Free calculator

Technician efficiency calculator

Three numbers tell you whether your bays are making money: productivity, efficiency and proficiency. Enter a week of hours for each technician and get all three, per tech and for the whole shop.

Hours this week

Technician	Paid	On ROs	Flagged	Prod.	Eff.	Remove
				88%	126%
				75%	103%
				65%	92%

Paid: hours on the timesheet. On ROs: hours clocked onto repair orders. Flagged: labor hours billed for their work.

Shop proficiency

83%

Your techs billed 99 hours for 120 paid. That's 21 paid hours with nothing billed against them.

Productivity · On ROs ÷ paid76%
Efficiency · Flagged ÷ on ROs109%
Proficiency · Flagged ÷ paid83%

Green meets a common target: productivity 85%, efficiency 110%, proficiency 95%.

Get these numbers without the spreadsheet

In MyAutoShopPro technicians clock in and out of jobs on the bay tablet, and every labor line records the hours billed. Paid, clocked and flagged hours are already there for each tech, every pay period. The tablet app comes with Starter, and time clock and payroll with Pro.

Start free The technician app →

Productivity, efficiency and proficiency

These three get used interchangeably in shop talk, which is how meetings about them go in circles. Each one measures a different thing, and each points at a different fix.

Productivity = hours on repair orders ÷ hours paid

Is the tech busy? Low productivity is a shop problem, not a tech problem: not enough cars, cars waiting on parts or approvals, or a tech pulled off to shuttle customers. The fix is in scheduling, parts and how fast estimates get approved.

Efficiency = hours flagged ÷ hours on repair orders

Does the tech beat book time? Above 100% means jobs got done faster than the labor guide allows. Low efficiency points at training, tooling, or work that isn't being billed at its full time: diagnosis given away and add-on work done without being written up.

Proficiency = hours flagged ÷ hours paid

Does the tech pay for themselves? This one combines the other two, and it's the number your payroll and your labor rate rest on. A shop whose techs run at 80% proficiency needs a higher door rate than one running at 105% to make the same money. The shop labor rate calculator shows exactly how much.

Why shop totals beat averages

The shop figure on this page adds up everyone's hours first and then divides. It doesn't average the percentages. A tech who worked 60 hours at 150% and one who worked 10 hours at 50% average out to 100%, but together they billed 95 hours for 70 paid, which is 136%. Summing the hours weights each technician by how much they actually worked, and that's the version that matches your payroll.

Measuring it every week

The calculation is simple. The hard part is collecting honest inputs. Paid hours come from payroll. Flagged hours come from your repair orders. Hours on repair orders need technicians to clock on and off jobs as they work, and that only happens reliably when it's a tap on a tablet in the bay rather than a paper sheet filled in on Friday afternoon. If your techs are paid flat rate, the flat-rate pay calculator turns flagged hours into a paycheck.

Technician metrics FAQ

Technician efficiency questions

Q1What's the difference between technician efficiency and productivity?

Productivity asks whether the technician is busy: of the hours you paid them, how many were spent working on repair orders? Efficiency asks how well they work: of the hours spent on repair orders, how many hours did they flag (bill)? A tech can be fully productive and inefficient (busy all day, slow on every job) or efficient and unproductive (fast, but waiting on cars half the day). The fixes are completely different, which is why it's worth measuring both.

Q2How do you calculate technician efficiency?

Divide flagged (billed) hours by the hours the technician was clocked onto repair orders. A tech who flagged 44 hours while clocked onto jobs for 35 is 126% efficient: they beat book time.

Q3How do you calculate technician productivity?

Divide the hours clocked onto repair orders by the hours the technician was paid for. 35 hours on jobs out of 40 paid is 87.5% productive.

Q4What is technician proficiency?

Proficiency (sometimes called overall productivity) is flagged hours divided by paid hours. It's productivity multiplied by efficiency, and it's the number that decides whether a technician pays for themselves. Above 100% means they bill more hours than you pay them for.

Q5What is a good technician efficiency percentage?

Experienced flat-rate technicians commonly run 110–130% efficiency on routine work. Shops typically aim for productivity of 85% or more and overall proficiency near or above 100%. New and apprentice technicians run lower, and that's expected. Track the trend for each person rather than holding everyone to one number.

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