This post in 30 seconds.
- The problem: every manager has a cost per visit; almost nobody can show where it came from. Published benchmarks run from about $150 to over $1,000 for the same event.
- The method: five cost lines (labour door to door, vehicle, overhead per field hour, scheduling and admin, the job that didn't get done), each with a public input you can point to.
- The number that matters: an unnecessary visit costs more than a visit, because it also burns the slot a real job needed. In the worked example below that lands at roughly $342, on labelled assumptions.
- Who this is for: heads of field operations, service managers and dispatch leads at equipment manufacturers, dealers, installers, utilities and maintenance providers.
Somebody on your team has a cost per visit. It gets used in the budget, in the business case for the new scheduling tool, in the argument about whether the out-of-hours rota is worth it. Ask where it came from and the honest answer is usually a vendor slide from three years ago.
That matters more than it sounds, because the same number gets used to justify the visits that should never have been raised. A truck roll decided off a ticket that says "unit not working" gets costed the same as a real repair, and the job that didn't get done that afternoon never appears anywhere.
If you run field operations at an equipment dealer, an installer, a utility or a maintenance provider, this post gives you a way to build the number properly, decide which visits were avoidable, and see what changes when the dispatcher can look before deciding. We build Venta Capture, VentaVid's guided capture platform, so the person already standing next to the fault can show it to your team before a van moves. Start for free and send a test link to your own phone before you read the rest.
In this post:
Why the benchmarks disagree by a factor of seven
The most-quoted figure for the cost of a field service visit is fifteen years old. In December 2011, TSIA's John Ragsdale reported that the association's benchmark survey put the average cost of a field service visit at $1,011.17, with no component breakdown attached.
At the other end, AEX's benchmarks for fibre operators put a fully loaded roll at $150 to $300, rising to $350 for manual dispatch operations and 15 to 25 percent higher in rural areas. Same word, "truck roll", and a sevenfold gap.
Both can be right, because they measure different things. A fibre technician does four or five short jobs a day in a dense patch. A TSIA member servicing medical imaging or industrial machinery sends a specialist, often a long way, often with parts worth more than the van.
A benchmark tells you what somebody else's visit cost. It cannot tell you what yours costs, and it says nothing about the visit that shouldn't have happened. That second gap is the one this post is about.
There is a second problem with borrowed numbers. Aquant, whose 2025 Field Service Benchmark Report covers 157 service organisations and nearly $9.5 billion in service costs, defines cost per work order as "materials, labor, travel, and more per job."
That is the visit. It is not the cost of the visit being pointless, which is the number a service leader needs when deciding how much to spend on triage.
The five lines that make up a field service visit
Build the number yourself. It takes five lines, and for each one there is a public input you can cite when finance asks.
A few notes on getting the inputs right, because this is where most estimates go soft.
- Labour is never the hourly wage. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts benefits at 30.0 percent of total employer compensation for private industry workers in June 2026, with wages at 70.0 percent. If your technician earns $35 an hour, the loaded figure is closer to $50. Use your own payroll ratio if you have it.
- Door to door means door to door. Start the clock when the van leaves the previous job and stop it when the notes are written. Time on site is usually the smallest part of a visit that turned out to be a reset.
- The mileage rate already includes the vehicle. The IRS business rate is 76 cents a mile from 1 July 2026, up from 72.5 cents, after fuel prices rose 38 percent in the first half of the year. The UK equivalent is HMRC's approved rate of 55p a mile from April 2026. Both are designed to cover fuel, wear and depreciation, so do not add a separate van cost on top.
- Overhead per field hour is the line people skip. Take the annual cost of running the service function that isn't on a van (the dispatch desk, the planning software, training, management, uniforms, test equipment) and divide by the hours technicians spend in the field (technician utilisation reports usually have this). It is a rough number. It is far better than zero.
- Opportunity cost only applies to the visit that shouldn't have happened. A needed repair uses its slot. An unnecessary one steals a slot from a job that then waits a day, breaches an SLA, or, in a chargeable operation, doesn't get invoiced this month.
Where these numbers come from
The example that follows uses illustrative inputs, so you can follow the shape of it and then swap in your own figures. Every assumption is marked as one.
Where a figure is a third-party benchmark it carries a source link, and where it is a Venta Capture result it is stated as such. We have not multiplied estimates together to manufacture a bigger number; the totals are simple sums of the lines above.
Which visits are avoidable
Not every visit that finds nothing was a mistake. Some faults are intermittent, some customers need reassurance, and some contracts oblige you to attend. The categories below are the ones where a clear look at the equipment before dispatch would, in most cases, have changed the decision.
How big is each bucket? Public data is thin, and the honest answer is that it varies by trade. Three figures are worth knowing.
