How route density is calculated
Route density is one division, done per day rather than for the business as a whole:
- On-site hours. The hours you are inside a customer's property doing the work they are paying for.
- Drive hours. Every minute of driving that day — the trip out, each hop between stops, and the trip home.
- Density = on-site ÷ (on-site + drive). Expressed as a percentage.
A day with five hours on site and one hour of driving runs at 83% density. The same five hours spread across a metro with two and a half hours of driving runs at 67%. Nothing about the work or the price changed.
Why density decides your real hourly rate
Your overhead — insurance, the van, the phone, the licenses — and the pay you need are carried entirely by the hours you can bill. So density is a direct multiplier on what an on-site hour is worth against the day it consumes:
- At 90% density, a $60 on-site hour is worth $54 for every hour your day actually costs you.
- At 65% density, that same $60 hour is worth $39.
That is roughly a third of the value of the hour, lost to the windshield — without changing a price, a client, or the quality of the work. It is why a mobile service business can be booked solid every day and still feel poor.
Density compounds with frequency
Cadence multiplies the unpaid driving as surely as it multiplies the revenue. A client thirty minutes away costs about 26 hours of unpaid driving a year if you serve them weekly, and about 6 if you serve them monthly — the same client, the same distance. This is why a far-flung client asking to move from monthly to weekly is a bigger decision than it looks: you are agreeing to four times the drive, not just four times the revenue.
Measure it per day, never as an average
A whole-business density average is comfortable and close to useless — it hides the single day dragging the year down. Measure it per service day and per zone. In most books, four days sit in a healthy band and one day contains a client who lives on the wrong side of town, and that one day is the entire problem.
How to improve route density
- Give each zone a day. Group clients geographically and hold the line when someone asks to swap. One conversation now beats a year of unpaid miles.
- Fill the gaps before you take the far job. A new client three streets from an existing stop is the most profitable work you will ever sell, because the drive is already paid for.
- Publish a travel premium for work outside your core zones. A published policy is a price; an absorbed one is a donation.
- Move one client, not all your prices. When a loose day and a tight day share a zone boundary, shifting a single client across it often lifts both — and costs nothing.
- Re-run it every quarter. Clients move and cadences drift; a day that was tight in March can be windshield by September.
What counts as a good number
There is no universal benchmark — a residential route packed into one suburb behaves nothing like a commercial route across a county. What matters is the comparison between your own days: the spread between your tightest and loosest day is the money available to you without selling anything new. Set a threshold you are comfortable with, then act on the day that falls below it.
Related templates and concepts
Route density only turns into money once you know what an hour of your day costs, which is the same problem an owner-operator solves with cost-per-mile. To weigh a workbook against the subscription apps, read spreadsheet vs field-service software. Start free with the recurring job schedule planner — no signup — or browse every tool on the templates for service businesses hub.
