The one number that says if your shop is efficient or just busy

Revenue per employee is your trailing twelve-month revenue divided by your total headcount, everyone on payroll: field techs, office and admin, and any owner who draws a wage. It is the simplest read on how much business each person you employ is actually carrying. Most owners track revenue and maybe profit, but never run this one number, and it is the fastest gut-check on whether the shop is efficient or just busy.

They are close cousins, and this tool shows them together. Sales per employee is just another name for revenue per employee: your revenue divided by everyone on payroll. Revenue per technician divides that same revenue by only your field techs, so it always reads higher because fewer heads carry it. Revenue per head is the same idea again. The whole-company number tells you whether the revenue can carry your whole payroll, and the per-technician number tells you how hard your field is working. Watch both.

For residential service trades, real-world revenue per employee usually lands around 200,000 to 350,000 dollars per person, and roughly 180,000 to 250,000 per field technician. The technician number runs higher because fewer heads carry the revenue. Those are published trade benchmarks, not our figures. Under about 120,000 per person is a warning sign that the shop is thin and wide. Around 250,000 is a healthy, well-run residential operation. Treat these as guidance, not a law: your market, your mix of new construction versus service, and your average ticket all move the number.

It is elite, not average. One widely-cited operator framework puts roughly 250,000 per employee at about 22 percent net profit, and roughly 500,000 per employee at about 33 percent, as targets to grow toward, not as the typical shop. Most healthy residential trades businesses sit well below 500,000 per person. Treat 500,000 as the top of the mountain, a place strong operators climb to over years, not a bar you are failing if you are not already there.

Because they have to be carried. Revenue per employee splits your revenue across everyone you pay, and the whole point is to ask whether that revenue can carry your whole payroll, including the people who never send an invoice. If you counted only the techs, a shop drowning in office staff would look perfectly healthy, and that is exactly the problem the number is best at catching. So office staff stay in, precisely because they are a cost that does not bill. The techs generate the revenue, the office is overhead the revenue has to cover.

Run the number first, and treat techs and office completely differently. A tech generates revenue, so adding one actually lifts your revenue per employee once they ramp, they pay for themselves as long as you have the work. An office hire brings in nothing, so it only drags the number down, and to keep your number from falling your field has to generate more to carry that seat. The honest test is not can I afford the salary, it is can this person bring in enough to keep the shop efficient, and a tech almost always can while an office seat has to be justified by freeing the techs to sell or produce more.

Mostly through your average ticket, which is your revenue divided by your jobs. Raise the ticket and the same number of jobs brings in more, which lifts your revenue per employee without adding a single head. The honest way to raise the ticket is not pushing your techs to upsell or quietly hiking prices, it is a pricebook that presents the next option on every job, good, better and best, so the bigger ticket sells itself and even the quiet tech looks sharp. A thin pricebook that quotes one line is the usual reason the number is stuck.

No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser. Your revenue, headcount and any other number you enter are used on your own computer and never leave it, so nothing is sent to a server and nothing is saved. That is true for every tool we ship.