- No fault found. Cranfield University's Dr John Ahmet Erkoyuncu, quoted by diginomica, described the aerospace experience as "something like 20% of total service calls" being NFF related, with estimates ranging from one in ten to one in three. He called it a rough idea, because companies would not share hard data. Treat it as a range, not a benchmark.
- Avoidable dispatch overall. Aquant's 2025 report found that "on average, 14% of truck rolls are unnecessary, meaning that 1 in 7 on-site visits could have been avoided with better troubleshooting tools and training." The same report puts the avoidable dispatch rate at 3 percent for leading organisations and 24 percent for the bottom performers. The 2026 edition moved the headline to one in five.
- Repeat visits. Aquant's resolution cost, which counts every visit needed to close a ticket within 30 days, runs 34 percent above the cost per work order on average. Its first-time fix rate chart shows 86 percent for the top fifth of companies, 75 percent at the median and 53 percent at the bottom.
The 3 percent to 24 percent spread is the important number, because it proves avoidable dispatch is an operating decision rather than a cost of doing business. If it were fixed, the top and bottom performers would land in the same place. They don't.
I've sat in on enough dispatch conversations to stop blaming the customer for the description. "It's making a noise" is what a person says when nobody has told them what a technician needs to know. The repeat visit for a missing part has the same root: the model on the record was two generations older than the one on the wall, and nobody looked.
A worked calculation, with the assumptions labelled
Here is a mid-sized operation, built line by line. Every input is an assumption unless it links to a source. Change any of them and the total moves; that is the point of showing the work.
- Technician wage: $35 an hour (assumption). Loaded for benefits at the BLS 30 percent share, that is $50 an hour.
- Door to door: 2.75 hours (assumption). 45 minutes out, 60 minutes on site, 45 minutes back, 15 minutes of write-up. Labour line: $137.50.
- Mileage: 40 miles round trip (assumption) at the IRS rate of 76 cents. Vehicle line: $30.40.
- Overhead per field hour: $15 (assumption), from a service overhead divided by field hours. Over 2.75 hours: $41.25.
- Scheduling and admin: 20 minutes of coordinator time (assumption) at $40 an hour loaded. Admin line: $13.33.
Direct cost of the visit: about $222. That sits inside AEX's $150 to $300 band for a mid-maturity operation, which is a useful sanity check rather than proof.
Now the line that only applies when the visit was pointless.
- Opportunity cost: $120 (assumption). The margin on the job that got pushed to tomorrow, or, if you run an in-house or contract operation, the downtime and SLA exposure on the deferred ticket. Pick whichever your finance team will recognise.
Cost of an unnecessary visit in this example: about $342. Roughly 54 percent more than the visit itself, and none of that extra shows on a fuel card or a timesheet.
Scale it to a queue. At 500 visits a month and Aquant's average of 14 percent avoidable, 70 visits a month did not need to happen, which is about $23,900 a month, or roughly $287,000 a year.
At the 3 percent that leading operators achieve it is around $5,100 a month. At the 24 percent of the bottom fifth it is about $41,000. Same operation, same visit cost, an eightfold difference driven by the dispatch decision alone.
These are illustrative figures, not a promise. Swap in your own wage, your own drive times and your own avoidable rate. The one thing not to do is leave the opportunity line at zero, because that is how an unnecessary visit ends up looking cheaper than it is.
If you want to see what a pre-dispatch look would do to your own queue, book a demo and bring the three job types that keep coming back "no fault found".
How visual triage before dispatch changes the number
Go back to the five lines. Visual triage before dispatch does not make a needed visit cheaper. It changes which visits get raised, and it changes what the technician knows when the van leaves.
- No fault found and reset visits. A pre-visit assessment that shows the display, the error code, the filter and the breaker settles a share of these from the desk through remote triage. The visit cost and the opportunity cost both disappear.
- Repeat visits for a missing part. A clear shot of the model plate and the part fitted means the right kit is in the van the first time. The 34 percent resolution premium shrinks towards zero on those jobs.
- Reassigned on arrival. Seeing the install and the access route puts the right trade on the job, with entry arranged. That is a first visit resolution problem solved before scheduling, not after.
- Out of contract. A serial number captured up front confirms whether the asset on the wall is the asset on the service contract before anyone drives to it.
The mechanism matters, because "ask the customer for photos" has been tried by every service desk and mostly fails. Unguided requests come back cropped too tight, without the model plate, without the context, and a week late.
A guided flow, built once by your best technician, walks the customer through the exact views in order and lets your reviewer request a retake in one click. We covered what belongs in a pre-visit assessment for field service, the capture mechanics in guided photo capture and the diagnostic side in remote diagnostics for field service.
