What This Electrician Found When He Started Tracking Ticket Size by Tech

A 6-truck residential electrical shop in the Pacific Northwest pulled 180 days of closed jobs and grouped by technician. The owner expected a spread. He did not expect the one he saw. Top tech averaged $612 per ticket. Bottom tech averaged $266. Same dispatch feed, same customer pool, roughly the same job mix.

That is a 2.3x gap. HomeAdvisor's 2025 pricing data puts the national average electrician ticket at $350 with a range from $85 to $1,150. HomeAdvisor The top tech was well above average. The bottom was under it. The owner had assumed the gap was skill and training. The audit showed something different.

Here is what the data exposed.

The tech who only ran what the dispatcher sent

The bottom tech ran 142 jobs in the 180-day window. 97 percent of them billed exactly what the dispatch ticket described. One outlet replacement got one outlet replacement. One ceiling fan install got one ceiling fan install. Almost zero additional work identified on site.

Home Service Scorecard's 2025 electrical KPI work calls this the TGL rate (technician-generated lead), and it is the single largest separator between top and bottom electricians. Home Service Scorecard Top electricians identify 2 to 4 additional items on a standard residential call. Bottom electricians identify zero.

The top tech in the shop ran 168 jobs and generated at least one additional work item on 109 of them, 65 percent. That is where the $346 per-ticket gap came from. Not skill on the original job. Options-pricing and discovery on the second, third, and fourth items.

Text Sully: "average ticket per job by technician for the last 90 days, with count of jobs where additional items were added to the invoice"

The options menu that nobody was presenting

The top tech was running a 3-option presentation on every call. Good, better, best. The homeowner picked one. The tech was trained to present choice, not to sell a single solution.

The bottom tech was running a single-option close. "Here is the problem. Here is what it costs." Customer said yes or no. If yes, one invoice line. If no, service-call fee only.

Simpro's 2026 residential-electrical guidance flags this pattern. Electrical Contractor Profit Margins via Profitability Partners Options pricing lifts close rate and lifts average ticket simultaneously. Customers who see three options almost always pick the middle one, which is priced above what the single-option close would have quoted.

The owner documented the top tech's workflow and built it into the onboarding template. The bottom tech got 3 ride-alongs. Ticket went from $266 to $398 in 45 days. Still below the top tech. Closing the full gap takes longer. The first 40 percent came from one process change.

Text Sully: "jobs with a single invoice line item vs jobs with 3 or more, by technician, for the last quarter"

The panel upgrade discovery the bottom tech was walking past

Residential panel inspections came out of the audit as the most consistent miss. The top tech flagged panel-age issues on 34 percent of service calls, generating a panel-upgrade quote 22 percent of the time and closing 11 percent. Average panel upgrade ticket: $2,400 to $4,200. The bottom tech flagged panel issues on 4 percent of calls.

The reason was simple. The top tech pulled the panel cover on every call as part of the standard diagnostic. The bottom tech did not. Panels were not in the dispatched scope. The bottom tech treated scope as boundary. The top tech treated it as starting point.

The shop's fix was a two-line SOP change. Every service call includes a panel inspection. Every panel inspection triggers a logged note. Every panel older than 25 years or with known problem brands (FPE, Zinsco) auto-generates a quote in the CRM.

Tommy Mello, who built A1 Garage Door Service to $200M+ in revenue, makes the same point on technician sales discipline:

When a tech walks in and sees one problem, the question is always what else is there. Every customer has a list. Most techs never ask. Owned and Operated on Tommy Mello

The Pacific Northwest shop applied the same logic to electrical. Every call, three diagnostics beyond the dispatched one.

Text Sully: "service calls in the last 6 months where the tech flagged an issue beyond the dispatch scope, by technician"

The service-call fee nobody was collecting consistently

HomeAdvisor puts the electrician service-call fee at $100 to $200 for the first hour. HomeAdvisor The shop's standard was $149. The audit found that the bottom tech was waiving the service fee on 23 percent of jobs where no work got booked. The owner had given the shop flexibility to waive it on "very small" jobs. The bottom tech defined "very small" loosely.

That is 33 jobs in 180 days with no service-call fee and no work, $4,917 of uncollected revenue. The top tech had waived service fees 4 times in the same window, on specific repeat customers by name.

The fix: waiving the service-call fee requires a reason tagged in the CRM at close-out. "Repeat customer, did similar work last quarter" is valid. "Customer seemed nice" is not. Uncollected fees dropped 90 percent in the next quarter.

