Utilisation rate
Utilisation rate is the share of an employee's available hours spent on billable client work. Realistic targets are 65% to 75% for delivery roles and 50% to 60% for leads and account managers.
A 40-hour week does not contain 40 billable hours. Internal meetings, admin, training, and rework consume real time, and a capacity model built at 85% utilisation is fiction that shows up later as unpaid overtime or dropped quality.
Utilisation is a planning input. The moment it becomes a metric people are judged on, recorded hours drift toward the target and the model stops being true.
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