How do I track technician utilization?
Utilization is billable hours over available hours — simple math that most MSPs get wrong on the denominator. Here's how to track it accurately.
Technician utilization is the share of a tech's available hours that goes to billable (or productive) work — calculated as billable hours divided by available hours over a period. To track it, you need two clean numbers: hours logged against work (from time entries) and true available capacity (scheduled hours minus PTO, holidays, and admin time). Most MSPs pull the first from their PSA; the second is where accuracy breaks down.
The formula
Utilization % = billable hours ÷ available hours. A technician available 160 hours in a month who logs 120 billable hours is at 75%. Track it per person, per team, and over time — a single snapshot hides the trend that actually matters for hiring and pricing decisions.
Where MSPs get it wrong
- Counting scheduled hours without subtracting PTO and holidays, which inflates the denominator and makes utilization look worse than it is.
- Missing time entries, which deflates the numerator and makes busy techs look idle.
- No visibility into future capacity, so you overbook, then slip projects when someone's already at 110%.
How Current helps
Current combines native time entry (which flows to your PSA — Autotask, ConnectWise, or Halo PSA — for billing) with PTO/availability-aware scheduling, so capacity reflects real time off, not just the calendar. Because scheduling, the dependency map, and what-if scenarios all read the same availability data, you can see who's overloaded before you assign the next project — and back-schedule around it. Utilization stops being a lagging spreadsheet metric and becomes something you plan against.
Define the denominator before you measure anything
Most utilization arguments are really disagreements about the denominator. Logged hours divided by a 40-hour week is a different number from billable hours divided by available hours after leave, and both are called utilization. Pick one definition, write it down, and use it consistently, because a utilization figure without a stated denominator is not comparable to anything — including last quarter's.
Two failure modes to avoid. Chasing a high percentage encourages people to log time they did not really spend, which corrupts the input you are managing on. And measuring only billable work quietly penalizes the engineers doing internal improvement, onboarding, and documentation, which is work you actually want done.
How Current calculates it
Current's resource lens reports logged hours divided by a per-person weekly capacity target, over the window you select. The capacity target defaults to 40 hours a week and admins can set it per person, so a part-time engineer or a team lead with fixed non-delivery time is measured against their own number rather than a company-wide assumption. The lens shows per-person logged hours against their capacity marker, average utilization, and a count of anyone over 100 percent.
Two things it deliberately does not do. It does not subtract time off from the denominator, so a month with leave in it will read lower and should. And it does not split billable from internal work in that percentage. If a lens cannot read its time entries it says so rather than drawing zeros, because a confident zero is the most misleading answer a utilization chart can give.
Scheduling is where time off does matter
Availability is handled in the scheduling engine rather than the report. When work is scheduled, a task is sized on the working calendar but placed around the assignee's actual absences, so a task assigned to someone on leave slides past that leave instead of landing on it. Hard absences count for this — booked leave, holidays, blocked days — while a half-hour meeting does not make the day non-working. The timeline, the dependency map, and what-if scenarios all read the same availability data, so all three agree.
What to look at alongside the percentage
- Distribution across the team, not the average — one person at 130 percent and one at 60 is a scheduling problem the average hides.
- Trend across quarters rather than a single window, since one month tells you almost nothing.
- Estimate accuracy on completed work, which usually explains an over-utilized team better than headcount does.
- Whether the work being logged is on the critical path, because a busy team can still miss every go-live date.