Text Sully: "service calls in the last 90 days closed with $0 revenue, by technician, with close-out reason"

The commission plan that rewarded revenue, not gross profit

The shop paid techs a flat hourly wage plus a 3 percent commission on job revenue over $200. That structure incentivizes revenue, not margin. Profitability Partners' 2026 electrical-margin research is blunt on this: if techs earn the same whether they run a high-margin service call or a lower-margin project, there is no incentive to develop the diagnostic and customer-facing skills that make residential service profitable. Profitability Partners

The owner switched to a gross-profit-linked commission structure. 8 percent of gross profit on jobs over $400. Techs who ran low-margin new-construction work earned less. Techs who ran high-margin service-and-repair with options pricing earned more.

Average ticket across all techs lifted from $384 to $467 in 60 days. Commission expense stayed roughly flat because the ticket lift offset the higher percentage. Gross margin on the shop lifted 5 points because the techs started self-selecting toward higher-margin jobs.

Text Sully: "tech commission paid vs gross profit generated per tech for the last 6 months"

The dispatch assignment that was punishing the top tech

One finding flipped the owner's dispatch policy. The top tech was being sent to quick, low-ticket service calls because the dispatcher trusted him to close fast. The bottom tech was being routed to longer projects because they "needed more time anyway." The shop was deliberately putting its highest-revenue-per-hour tech on its lowest-revenue-per-hour jobs.

Re-routing moved the top tech to high-discovery residential service (panel-age, older homes, whole-house inspection candidates) and moved the bottom tech to simpler projects where the scope was tight and the ticket was what it was. Ticket-per-hour on the top tech went up 28 percent. The bottom tech's ticket held steady, but his callback rate dropped because the jobs matched his skill level better.

What jumped out after 180 days of tracking

The 2.3x ticket gap was not a skill gap. It was three process gaps.

1. Options-pricing. Top tech presented 3 options. Bottom tech presented 1.
2. Diagnostic scope. Top tech inspected beyond the dispatch scope. Bottom tech did not.
3. Service-fee discipline. Top tech charged on every call except named repeat customers. Bottom tech waived indiscriminately.

The owner fixed the process in 30 days. The ticket gap closed to 1.5x in 90 days. It never fully closed because the top tech was genuinely better at options presentation, but the bottom tech went from $266 to $398 average ticket, which added roughly $22,000 of quarterly revenue at higher margin.

He framed it this way at the following Monday meeting:

We thought we had a training problem. We had a dispatch problem and a script problem. The training was needed, but the training had been there for a year. The process change took a week.

Text Sully: "for each technician, average ticket, percent of jobs with options quoted, and percent with additional work identified, last 6 months"

The hourly-rate finding that did not matter

One of the things the owner expected to find was a pricing gap. He assumed the low-ticket tech might be discounting rate. The audit showed he was not. Every tech was billing the same $125 per hour. The top tech was just billing more hours per call and more line items per ticket, at the same rate.

That is consistent with HomeAdvisor's 2025 range of $50 to $130 per hour nationally and a $100 to $200 service-call fee. HomeAdvisor Rate is a shop-level lever. Ticket size is a tech-level lever, driven by options, discovery, and dispatch routing.

What this means for your shop

If you are not tracking ticket size per technician, the spread inside your shop is probably larger than you think. A 50 to 100 percent gap between top and bottom is normal. A 2x-plus gap is common and is almost always fixable through process, not hiring.

Five diagnostic questions:

1. What is average ticket per tech for the last 90 days, and what is the spread?
2. What percent of invoices have 3+ line items per tech?
3. What percent of service calls generate a second-project quote per tech?
4. What percent of service calls close with $0 revenue per tech?
5. Does your commission structure pay on revenue or gross profit?

For broader dashboard coverage see contractor dashboard metrics most owners ignore and the home service KPI playbook. For AI applied to electrical specifically see AI agents for electricians.

Sources

• HomeAdvisor: How Much Do Electricians Charge 2025 Data
• Home Service Scorecard: KPIs for Electrical Contractors
• Profitability Partners: Electrical Contractor Profit Margins
• Owned and Operated: How Tommy Mello Built a $200M Home Service Business
• FieldEdge: HVAC Technician Hourly Rates and Performance
• ServiceTitan: Plumbing Business Profitability guidance