When companies evaluate whether to manage field service internally or work with a partner, they usually start with the most obvious number: technician salaries. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the median annual wage for installation, maintenance, and repair occupations was $58,230 in May 2024. For specialized field technicians, the range runs from $45,000 to $75,000 depending on the region and skill set. Multiply that by the number of techs you need, and you've got your labor cost. Simple enough.
Except it's not. The salary is maybe 40% of the actual cost of putting a technician in the field. The rest is a long list of expenses that don't show up on the job posting but absolutely show up on the P&L.
Start with vehicles. A service van or truck runs $35,000 to $50,000. Add insurance, fuel, maintenance, and GPS tracking. That's another $8,000 to $12,000 per year, per vehicle. Now multiply that by your headcount.
Then there's tools and equipment. Depending on the industry, a technician's kit can cost anywhere from $2,000 to $15,000. Specialized diagnostic tools, calibration equipment, safety gear. And tools break, get lost, or become obsolete. You're replacing them regularly.
Training is another big one. Every new hire needs onboarding. Every product update requires retraining. If you're servicing multiple product lines, your training program needs to cover all of them. That's not just the cost of the training itself. It's the cost of the technician's time while they're in a classroom instead of in the field generating revenue.
And finding people to train is getting harder. TechForce Foundation estimated a shortage of 642,000 technicians across service sectors. ACHR News reports 111,000 unfilled HVAC positions nationwide. The plumbing industry faces a projected 500,000+ worker deficit by 2027, according to John Dunham & Associates research cited by Bloomberg. When the labor pool is this tight, recruiting costs spike. Signing bonuses, relocation packages, and higher starting wages become table stakes just to get candidates in the door.
Parts inventory adds another layer. If your technicians carry common parts in their vehicles, you need a system to manage that inventory. You need to restock it. You need to track what's been used and what's been returned. And if a technician doesn't have the right part on the truck, you're looking at a second trip, which means double the travel cost and a frustrated customer.
Dispatch and coordination overhead is often underestimated. Someone has to schedule the work, route the technicians, handle cancellations and reschedules, manage escalations, and communicate with customers. That's either a dedicated dispatcher or a manager who's splitting their time. Either way, it's a cost. The field service management market exists precisely because this coordination problem is so expensive to solve. Fortune Business Insights values that market at $6.14 billion in 2026, growing to $13.79 billion by 2034.
Benefits, workers' comp, and liability insurance round out the picture. Field service carries real risk. Technicians work on electrical systems, heavy equipment, and commercial installations. The insurance premiums reflect that.
Add it all up and the fully loaded cost of a single field technician is often two to three times their base salary. For a team of 20 technicians spread across the country, you're looking at well over $2 million per year before you've even started measuring whether the work is being done well.
The cost of getting it wrong is even higher. According to research from Humanly, an unfilled field service position can cost $4,500 to $7,500 per day in lost revenue. ABB found that industrial downtime costs $10,000 to $500,000 per hour. When you can't get a technician to a site fast enough because your internal team is stretched thin, those numbers add up fast.
The alternative isn't about spending less on service. It's about spending smarter. A service partner absorbs the vehicle costs, the tool costs, the training costs, and the dispatch overhead. You pay for completed work, not for idle capacity. And because the partner is managing technicians across multiple clients, their utilization rates are higher, which means their cost per job is lower.
None of this means internal teams are always the wrong choice. For companies with dense, concentrated service needs in a small geography, an internal team can make sense. But for nationwide coverage across dozens of markets, the economics almost always favor a partner model.