What it means
The calculation is deliberately simple: count the jobs the schedule said would be done, count the ones that were genuinely completed, and express the second as a percentage of the first. What varies between businesses is the definition of "completed" and the window over which it is measured.
It matters because an unfinished job costs money twice. The first visit consumed a technician's time, fuel and parts handling, the return visit consumes them again, and in the meantime the customer waits and the invoice cannot be raised.
Managers use the number to find where the schedule is unrealistic rather than where people are slow. A rate that collapses on Fridays or in one region usually points to travel time, parts availability or over-booking rather than to a lack of effort.
A useful refinement is first-time completion rate, which counts only the jobs finished on the first visit. Comparing the two exposes how much of the headline number is being propped up by repeat visits that customers experience as failure.
Take care with the denominator, since jobs cancelled by the customer or postponed by weather are often excluded. Excluding too much turns the measure into a comfortable number that no longer explains why revenue is arriving late.
In practice
Real-world examples.
Example
A heating and plumbing firm tracks job completion rate weekly and finds it drops to 72% in the last week of each month. The cause turns out to be a parts ordering cycle that runs dry before the next delivery, and moving to twice-monthly stock runs lifts the rate to 89%.
Example
A hospital cleaning contractor reports 96% completion against its schedule but only 81% first-time completion, because rooms are frequently occupied when the team arrives. Rescheduling around ward discharge times closes most of the gap without adding staff.
Example
A telecoms installer includes job completion rate in its service level agreement with a housing association, committing to 90% per month with a rebate payable below that. In the third month it lands at 86% and pays a $9,000 credit, which prompts a review of how many appointments are booked per engineer per day.
Think of it
“Completion rate shows how often you finish work on schedule-your on-time delivery rate.
Formula
Calculation
Job Completion Rate = (Jobs Completed / Jobs Scheduled) x 100
An appliance repair business schedules 1,280 jobs in a month and completes 1,120 of them.
1,120 / 1,280 = 0.875
0.875 x 100 = 87.5%
Of those completions, 980 were finished on the first visit, so the first-time completion rate is 980 / 1,280 = 0.766, or 76.6%.
The 160 jobs that were not completed each require a return visit costing an average of $85 in labour and travel, so the month's rework bill is 160 x $85 = $13,600.
To reach a 92% target the business would need 0.92 x 1,280 = 1,177.6 jobs, rounded up to 1,178, which is 58 more completions than it managed. That is the number the operations manager takes into the planning meeting.Case study
Seen in the real world.
Fenwick Field Services is an illustrative, fictional commercial refrigeration company operating 24 vans across three depots. Its headline job completion rate sat at a respectable 88%, and management considered the operation healthy until customer complaints started arriving from one depot in particular.
Splitting the measure by depot and by first visit told a different story. Two depots ran at roughly 93% completion with 85% first-time completion, while the third managed 78% and 58%. Engineers at the third depot were being sent to jobs without diagnostic information, so they arrived without the right parts and had to book a second visit almost half the time.
In this illustrative case the fix was not more engineers. Fenwick added a five-minute triage call before dispatch, stocked the twelve most common failed components on every van, and watched the depot's first-time completion climb to 79% over two quarters, with the rework cost falling by roughly a third.
Watch out
Common mistakes.
- Counting a job as complete when the engineer leaves the site rather than when the work actually satisfies the customer, which inflates the rate and hides rework.
- Quietly removing cancelled, postponed or reassigned jobs from the denominator until the measure only counts the jobs that were always going to go well.
- Treating a low rate as a performance problem for individual staff when it is far more often a symptom of scheduling, parts supply or travel distance.
Questions
People also ask.
What is a good job completion rate?
It depends on the work, but most well-run field service operations target somewhere between 85% and 95%, with first-time completion trailing several points behind.
How is it different from first time fix rate?
First time fix rate counts only jobs resolved on the initial visit, so it is a stricter subset of job completion rate and usually the more revealing of the two.
Should partly finished jobs count?
No, and giving them partial credit makes the measure impossible to compare over time, though tracking them separately as a "returned incomplete" count is useful.
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