Average Revenue Per Truck: HVAC, Plumbing, Electrical Benchmarks
Average revenue per truck for HVAC, plumbing, and electrical residential service shops. Real benchmarks, why the number matters, and how to lift it.
If you only get to look at one number on your business, look at revenue per truck per year. It tells you whether the truck is paying for itself, whether the tech is being scheduled into a real day, and whether adding another truck would actually grow the business or just spread the same revenue over more overhead.
Owners often think they have a growth problem when they actually have a utilization problem. Two trucks doing $700K each is a stronger shop than four trucks doing $400K each, even though the total revenue is higher in the second one. The first one prints money. The second one is one bad month from a cash crisis.
Here are the benchmarks, what they mean, and how to lift the number without adding trucks.
What is revenue per truck and why does it matter?
Revenue per truck is your annual top-line revenue divided by the number of fully equipped, billable service trucks you run. It is the single best capacity metric in home services because it absorbs everything: ticket size, booking rate, tech productivity, dispatch quality, and how well the office feeds the truck.
Ellen Rohr's point is that a number you look at moves. Most owners look at revenue. Few look at revenue per truck. The owners who watch this number weekly tend to run tighter, more profitable shops than the owners who only watch the top line.
What is average revenue per truck for residential HVAC service?
Average revenue per truck for residential HVAC service runs roughly $400K to $700K a year, with strong shops above $700K and the best shops in dense markets pushing $1M. Below $400K and the truck usually is not paying for itself once fully loaded costs are counted.
The wide range comes from a few drivers:
- Market density (calls per square mile)
- Average ticket (mix of repair vs replacement)
- Booking rate on inbound calls
- Whether the shop sells maintenance memberships
- Whether the truck does install or service or both
A pure-service truck in a dense suburb running options-based selling and a strong membership base will hit the top of the range. A truck that mostly runs installs at lower margin can post higher revenue and still earn less per truck-day. Revenue per truck is the headline. Margin per truck is the follow-up question.
What is average revenue per truck for residential plumbing?
Residential plumbing service tends to run $350K to $650K per truck per year, with the spread depending on the same drivers as HVAC plus how much the shop captures of the bigger-ticket work (repipes, water heater replacements, sewer line repairs, water treatment).
Plumbing has a wider variance because the ticket mix matters more. A truck that captures the larger jobs lands at the top of the range. A truck that only runs drain cleaning and small repairs lives at the bottom.
What about electrical contractors?
Residential electrical service runs roughly $300K to $600K per truck per year for general service work, with shops doing panel replacements, generators, and EV chargers landing at the top. Pure service-only trucks doing outlet work and small repairs tend to come in lower because the ticket size is smaller and the time per call is longer relative to revenue.
The pattern is the same across trades. Higher-ticket capture lifts revenue per truck. Better office support (booking rate, fast lead response, estimate follow-up) lifts the calls per truck. Lifting both is the playbook.
How do I calculate revenue per truck for my shop?
Take last year's total service revenue (exclude pure new construction or commercial install contracts if those run on a different model), divide by the number of fully equipped billable trucks you ran on average. Do not count the owner's truck if it only runs occasionally. Do not double-count an install truck and a service truck that share a tech.
A few sanity checks:
- Calculate revenue per truck-day (divide by working days) so you can compare to your fully loaded daily cost
- Pull revenue per truck by month to see seasonality and identify your peak vs slow gap
- Pull revenue per truck by tech to see who is carrying the shop
The number that matters most is revenue per truck-day vs cost per truck-day. If the gap is shrinking, the business is too. If the gap is widening, you are getting more efficient even if the top line looks flat.
Why is my revenue per truck low?
Revenue per truck is low when one of three things is happening: not enough calls per truck, low close rate on the calls you get, or low ticket size when you do close. Most owners default to the first one (more calls) when the bigger lift is usually in the second or third.
Quick diagnostics:
- Booking rate under 75 percent on inbound calls? The office is the bottleneck, not the marketing.
- Average ticket below your trade benchmark? Options-based selling is missing, or financing is missing on the big tickets.
- Membership conversion under 20 percent of service calls? You are leaving recurring revenue on the table.
- Calls per truck per day under 5 to 7? Either dispatch or routing is loose, or the call volume is genuinely thin.
At Temperature Pros, we found the booking rate was the leak. It was 40 percent. We fixed the system that handles inbound calls and it moved to 91.7 percent on the same phone number. The trucks did not change. The dispatch did not change. The revenue per truck moved because more of the calls became jobs.
How do I lift revenue per truck without adding trucks?
Lift it by getting more out of each existing truck-day. Five plays in order of typical payoff:
- Answer every call. About 31 percent of calls come in after hours, 78 percent of callers will not leave a voicemail, and the missed-call leak is usually the single biggest gap.
- Follow up on every estimate more than once. Joe Crisara's framing is that a quote with no follow-up is a coin flip you walked away from.
- Standardize Good, Better, Best at the kitchen table. Average ticket moves with options.
- Push the maintenance membership on every service visit. Recurring revenue smooths the slow months and produces repeat calls.
- Reactivate past customers. One reactivation campaign at Temperature Pros recovered $31,247 in 90 days with zero ad spend.
Notice what is not on the list: more marketing spend. Most shops with low revenue per truck are not under-marketed. They are leaking what the marketing already produced.
How does Maximus lift revenue per truck?
Maximus lifts revenue per truck by closing the office gaps that drop calls, lose estimates, and let past customers drift. He answers every call so the booking rate moves toward 90 percent, follows up on estimates so they do not go cold, chases invoices so the work that was done gets paid for, and runs reactivation outreach so the next call from a past customer happens.
He is your AI operations manager. He sits on top of the software you already run (Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, FieldEdge), deploys in about 48 hours, and runs $497 a month or 8 percent of the revenue he recovers, whichever is higher.
The same trucks. The same techs. More of the work the marketing already produced.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good revenue per truck for an HVAC service business? Residential HVAC service trucks generally run $400K to $700K a year, with strong shops above $700K. Below $400K usually means the truck is not paying for its fully loaded cost.
How do I calculate revenue per truck? Divide your annual service revenue by the average number of fully equipped billable trucks you ran during the year. Exclude pure construction or commercial install revenue if it runs on a separate model, and do not count an occasional owner truck.
Why does my revenue per truck seem low? The most common causes are a booking rate under 75 percent on inbound calls, average ticket below trade benchmark (usually a Good/Better/Best gap), or membership conversion under 20 percent on service visits. Fix the office before adding marketing.
Is it better to add trucks or lift revenue per truck? Lift first, then add. A shop running $400K per truck that adds another truck usually just runs $400K per truck across more overhead. The same shop that lifts to $600K per truck before adding doubles the impact of the next truck.
How does the booking rate affect revenue per truck? Directly. Lifting the booking rate from 40 to 90 percent on the same call volume more than doubles the jobs that hit the truck, without changing marketing spend. At Temperature Pros, that single change was the largest move in revenue per truck we saw.
What is the easiest way to lift revenue per truck? Answer every call, follow up on every estimate, and reactivate past customers. Those three plays usually move the number more than any marketing change, because they are about keeping the revenue you already had a shot at.
See What He Finds in Your Business. See your current revenue per truck and what closing the office leaks would add, in 60 seconds. Look in the Mirror
Written by Nirav Doshi and Neal Doshi, owners of Temperature Pros Orlando and co-founders of Complete Data Products. Every number here comes from a real home services P&L.
Related: numbers a home services owner should check every morning and HVAC business profit margin.