Utilisation Rate & Billable Hours Calculator

There's no single audited number, but most services teams treat 60–80% as a sensible target for delivery roles — and lower for seniors, whose week also has to fit selling, managing and running the business. 100% is a red flag, not a goal: it leaves no time for training, improvement, admin or rest, and it rarely survives contact with a real month. Treat the bands in this calculator as common targets teams aim for, not benchmarks.

Billable hours divided by capacity. Capacity is what you pay for: team size × contracted hours per week. If 8 people are contracted 37.5 hours each (300 hours of capacity) and the team logs 180 billable hours, utilisation is 180 ÷ 300 = 60%. Measure it over a consistent period — weekly, straight from timesheets, is the most common.

Your headline rate only applies to the hours you bill. The effective rate spreads billable revenue across every contracted hour — so someone on £85/hour who bills 24 of their 37.5 hours really earns £54.40 for each hour of payroll. It's the quickest way to see how unbillable time dilutes a rate card, and why two people on the same rate can be worth very different amounts.

This calculator uses contracted hours, because that's the number you pay for and the hardest to argue with. Some teams measure against 'available' hours instead (contracted minus holiday, sickness and internal time), which flatters the percentage. Either works — pick one definition, write it down, and never compare a contracted-hours number against an available-hours target.

We make Landing — the all-in-one platform where timesheets, utilisation and margin live together and update themselves. A genuinely useful free calculator is the best introduction we know; the answer is yours either way. No payment, no trial, no strings.