Utilization Rate Calculator

Most agencies target 70 to 80 percent for billable staff. Below 60 percent usually signals a pipeline problem or too much non-billable overhead. Above 85 percent leaves no buffer for proposals, knowledge transfer, or absorbing scope creep without burning people out.

Yes. Any hour not invoiced to a client is non-billable, whether it goes to an internal product, a free pitch, a team meeting, or onboarding. Tracking all of it is the only way to see where capacity actually disappears.

Utilization measures the percentage of available time spent on client work. Billable hours is the raw count. Realization rate then measures what fraction of those billable hours actually became invoiced revenue. High utilization with low realization usually means time is being written off or discounted after the fact.

At full utilization there is no slack for proposal writing, onboarding new clients, or unexpected scope changes. Teams that stay at 100% for extended periods either burn out, let quality slip, or both. Most high-performing agencies treat anything above 85% as a trigger to hire or renegotiate scope before delivery suffers.

Teetrack captures time entries against projects in real time, then computes each person's billable and available hours from that data. The utilization dashboard updates continuously so you see the metric live rather than calculating it manually each week.