There is also the question of who has to be on the other end. Live remote support removes the drive but keeps the appointment: two calendars, a trained person on every session, and a cap on how many tickets you can triage a day.
Asynchronous capture removes that too. The link goes out with the ticket, the customer films when they get to it, and your team reviews from the desk when ready. Five hundred tickets do not need five hundred staffed video sessions.
On Venta Capture's field service flows, 23 percent of customer problems are solved without dispatching a technician at all. The visits that still go ahead leave with the model plate, the install and the access route already seen, which is where the 79 percent reduction in field service visits required on those flows comes from. Neither number is a promise for your queue; both are what a look-first dispatch decision produces when the look is guided.
Two limits, stated plainly.
- Capture doesn't diagnose. The flow collects the views your technician would want. Your technician still makes the call.
- Remote-first, not remote-only. Plenty of faults need hands on the equipment, some urgently. The goal is to see first and act second, and to make the visits that remain better informed.
Re-run the worked example with one more labelled assumption: half of the 70 avoidable visits get settled from the desk. That is 35 visits a month at $342, about $12,000.
Reviewing 500 submissions at five minutes each and $40 an hour costs roughly $1,700 in reviewer time, so the net is around $10,300 a month before counting the repeat visits that never get booked.
Conservative on purpose. If your avoidable rate is nearer 24 percent than 14, the arithmetic moves fast.
For the how-to side, which visits to start with, what to put in the flow and how to measure the change, read how to reduce truck rolls. This post is the cost side, and the two are meant to be read together. And once the van does roll, a proof-of-work capture at the end of the job gives you the completion record without a supervisor driving out to check.
Once the number is on paper, reducing unnecessary service visits covers which categories to go after first, and improving first-time fix rate the repeat-visit side of the same cost.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a field service visit cost?
Published figures run from about $150 to $300 per roll in dense fibre operations (AEX) to a 2011 TSIA average of $1,011 for technology and equipment service. The spread is real, which is why a borrowed benchmark rarely survives a budget meeting. Build your own from labour door to door, mileage, overhead per field hour and admin time.
What should be included in the cost of a truck roll?
Fully loaded labour for the whole trip, a per-mile vehicle rate, a share of service overhead per field hour, and the coordinator time to book and close the job. For a visit that turned out to be unnecessary, add the margin or SLA cost of the job that got pushed. Leaving that line out is the most common way the number ends up too low.
How do I calculate our cost per field visit?
Take a month of completed jobs, total the technician hours door to door at loaded cost, add mileage at the IRS or HMRC rate, add overhead and admin, and divide by the number of visits. Then tag which of those visits fell into an avoidable category and cost those separately with the opportunity line added. Two numbers, not one.
What percentage of field service visits are unnecessary?
Aquant's 2025 benchmark across 157 service organisations found 14 percent of truck rolls unnecessary, with leading operators at 3 percent and the bottom fifth at 24 percent; the 2026 edition puts the headline at one in five. Your own rate depends on trade, contract terms and how much the dispatcher can see before deciding.
What counts as a no fault found visit?
A visit where the technician tests the equipment and cannot find or reproduce the reported fault, so it goes back into service with no repair. Cranfield University research quoted in diginomica put the aerospace estimate at roughly 20 percent of service calls, within a range of one in ten to one in three. Many of these are intermittent faults; a fair share are resets, consumables or a misdescribed symptom.
Why is a repeat visit more expensive than the first one?
Because the second trip carries all five cost lines again, plus the customer's extra downtime and the SLA risk. Aquant measures this as resolution cost, which includes every visit in a 30-day window, and finds it runs 34 percent above the cost of a single work order on average. Most repeats trace back to a part or a skill that nobody knew was needed.
Does visual triage mean we stop visiting customers?
No. It means the dispatch decision is made with eyes on the equipment instead of from a sentence in a ticket. Visits that a clear view would have settled stop being raised; the visits that still happen leave with the right part, the right skill and the access sorted.
Put a number on next month's queue
Pick next month's queue, cost it with the five lines, and count how many visits were decided from a sentence. If the answer looks anything like one in seven, the cheapest experiment is to put a guided capture link on the next batch of "unit not working" tickets and see how many settle from the desk.
What it takes to start.
- Free plan, no credit card. Build a flow for your most common fault and send it to your own phone first.
- Live in 10 minutes for a first standard flow. Stuck? Book a free setup call and we build it together.
- Nothing for the customer to install. The link opens in the phone's browser, in their language, with your branding on it.
The VentaVid team builds Venta Capture, and a real person runs the setup call.
Start for free and cost your first week of triaged tickets against the number you built above. If you'd rather see it against your own job types first, book a demo and bring the three that keep coming back "tested OK".