You're Paying for 41 Hours a Week. How Many Are You Billing?

Infographic: landscaping employees averaged 41.1 hours a week in August 2026, average hourly crew pay was 27.71 dollars, and every hour past 40 in a week is paid at 1.5 times the regular rate.

Your crews are working about 41 hours a week. That is not a guess. It is what the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports for the whole landscaping industry.

Here is the question the BLS cannot answer for you: how many of those 41 hours did a customer pay for?

Every paid hour that is not billed comes from somewhere. A detour to the dump. Fifteen minutes waiting on a gate code. A crew that finished early and took the long way back. None of it shows up on an invoice, and all of it shows up on payroll.

Most owners have never measured the gap between hours paid and hours billed. Here is what the federal data says about the paid side, and how to find the billed side for your own crews in about two weeks.

What You Are Paying For

In August 2026, all employees in landscaping services averaged 41.1 hours a week, up from 40.3 in July. Production and nonsupervisory employees, the people on the trucks, averaged 40.8 hours and earned an average of $27.71 an hour (BLS Current Employment Statistics, August 2026, preliminary, not seasonally adjusted).

Hours over 40 in a workweek must be paid at no less than one and one-half times the regular rate (29 CFR 778.107). At the August 2026 average, that is about $41.57 for every overtime hour.

Put simply, the average crew member is already at or past 40 hours during the busiest part of fall. Every extra non-billable minute now costs time and a half.

The Hours Nobody Bills

A lot of what a crew does in a day is work you pay for but cannot invoice. Federal rules count most of it as hours worked. Under 29 CFR 785.38, travel "from job site to job site during the workday must be counted as hours worked," and so does the drive from the yard when the crew reports there to "pick up and to carry tools."

That is fair. The crew is working. The problem is not paying for drive time. The problem is not knowing how much of it there is, so it never gets priced into your bids or cut out of your routes.

The usual non-billable hours on a landscaping crew:

Yard time: loading, fueling, and getting the route before the first stop
Drive time: between properties, and to and from the yard
Side trips: the dump, the parts store, the gas station, the second gas station
Waiting: on gate codes, on customers, on another crew
The long way home: a crew that finishes at 2:30 and clocks out at 4:00

What 10 Minutes a Stop Is Worth

Here is an example, not survey data. A three person crew runs 6 stops a day, 5 days a week. Between the stops, each visit picks up 10 minutes nobody bills: a slow drive, a wrong turn, a wait at the gate.

That is 60 minutes a day per person, or 5 hours a week per person, and 15 crew hours a week. At the August 2026 BLS average of $27.71 an hour, that is about $416 a week, or roughly $12,470 over a 30 week season, for one crew. If those hours land past 40, the cost goes up by half again.

You do not need to eliminate all of it. Cutting it in half on three crews pays for a lot of things.

How to Find Your Own Number

1. Pull two weeks of timesheets. Total the paid hours for one crew. That is your paid number.

2. Total the time on site. For the same two weeks, add up the time the crew was actually at each customer's property, arrival to departure. That is your billable number.

3. Divide. Billable hours divided by paid hours is your crew's billable ratio. Write it down. That is your baseline.

4. Look at the gaps, not the crew. Most of the difference is usually route order, a far-off property, or the dump run, not anyone slacking. Fix the route first.

5. Price what is left. Whatever drive and yard time remains after you tighten the routes is a real cost. Put it in your rates rather than hoping it goes away.

Where Alertrax Fits

Step 2 is the hard part, because nobody writes down arrival and departure times reliably. Alertrax records them automatically for every truck and trailer.

Automatic Time-on-Site Logging: Every arrival and departure is timestamped automatically, at every property, with nothing for the crew to tap.
Trip Reports You Can Export: Pull a date range by vehicle or across the fleet, with start time, stop time, addresses visited, duration, and distance, in a table you can put beside a timesheet.
AddressFence: Set your yard as an address and see exactly when each crew rolled out and came back.
Complete Route History: A full breadcrumb trail of the day, so you can see where the minutes between stops went.
Live Fleet Map: Every tracked truck and trailer on one map in the Alertrax Fleet Portal, with location updates every 2 minutes.
One-Year Battery, No Wiring Required: Alertrax runs on two AA cells, with nothing to wire in and nothing to charge.

The same tracker on the trailer also sends an after-hours alert if the trailer moves when it should be parked. For more on the minutes before the first stop, see The 30 Minutes Before the First Mow Are on the Clock.

Pricing

You can equip your fleet with Alertrax for a low monthly rate, no long-term contracts, no hidden fees.

(Want to own it outright? We offer a $599 Lifetime option for permanent, subscription-free tracking.)

Every Alertrax order comes with a 30 day money-back guarantee. Two weeks of trip reports is enough to find your number.

Sources

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Current Employment Statistics, Landscaping Services (NAICS 56173), not seasonally adjusted, series CEU6056173002, CEU6056173007, and CEU6056173008, retrieved October 2026: average weekly hours of all employees of 40.3 in July 2026 and 41.1 in August 2026; average weekly hours of production and nonsupervisory employees of 40.8 in August 2026; average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees of $27.71 in August 2026. August 2026 figures are preliminary and subject to revision
Electronic Code of Federal Regulations (eCFR), 29 CFR 785.38, "Travel that is all in the day's work," retrieved October 2026
eCFR, 29 CFR 778.107, "General standard for overtime pay," retrieved October 2026

This article is provided for general informational purposes and is not legal, payroll, or financial advice. It summarizes federal regulations only; state and local wage laws may impose different or stricter requirements, and some employees may be exempt from overtime. BLS figures are industry averages and may not reflect your company. The 10 minutes a stop example and its dollar figures are an illustration, not survey data.

Know Both Numbers

You already know what you pay. Find out what you bill, and the gap between them becomes something you can manage instead of something you absorb.

Visit www.buyalertrax.com today and see where your crews' hours really go.