Bench time: what it costs your business and how to reduce it

A project ends on Friday. On Monday, three of the people who worked on it have nothing assigned. One picks up some internal work, one helps on a pitch, and one waits. The next project that needs them starts in three weeks. Nobody planned those three weeks, and nobody will see what they cost until utilization is reported at the end of the month.

This guide covers how to put a number on bench time, how to see it before it starts, and what to do about it. For the definition and formula, see the bench time glossary entry.

Why some bench time is useful

Bench time is the paid hours a billable person has with no client work assigned, and a small planned amount of it is useful. A team with every hour allocated has no room for an urgent client request, a pitch, training, or the gap between one project ending and the next starting.

You can tell useful bench time from the costly kind with three questions:

• Was it planned? A week reserved for training after a long project is a decision. Three weeks with nothing assigned because nobody looked ahead is a planning gap.
• Is it concentrated? Two spare hours a week across everyone is slack. One developer with nothing to do for a month is a staffing problem.
• How long does it last? A gap of a few days between projects is normal. The same person unassigned for six weeks means supply and demand for that role do not match.

The aim is to keep bench time small and deliberate, and to know its cost when it is neither.

The cost of an idle billable role

An unassigned billable person costs your business twice: the salary is still paid, and the revenue those hours would have earned is missing. Both figures are easy to calculate per role per week.

The table uses illustrative numbers for a 40-hour week. Replace them with your own loaded costs and rates.

Loaded cost is salary plus employer taxes and benefits. Revenue lost is the billing rate multiplied by 40 hours. Break-even utilization is the share of the week the person has to bill for their own cost to be covered: loaded cost divided by the revenue of a fully billed week. For the mid-level role, $2,000 divided by $5,600 is 36%, or about 14 billable hours.

That break-even figure covers the person's direct cost only. Rent, software, management, and sales time also have to be paid from billable hours, which means the utilization your business needs to stay profitable is well above it. Our guide to billable utilization rate covers how to set that target per role.

Use the weekly figure when you ask for a decision. Nobody acts on "utilization was 68% last month". People do act on "two mid-level developers unassigned for three weeks is $12,000 in salary and $33,600 in revenue we did not bill".

Reading bench time as a leading indicator

You can see bench time in the allocation plan weeks before it happens. Reported utilization shows it after the month has closed, when the hours are already gone.

Three signals show bench time while there is still time to act:

1. Project end dates with nothing after them. For each person, look at the date their current allocations end and what follows. A person whose allocations stop in two weeks with nothing booked is future bench time.
2. Planned utilization four to eight weeks out. Total the allocated hours per role for each coming week and divide by available hours. A role that drops from 80% to 45% in week five needs work found for it now.
3. Pipeline by role. List the deals likely to close and the roles each one needs. If the pipeline is full of strategy work and the people coming free are developers, you will not see the gap in the headline pipeline figure.

Review these weekly, in the same meeting where over-allocation is checked. The two problems are found in the same data: one is a person with more hours booked than available, and the other is a person with far fewer. Our guide to resource forecasting for agencies covers how to build the forward view.

Levers for reducing bench time

You have six ways to reduce bench time, and the order to try them in depends on how long the gap will last. For short gaps, find work that is ready to start. For long gaps, change supply or demand.

1. Pull work forward. If a signed project starts in three weeks and the people are free now, ask the client whether discovery or setup can begin early. This turns bench time into billable time with no new sale.
2. Reallocate across teams. A free designer in one team can take work from an overloaded designer in another. To do this, you need one view of everyone's allocations, across teams.
3. Keep an internal backlog ready. Internal projects such as your own website, templates, and tooling should be scoped and prioritized in advance. Then someone coming free can start on Monday.
4. Plan training into gaps. Training that would otherwise interrupt client work can be scheduled into a known gap. It has to be arranged before the gap starts.
5. Shift from freelancers to employees. If freelancers are doing work a benched employee could do, move it at the next sensible handover point.
6. Change supply. When a role is under-booked for a quarter with no pipeline for it, the options are a hiring freeze for that role, retraining toward a role in demand, or reducing headcount. These are slow decisions, and the earlier you see the signal, the more options you keep.

Pulling work forward and reallocating are the only two that recover revenue. The other four put unbilled time to good use, which is worth doing, but do not report it as solved bench time.

When bench time signals a sales problem

Bench time is a sales problem when demand for a role is too low across the whole team for several weeks. It is a resourcing problem when the work exists and the wrong people are assigned to it. You need to tell the two apart before choosing a fix.

A quick test: if other people in the same role are overloaded while one is idle, the problem is resourcing. If everyone in the role has spare hours, your business has more capacity in that role than it is selling.

When the cause is sales, reshuffling people only moves the idle hours from one person to another. The resourcing lead's job at that point is to give sales a specific figure, for example "we have 240 unassigned developer hours in November". Sales can act on a number like that. Our guide to resource capacity planning covers how to weight the pipeline when planning demand.

Where Pike fits

Pike shows each person's allocated hours against their available hours across every project, for the coming days or the year ahead. An under-booked week is visible in the same view as an overloaded one, and allocations can be changed from that view. Utilization is reported by project, team, or person, which lets you tell a role that is under-booked as a whole from one person with a gap.

The resource management feature page shows the allocation and capacity views, pricing lists what each plan includes, and the resourcing and capacity planning guide covers the wider process. To see who on your team is unassigned over the next eight weeks, book a 15-minute walkthrough.

Frequently asked questions