How much work can a contractor take?

Contractor capacity is the time available to finish promised work after allowing for travel, materials, administration and delays. Measure those hours, convert each new job into the time it needs, and leave a buffer before offering a start date.

Example: divide a 45-hour week by activity

Start with an honest count. Below is one worked example: a one-person van trade, seven to four, five days a week. The numbers show the method, not an average.

Twenty-six billable hours out of forty-five. That ratio is not a failing. It moves with the work rather than with how hard you push: a crew parked on one site for two weeks loses almost nothing to driving, while a service business making frequent trips may lose more time to travel. Write down where one ordinary week actually went and you have your own number.

The number that matters for scheduling is one step above billable: field hours — site time plus the driving and material runs around it. Here that is 34.5. The other 10.5 hours in this example already cover office work, estimating and upkeep. Reserve that time in the working week rather than adding it again at night.

How many jobs of your size fit in what's left

Run every job type you sell through one calculation: on-site hours plus its share of drive and material time. That total is a slot.

Compare travel for your job mix. In this example, eleven service calls use eleven hours of driving and material time. Three remodel days use 2.25. Four full remodel days would need 35 field hours, so they do not fit the 34.5-hour budget.

Check the gaps between different job sizes. Put a 5.75-hour job in a nine-hour day and the remaining 3.25 hours may be difficult to fill. Grouping similar nearby jobs may reduce these gaps; check actual hours and profit rather than assuming it will.

Leave a scheduling buffer and measure delays

As an initial planning assumption, try booking 80 to 85 percent of field hours; on 34.5 field hours it comes to 28 or 29 bookable hours a week. The rest is not idle time. It absorbs the thing that goes wrong, and something goes wrong most weeks — a part comes in wrong, an inspector reschedules, a wall opens up worse than the walkthrough suggested.

You do not have to take 20 percent on faith. Go through your last ten completed jobs and write the field hours you estimated next to the hours it took. Add both columns and divide. Ten jobs taking 128 hours against 108 estimated ran about 19 percent over. At that pace, divide available hours by 1.19 to find how many estimated hours fit. Check whether the overruns recur before using that factor for future jobs.

Callbacks can use a substantial part of that buffer. A callback on a four-hour job is rarely a four-hour problem: the drive out, an hour or two of work, sometimes a part, the drive back. Call it three field hours. One a week is nine percent of 34.5. Two is a whole job slot.

Overbooking also compounds. A crew working past six to catch up makes more of the mistakes that generate callbacks, which eat the capacity you were trying to create. Booking more hours than you can deliver can turn the extra work into delays and rework.

Measure your backlog in weeks, not in jobs

"I've got a lot on" is not a number. This is:

Backlog (weeks) = field hours of signed, unstarted work ÷ bookable field hours per week

Ninety-six hours of signed work against 28 bookable hours is 3.4 weeks. Recalculate every Friday and you have a trend instead of a feeling.

What counts as healthy depends on your trade and your market. Under a week and you are exposed: one cancellation and you are calling old customers. A few weeks gives you room to plan material and turn down bad jobs while customers will still wait. Too long and you lose work you never hear about, because a homeowner with a leak calls the second name on the list. Emergency work runs out of road faster than remodeling does, so pick your own ceiling and watch your close rate as you approach it.

Seasonality shows up in the same data. Pull last year's invoices by month. If last April was much busier than February, use that pattern to plan staffing and pricing before the next busy season. Confirm that current inquiries support the forecast.

Respond when demand stays above capacity

A short spike you ride out. A backlog that has sat above your ceiling since spring means demand exceeds capacity structurally, and you have four responses with very different math.

Raise the price. While demand keeps outrunning your calendar, this is the cheapest of the four: the leads you lose are ones you could not have served anyway. Run it on your own rate. If 28 bookable hours at $95 is $2,660 a week, going to $110 produces $3,080 if enough customers still accept to fill all 28 hours. Losing a fifth of leads only leaves the week full if demand was sufficiently above capacity. (Arithmetic on an example rate, not a going rate; hourly rates swing widely by trade and region.) You did not work more. You stopped rationing by first-come-first-served. Work already under contract stays at the price you signed.

Give a real date instead of a vague one. A start window such as "the week of October 12, subject to material delivery" gives the customer something concrete to assess. Keep deferred jobs in a written list with the date you promised.

Send the overflow to someone you trust. Explain why you cannot fit it in and let the customer decide whether to contact your referral.

Add capacity, and do it last. A new hire does not add 40 hours. Allow for training and supervision; net capacity may initially fall. Set up the required employer accounts, insurance and hiring records before work begins, then meet the filing and payment deadlines that apply. See first-employee payroll preparation.

Putting a date you can hit on the estimate

An estimate without timing leaves the customer unsure when work could begin. Put the start window and your assumptions about site access and material lead time in the estimate itself in DoneQuote, next to the price, so the date you worked out from your field hours is the date the customer approves.

Being fully booked is not a problem to solve. It is a signal that your price, your job mix or your capacity is out of line with your demand. Knowing which one is the whole job.