Utilisation Rate Calculator
The Utilisation Rate Calculator shows what share of your available time is spent on billable, revenue generating work. It is a core metric for agencies, consultancies, professional services and any team that sells time. You enter the billable hours delivered in a period and the available hours in that same period, and the tool divides one by the other to give your utilisation percentage, along with the idle hours that were available but not billed. Available hours are the capacity you have to sell, usually your standard working hours less holidays and planned leave, while billable hours are the part clients actually pay for. The ratio between them tells you how efficiently you are converting capacity into income. A rate that is too low points to thin demand, slow sales or too much internal work, while a rate that is constantly near the top can signal overload and leaves no slack for development, rest or winning new work. This makes utilisation a useful early warning and a planning tool, not just a scorecard. Use it per person to manage workloads, and across a team to forecast capacity and decide when to hire. Good practice is to define available hours consistently so comparisons mean something, and to pair utilisation with your average rate, since a high rate at moderate utilisation can be healthier than a flat out team on low fees. Set a realistic target band rather than chasing the maximum, and review the trend over time instead of reacting to a single week. Used well, it keeps your pricing, staffing and pipeline in balance.
Utilisation = billable hours / available hours x 100.
How it works
The calculator divides your billable hours by your available hours and multiplies by 100 to give a percentage. Idle hours are the available hours minus the billable hours. A higher percentage means more of your capacity is being billed.
Worked example
With 30 billable hours out of 40 available, utilisation is 30 divided by 40, which is 0.75, or 75.0 percent. That leaves 10 idle hours that were available but not billed.
Related calculators
- Billable Hours Calculator: revenue from billed time.
- Hourly Rate Calculator: set your charge rate.
- Revenue per Employee Calculator: output per head.
- Can I Afford to Hire?: the background to this calculation.
- Should I Delegate or Do It Myself?: the background to this calculation.