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It’s possible to have a fully staffed team and still be losing money on labor. The gap usually shows up in one number: sitter utilisation rate.
What it is
Sitter utilisation rate is the percentage of a sitter’s available working hours that are actually booked with paying visits. A sitter available for 30 hours a week who’s booked for 18 is running at 60% utilisation. The other 40% is capacity you’re paying for, or at least holding open, without revenue attached to it.
Why low utilisation is a silent margin killer
Unlike a missed invoice or a client complaint, low utilisation doesn’t show up anywhere obvious. It just quietly means your effective cost per visit is higher than your pricing assumed, because the fixed cost of keeping a sitter available is being spread across fewer billable hours.
Common causes worth checking
Uneven geographic coverage is the most common culprit — a sitter assigned to a sparse territory will always show lower utilisation than one in a dense one. Scheduling gaps between visits, overly conservative buffer times, and simply having more sitters than current demand supports are the next most common causes.
Raising it without burning people out
The instinct is to just book sitters tighter, but that trades utilisation for turnover. Better levers: rebalance territories so demand and coverage actually line up, review buffer times against real drive times rather than estimates, and use utilisation data to inform hiring instead of hiring reactively.
What Low Utilisation Actually Costs You
A sitter who’s only booked at 40% of their available capacity is still costing you in scheduling overhead, onboarding time, and often minimum guaranteed hours if you offer them — while a fully utilised sitter is generating revenue against nearly all of that same fixed overhead. Low utilisation across your team is one of the more common hidden reasons a business feels busy but doesn’t feel profitable.
How to Improve It Without Overworking Anyone
The fix usually isn’t pushing individual sitters harder — it’s better matching between demand and available capacity. This means tracking utilisation per sitter regularly, identifying which sitters are consistently underbooked, and either directing more client volume their way, adjusting their availability windows, or, if the imbalance persists, having an honest conversation about whether their role still fits the business’s current needs.
How to Actually Improve Utilisation
Low sitter utilisation usually traces back to one of two causes: scheduling that clusters visits inefficiently by geography and time, or simply carrying more staff capacity than current booking volume supports. The fix for the first is route-aware scheduling software; the fix for the second is either growth in bookings or a hard look at staffing levels before it erodes margins further.
Track this alongside Monthly Recurring Revenue and Revenue Per Active Client for a fuller picture of where your growth ceiling actually sits.
