Utilization

Utilization answers a simple question: of the hours you tracked, how many were billable? It's the rough health metric for a freelance practice. Too low and you're not paying yourself enough for the time you spent; too high and you're probably under-tracking the unbilled work that keeps the business running.

Where to find it

Open Analytics. Utilization is shown in the utilization section for the selected period and filters.

What it shows

For the period you pick, the report shows:

• Billable hours. Hours marked billable.
• Non-billable hours. Hours marked non-billable (admin, internal, prospecting, etc.).
• Utilization rate. billable / (billable + non-billable), expressed as a percentage.

The web app shows utilization for the selected period. Team accounts also show per-user utilization.

CLI, REST, and MCP workflows can group utilization by:

• Project. Which work is the most billable.
• Client. Which clients are most billable on a per-hour basis.
• User. If you're on a team, which teammates have which utilization rates.

What "good" looks like

There's no universal good number. Solo freelancers running their own practice typically sit between 40% and 70% billable; agency hires toward the higher end. The trend matters more than the absolute number. If your utilization is dropping week over week, something is eating your time that you didn't expect.

CLI and API

From the CLI:

hourdini util --period month --group-by project

REST exposes GET /api/v1/reports/utilization. MCP exposes get_utilization.

For raw non-billable analysis, filter the Time list or export time entries and include your tags.