Your crew is on the clock from the moment they arrive at the yard. If your production schedule does not account for drive time and job site setup, every day runs over — and every estimate for labor hours is wrong.
A crew of four starts at the yard at 7am. Drive to the job site takes 35 minutes. They unload the trailer, set up work zones, and review the day's task list — another 20 minutes. They start actual billable production work at 8am. That is a full hour of crew time before a single square foot of base material is compacted or a single paver is set.
Four crew members times one hour equals four man-hours, times your loaded labor rate of $35 per man-hour, equals $140 in labor cost before production starts. On a 5-day week, that is $700. Multiply across a full year and you are looking at a significant cost that most contractors never formally account for in their labor estimates.
Does that mean you should charge clients for drive time? Sometimes. But the more immediate fix is building a weekly schedule that reflects how your day actually runs — so your production estimates are accurate and your daily task loads are achievable.
Calculate Your Real Production Window Per Day
Start with your crew's paid hours in a day — typically 8 to 10 hours. Then subtract the non-production time that happens every day whether you plan for it or not:
- Drive time: Yard to job site, including any material pickup stops. Track actual drive times for your common job areas — do not estimate.
- Site setup: Unloading trailer, positioning equipment, reviewing task assignments, marking any work zones. For most hardscape days this runs 20 to 30 minutes.
- Lunch: 30 minutes unpaid, but it is still a gap in the production day.
- End-of-day cleanup and load-out: 20 to 30 minutes to pack equipment, clean the work area, and secure the trailer.
- Return drive: Job site back to yard.
A 9-hour paid day with 35-minute drive each way, 25 minutes setup, 30 minutes lunch, and 25 minutes load-out gives you approximately 6.5 hours of actual production time. That is your real production window. Schedule based on that number.
Grouping Jobs by Geography
One of the highest-impact scheduling decisions you can make is grouping jobs by location within the week. If Monday is a job in north Austin, Tuesday is a job in south Austin, and Wednesday is back in north Austin, your crew is spending a cumulative 3 to 4 hours more in drive time that week than if all three jobs were geographically clustered.
When you build the weekly schedule, cluster jobs geographically where production phases allow. You will not always have this option — job phases do not always align with geography — but when they do, the drive time savings are direct labor cost savings.
Pre-Staging Materials the Afternoon Before
Site setup time is partly unavoidable — equipment needs to be positioned, zones need to be marked. But a significant portion of setup time is spent figuring out where materials are and what the plan is for the day. Both of those can be resolved the evening before.
For any job starting the next morning, confirm the day before: materials are on-site or confirmed for delivery before crew arrival, the crew knows the specific task for the day (not just "work on the patio"), and any equipment that needs to be repositioned is ready to go. A crew that arrives knowing exactly what they are doing and where everything is gets into production 20 to 30 minutes faster than one that spends the first part of the morning sorting it out.
The Weekly Schedule Template That Works
For a crew running 5 days per week with a 6.5-hour average production window, your weekly production capacity is approximately 32.5 crew hours. Assign tasks to each day with those production hours in mind — not the full 9 hours. Leave one 30-minute block per day as administrative float (material stops, unexpected client questions, equipment adjustments).
Review the weekly schedule every Friday afternoon. Update actual production versus planned, identify any jobs that need priority the next week, and confirm materials for Monday. What jobs are running behind? Which ones have material deliveries confirmed? Which sites need equipment repositioned before Monday morning?
"You do not have eight productive hours in a day. Know your real number and schedule to it."
Schedule smarter
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Book a Demo →Frequently Asked Questions
Should I charge clients for drive time?
On jobs beyond a reasonable service radius — typically 30 to 45 minutes from your yard — many contractors charge a mobilization fee that covers drive time and fuel for the first day. On longer projects where drive time is a daily cost, it should be built into your labor rate rather than broken out separately. The key is making sure drive time cost is somewhere in your pricing — not silently absorbed as overhead.
How do I handle a day where the crew moves between two job sites?
A mid-day site change adds 30 to 60 minutes of non-production time — drive between sites, load-out at the first site, and setup at the second. Factor this into your production estimate for that day. A day with a planned mid-day site change should have lower production targets than a full day at one site.
What tools are best for building and sharing a weekly crew schedule?
At small scale, a shared Google Sheet or a text-based daily briefing to your foreman works. As you grow to two or more crews, you need a tool that shows all active jobs, crew assignments, and status in one place — something your foreman can see from the field without calling you. Purpose-built landscape job management software solves this as you scale.
Edgar Galindo
Co-founder, Ledge
Edgar built Ledge while running a landscape design-build company in Central Texas. Accounting for drive time in crew scheduling was one of the first changes that brought labor estimates in line with actual crew costs.