Construction productivity tracking
- Output per labor hour
- 7.50
- Labor minutes each unit took
- 8.0
- Units per person in the period
- 1,200.0
The numbers on this page come from the inputs you enter and the method stated: 3,600 seconds to an hour, 52 weeks to a year, twelve months to a year, and nothing else. No industry shrinkage figure, no occupancy benchmark and no assumption about your attrition; every one of those is yours to enter.
Construction productivity tracking has a problem the office does not: the unit of output changes with the trade, the crew changes with the week, and the hours that matter are booked on a site where nobody is sitting at a computer. The rate is still the same arithmetic, quantity installed divided by the labor hours it took, but getting a quantity and an hour that belong to the same piece of work is most of the job. This page is for the contracts or operations manager at a United States contractor who has to explain a labor overrun against the hours that were priced, and who wants the explanation in units per hour rather than in opinions about the crew. It covers what to track per trade, which hours to count, and how to tell a productivity problem from a pricing one.
Open the Productivity calculator Free to use. No account, no card, no sign-up.
Pick a unit per trade, not one unit for the job
Concrete is cubic yards placed, drywall is square feet hung, conduit is linear feet pulled, and a single job-level unit averages all of them into a number that moves for reasons nobody can name. Track the rate per trade and per activity, at the same grain your estimate was priced at, because the whole point is to compare what happened with what was assumed. If the estimate priced an activity in a unit you cannot count on site, that is a finding about the estimate.
Count the hours that belong to the quantity
The hours are the crew hours booked to that activity, including the apprentice and the foreman's time on the work, and excluding travel, standby and rework booked elsewhere. Rework is the one everybody leaves in by accident: a rate that quietly includes redoing last week's work reads as slow labor when the actual problem is quality or sequence. Time booked to an activity that was not worked that day will wreck the rate faster than any measurement error.
Compare against the priced rate before the job ends
The estimate carried an assumed rate for every activity, whether anyone wrote it down or not, and dividing the priced hours by the priced quantity recovers it. Comparing the measured rate to the priced one while the activity is still running is the only version of this that saves money; the same comparison at close-out is a lesson for the next bid. A gap of a fifth or more on a labor-heavy activity is worth stopping for.
Decide whether it is productivity, sequence, or the price
A rate below the priced one has three common causes and they need different responses: the crew is being interrupted or waiting on another trade, which is sequence and belongs to the program; the activity was priced at a rate nobody has ever achieved on this kind of work, which belongs to estimating; or the work is genuinely taking longer, which belongs to the foreman. Recording which of the three you concluded, on the activity, is what makes the next estimate better.
Will it do what you need for Construction productivity tracking?
Tell us how your team plans its staffing today and where the number gets argued; a person who has built one answers.
Construction productivity tracking: common questions
What is a reasonable unit for construction productivity tracking? Whatever the activity was priced in: cubic yards, square feet, linear feet, each. Use the estimate's own unit so the measured rate and the priced rate can be compared without conversion, and define it once per activity.
Should overtime hours be counted in the rate? Yes, in the hours, because they were paid and the plan has to carry them. Keeping a separate rate for straight time is useful when overtime is heavy, since sustained overtime usually lowers output per hour and the combined figure hides it.
How is this different from earned value on the job? Earned value reports progress and cost against the program in money. The rate here is in units per labor hour, which is what a foreman and an estimator can both act on. They agree when the priced rates are right, and the rate is the one that shows why when they do not.
Does this need a site app? No. A daily quantity and the crew hours booked to the activity are enough, from whatever the site already fills in. The calculator on this site works the rate from those two numbers and converts the remaining quantity into the hours it will take at the rate you are achieving.
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