Average ticket is usually the first number an owner checks on a technician, and one of the most misread. It feels like a measure of selling skill. In practice it reflects job type, price book, call mix and counting rules at least as much as anything the tech did in the home.
Average ticket in plain English
A plumbing shop invoices $84,000 across 200 repair calls in a month (example numbers). Average repair ticket: $420.
The same month it ran 40 water heater installs at $3,100 each and 120 drain maintenance visits at $189. If you blend all 360 jobs together you get about $640, a number that describes none of the three kinds of work. Next month, two more installs could lift the blended figure even if every repair tech had a worse month.
How do you calculate average ticket?
Metric
Average ticket
What a typical paying job is worth, for one kind of work.
Average ticket = invoiced revenue ÷ number of invoices (same job type, same period)
Where the numbers come from: Invoices by invoice date, filtered by job type or business unit.
Worked example: why the split matters
| Job type (example) | Invoices | Revenue | Average ticket |
|---|---|---|---|
| Service and repair | 200 | $84,000 | $420 |
| Maintenance | 120 | $22,680 | $189 |
| Installs | 40 | $124,000 | $3,100 |
| Blended | 360 | $230,680 | $641 |
The blended $641 is accurate and useless for coaching. Use the split rows.
Rules to decide before you track it
- $0 tickets. A diagnosis with no repair, a warranty visit, a free recall. Excluding them shows what a sale is worth; including them shows what a visit earns. Many shops exclude them and track the $0 share separately.
- Membership dues. Monthly membership charges are small invoices that drag the average down without telling you anything about field selling. Leave them out.
- Date basis. Invoice date and job completion date give different answers at month end. Pick one.
- Invoices or jobs. A job with a deposit invoice and a final invoice counts twice by invoice. Count by job for installs.
Mean vs median
The mean ties back to total revenue, so use it for planning. The median shows the typical ticket and ignores the one huge job. When they diverge, a handful of big tickets are moving your average, which is fine to know before you praise or coach anyone.
What is a good average ticket?
There is no reliable public benchmark for trade average tickets. Figures you see online rarely state the job type, region, whether $0 visits count or what year's prices they reflect, and equipment price changes alone can shift install tickets substantially. Compare yourself to your own baseline: the median of your last 13 weeks for each job type, plus the same months last year for seasonal work.
What raises average ticket?
| Lever | Why it works | How to check |
|---|---|---|
| Options on every call | The customer picks a level of fix instead of yes or no | Options-presented rate |
| Whole-system check | Techs find the second problem the customer didn't call about | Lines per invoice |
| Accurate flat-rate prices | Underpriced tasks cap the ticket no matter how well the tech sells | Revenue per labor hour by job type |
| Membership offer | Adds recurring revenue and future work | Memberships sold per opportunity |
| Proof photos | Customers approve what they can see | Share of proposals with photos |
The most common hidden cause of a low ticket is the price book itself. If your tasks don't cover your labor rate and overhead, no amount of selling fixes it. Our guide to pricing HVAC jobs works through the math.
Free calculatorLabor rate & flat-rate price calculatorFind the hourly rate you need to charge to hit your profit goal, then price any job.Comparing technicians fairly on average ticket
A ranking of techs by average ticket mostly ranks who got sent on which calls. To make it fair:
- Compare within a job type. Repair ticket against repair ticket, maintenance against maintenance.
- Use the same counting rules for everyone. Same $0 rule, same date basis, same handling of jobs split between two techs.
- Look at the median as well as the mean. One tech's single $12,000 sale shouldn't decide the month.
- Read it next to callbacks and reviews. A rising ticket with rising callbacks is a warning, not a win.
Done this way, the spread between techs on the same work is usually where the coaching opportunity sits.
Average ticket vs close rate
These two are a pair. Close rate tells you how often a proposal sells; average ticket tells you what each sale is worth. Multiply them and you get revenue per proposal presented, the fairest single number for comparing technicians on the same kind of calls. A tech with a 70% close rate and a $300 ticket ($210 per proposal) earns the shop less than one with a 50% close rate and a $520 ticket ($260 per proposal).
How average ticket shows up in TradesWork
In TradesWork, reports define average ticket as the revenue of invoices over $0 divided by the number of those invoices, on invoice date, with monthly membership charges left out so they don't drag it down. You can filter it by business unit, job type and technician, and clicking the value opens the invoices behind it. The owner dashboard shows the average ticket trend, and Ask the business answers questions like "average ticket for the plumbing business unit this quarter" from the same definition.
