Glossary
Bench time
Bench time is the hours a consultant or agency employee is paid for but not assigned to any billable project.
How to calculate bench time
Bench time is whatever is left after subtracting allocated hours from available hours. A consultant with 40 available hours in a week who is staffed on projects for 30 of them has 10 hours of bench time.
Agencies usually track it at the individual level first, then roll it up by role, team, or office to see where unassigned capacity is concentrating.
Bench time = Available hours - Allocated hours
Example: a consultant with 40 available hours and 30 allocated hours has 10 hours of bench time that week.
Why bench time is not automatically a problem
A small, planned amount of bench time between engagements is normal and even useful: it covers training, business development, and the gap while a new project gets staffed. The problem is bench time that is large, unplanned, or goes unnoticed because nobody is tracking it against allocated work.
Bench time and utilization rate measure the same gap from opposite directions. Rising bench time and falling utilization describe the same thing happening to a team's capacity.
What drives bench time up
The usual causes are a sales pipeline that is not converting fast enough to keep newly available people staffed, over-hiring ahead of confirmed demand, and resourcing decisions made without visibility into who is coming off a project and when.
Agencies that track bench time in real time can reassign people before it accumulates, rather than discovering a month later that several consultants were sitting unbilled.
Example
A 20-person consulting team has 800 available hours in a week. Project allocations account for 680 of those hours, leaving 120 hours of bench time across the team, or an average of 6 hours per person. If the team bills at a $150 blended rate, that unallocated time represents $18,000 of unbilled capacity for the week.
