Jobs per day is a staircase
The intuition is that a tighter service area means proportionally more work done. The arithmetic says otherwise. A day holds a whole number of stops, so drive time only converts into revenue when the saving is large enough to fit another complete job — service time, setup and one more leg. Below that threshold, everything you save in driving turns into idle time at the end of the day.
Run the defaults and this is stark. At a 12 mile radius the day holds four jobs. It also holds four jobs at 8 miles, at 20 miles and at 28 miles. The fifth job only appears when the legs drop under about eight minutes, which needs the radius down near five and a half miles. Everything between six and twenty-eight miles is the same day with different fuel bills. That is worth knowing before spending a month trying to tighten the routing from twelve miles to nine.
The circle constant
Two points dropped at random in a circle of radius R are on average 0.9054R apart. That is exact, it comes out of the geometry and nothing else, and it is the honest starting point for how far apart two unrelated bookings in a service area will be. What routing does is beat it. Booking by zone, or grouping the day by neighbourhood, pulls the average leg well below the random figure; taking calls in the order they arrive pulls it back up towards it.
The multiplier on this page is a blunt stand-in for that, and it is the least reliable number in the calculation. If you have a mileage log, use it: total miles for a month, minus the runs to and from base, divided by the number of legs. That single figure replaces the whole radius model and it is worth more than any refinement to the estimate.
Setup time is the quiet one
Every stop costs more than the work. Parking, running hoses or cords, greeting the customer, walking the job, packing everything back, taking payment. Fourteen minutes a stop across four stops is nearly an hour of the paid day, and it does not show up on the schedule because the schedule records the appointment, not the arrival and departure.
It also changes the answer to the density question. If setup is fourteen minutes and a leg is sixteen, then the two are roughly equal, and a route made of many short jobs is a route made mostly of setup. That is the argument for minimum ticket sizes and for bundling neighbouring stops, and it is a stronger argument than the fuel bill ever is.
The billable fraction
Only the on-site work is invoiced. Setup, driving, the base run and the admin time are all paid for and none of them are billed. On the defaults here that is a little over half the paid day being billable, which is normal for a mobile trade and startling the first time it is written down.
Any hourly rate you quote has to carry the rest. This is the same arithmetic that makes a shop rate much higher than a mechanic wage, and it is why comparing a mobile rate against an employee hourly cost is comparing two different things.
Related pages
For pricing the work rather than fitting it into a day, job cost and markup takes a cost stack to a bid, and cleaning job time works the on-site hours out from the property rather than assuming them. Shop labor estimates covers the fixed-location version of the same billing question.
For the vehicle side, driving cost puts a per-mile number on running a vehicle and the mileage log is where the miles-per-leg figure this page prefers actually comes from. If your bottleneck is the book rather than the road, no-shows and deposits covers the stop that was scheduled and did not happen.
Questions people ask
How many jobs a day should a mobile service van do?
There is no general figure, and any number quoted without your on-site time, setup time and leg distance is meaningless. What this page does is fit whole jobs into a paid day after removing the base run and the admin time, which is the actual constraint. The useful output is not the number itself but the staircase: run the radius table and see where the count changes, because that tells you whether tightening the area would do anything at all.
Is it worth shrinking my service radius?
Only if it crosses a step. Because a day holds whole jobs, saving drive time is worth either one entire extra job or nothing, and the radius table shows you which. On the default figures, radii from about six to twenty-eight miles all produce the same four jobs, so cutting from twelve to nine would save fuel and change nothing else. Cutting to five adds a job and a quarter to the day. The fuel saving on its own is almost never the reason.
What is windshield time actually costing me?
Add the between-stop driving and the base run, and read it as a share of the paid day. It is paid at the technician cost per hour, it consumes the van at the vehicle cost per hour, and it burns fuel, but the largest cost is the one that does not appear as a cost at all: the job that did not fit. On the defaults, driving is around fifteen percent of the day, and the unfilled block at the end is another twelve percent that exists only because the remaining time is not long enough for another stop.
How do I find my real average distance between stops?
Take a month of odometer readings or your mileage app export, subtract the runs to and from base, and divide what is left by the number of legs driven. That gives one number that replaces the radius, the routing multiplier and all the guessing behind them, and it is the single most valuable input on this page. Enter it in the optional field and the radius model is ignored for the current day, though the radius table still shows the shape of the trade.
Should I raise prices or add a stop?
On a day with room in it, the extra stop is almost always the better move, because the technician and the van are already paid for and the only new cost is the fuel for one more leg. The comparison at the bottom of the page puts them on the same scale: it works out the percentage price rise across every ticket that would earn the same amount as one additional job. The rise also costs you whatever volume walks away, and the extra stop does not — but the extra stop only exists if the day has a gap the size of a whole job in it.