Most contractors track revenue per job and never price the trips that produced no revenue at all. Enter your numbers below to see the annual cost of callbacks and truck rolls — and what halving your callback rate would be worth.
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A truck roll is any dispatch of a technician and vehicle to a customer site. The term covers the whole cost of putting a van on the road for one visit — the technician's time, fuel and vehicle wear, and the overhead attached to that hour. It is used most often when that trip produced no revenue: a callback, a no-fault-found visit, or a job the technician could not complete because they arrived without the right part.
Industry estimates put the direct cost of a single truck roll between $150 and $500. The Technology & Services Industry Association puts the fully loaded figure — including overhead and lost schedule capacity — near $1,000.
Add these five figures for one visit:
The first four are what a truck roll costs you. The fifth is what it cost you to not do something else. A shop counting only fuel and wages will price a truck roll at a third of its real figure.
Enter your monthly call volume and callback rate. Default cost figures come from ACCA and TSIA industry estimates — replace them with your own numbers for a sharper answer.
Defaults: $650 per two-hour callback (Air Conditioning Contractors of America estimate) and $300 per truck roll (mid-range of the $150–$500 industry band; the Technology & Services Industry Association puts fully loaded cost closer to $1,000). Freed slots are the callbacks removed — each one can hold a new billable job, so the true gain is the saving plus that job's revenue.
If the annual number surprised you, the cause is usually diagnostic rather than technical.
Count return visits logged as new jobs. Most shops discover a materially higher callback rate than they assumed. How to measure FTFR →
Four of five callback causes are things the office could have known before dispatch. The five causes →
Estimate visits are truck rolls that may never produce revenue. Virtual estimates →
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