate card, quoting sheet, job costing, payment terms and follow-up templates. Built by the same people who write these guides.