Drive time is the most expensive time a service company buys and can't sell. Every minute a tech spends in traffic is paid, burns fuel and wears the truck, and no customer is billed for it. Route optimization is the discipline of buying less of it without breaking the promises that keep customers happy.
Route optimization in plain English
Say an example plumber has five jobs today scattered around a metro area. Done in the order they were booked, she crosses the river twice and drives 70 miles. Reordered so the north-side jobs come first and the south-side jobs after lunch, the same five jobs take 45 miles. Nothing about the work changed; only the order did.
Now add a second plumber, a customer who was promised 8 to 10, a water heater replacement only one of them is certified for, and an emergency that comes in at 11. That's route optimization in field service: the same question, with rules attached.
Why routing service trucks is a hard problem
The problem has a long history. In 1959, G. B. Dantzig and J. H. Ramser published "The Truck Dispatching Problem," about assigning gasoline deliveries from a terminal to service stations so the fleet drives the fewest total miles.1 It started what is now called the vehicle routing problem, and it gets hard fast: the number of possible orders grows explosively with each added stop.
Field service adds rules that a delivery route doesn't have:
| Constraint | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Arrival windows | The customer was promised a time; the route must hit it |
| Skills and certifications | Not every tech can do every job |
| Parts on the truck | The closest tech may not carry the part |
| Variable job length | A repair can run 30 minutes or 3 hours |
| Emergencies | New high-priority work appears mid-day |
| Shifts and breaks | Techs start and stop at different times and places |
That is why most practical systems combine good rules (zones, booking by area) with software that proposes an order a person approves.
What does drive time cost?
Metric
Daily drive cost per technician
What paid driving costs you each day in labor and vehicle use.
drive hours × loaded hourly cost + miles × per-mile cost
Where the numbers come from: Drive time from job statuses or GPS; miles from GPS trips or odometer; costs from payroll and fleet records.
Federal rules count travel from job site to job site during the workday as hours worked,2 so drive time is paid. In June 2026, private employers paid $49.01 per hour worked in total compensation for installation, maintenance and repair occupations.3 The IRS business mileage rate, a common stand-in for vehicle cost, is 76 cents a mile from July 1, 2026.4
| Example | Per tech per day | 10 techs, 250 days |
|---|---|---|
| 1.5 hours driving, 45 miles | $107.72 | $269,300 |
| Save 20 minutes and 8 miles | $22.42 saved | $56,050 saved |
Labor: 1.5 × $49.01 = $73.52. Vehicle: 45 × $0.76 = $34.20. The savings row uses the same rates for 20 minutes ($16.34) and 8 miles ($6.08). These are example numbers built on public rates; your own come from your timesheets and fleet data.
The saved hours are also capacity. Twenty minutes a day across 10 techs is about 833 hours a year that can go to paying work.
How to optimize routes in practice
- 1
Book by zone
Group your service area into zones and steer bookings so each tech works one or two zones a day. This does most of the work before any software runs.
- 2
Fix the hard rules
Skills, certifications, promised windows, shifts and time off. A route that breaks one of these isn't a better route.
- 3
Pick one goal per day
Least driving, most revenue or keep every promise. They conflict; decide which wins.
- 4
Re-plan with few moves
When the day changes, fix the rest of it from where trucks actually are, moving as few customers as possible.
- 5
Measure drive minutes per job
Track it weekly by tech and zone. It's the number that tells you whether routing is working.
Route optimization vs dispatching
Routing proposes an order; dispatching decides. A good dispatcher knows things the routing math doesn't: the customer who needs a call before the tech arrives, the tech who's better on older equipment, the install that will run long. The best results come from the software doing the arithmetic and the dispatcher making the calls. For a deeper look at choosing between least driving, most revenue and keeping promises, read dispatching for revenue, not just drive time.
How route optimization works in TradesWork
The dispatch board can propose a shorter order for one technician's remaining stops and show drive minutes before and after; you apply it only if you like it, and the same set of arrival windows is handed out in the new order.
The AI dispatcher plans a whole day or re-plans the rest of today with one of four goal presets: Balanced, Least driving, Most revenue or Keep every promise. It never breaks hard rules such as expired certifications, time off or work already under way, and it shows drive minutes, utilization and windows kept before and after. Nothing changes until a dispatcher approves it.
Fleet GPS replays any day's route as trips with distance, duration and idle time, so you can measure drive time rather than estimate it.
Footnotes
-
The Truck Dispatching Problem, G. B. Dantzig and J. H. Ramser, Management Science 6(1):80–91, 1959. ↩
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29 CFR 785.38, Travel that is all in the day's work, Code of Federal Regulations, via Cornell Legal Information Institute. ↩
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Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026, Table 4, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Private industry, installation, maintenance and repair occupations. ↩
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Standard mileage rates, Internal Revenue Service: 72.5 cents a mile for January 1 to June 30, 2026, and 76 cents a mile from July 1, 2026. ↩
