April 25, 2026·7 min read

Landscape Architect Utilization Rate: A Practical Guide

Learn how to calculate and improve landscape architect utilization rate with real benchmarks, formulas, and workflow fixes that protect your firm's margins.

Most landscape architecture firms track utilization loosely—if at all. That's a margin problem disguised as a time-tracking problem, and fixing it starts with understanding what utilization actually measures and what a healthy number looks like for your firm size and project mix.

What Utilization Rate Actually Means

Utilization rate is the percentage of an employee's total available hours that are billed (or billable) to a project. It is not the same as productivity, and it's not the same as efficiency. A designer can be extremely productive on internal tasks—mentoring, QC reviews, proposal writing—and still have a utilization rate that's killing your margins.

The two numbers you need to know:

Billable utilization = billable hours ÷ total available hours × 100

Collected utilization (more useful) = hours billed and collected ÷ total available hours × 100

Most firms conflate these, then wonder why their project profitability reports don't match their bank account.

The Formula and a Worked Example

Available hours are typically calculated as 2,080 per year (52 weeks × 40 hours), minus holidays and PTO. For a firm offering 10 holidays and 15 PTO days, that's roughly 1,880 available hours annually.

Formula:

Utilization Rate = (Billable Hours Logged / Available Hours) × 100

Worked example: A mid-level designer logs 1,100 billable hours against 1,880 available hours. 1,100 ÷ 1,880 × 100 = 58.5% utilization

That's below most healthy targets for a billable staff role. At a billing rate of $140/hour, that designer generated $154,000 in billable time. If your target was 65% utilization, the gap is 122 hours—or $17,080 in unrealized revenue from a single person, for a single year.

Multiply that across a five-person team and you're looking at a $85,000+ annual revenue leak.

Benchmarks by Role

Utilization targets aren't one-size-fits-all. Principals carry business development, client management, and firm leadership responsibilities that are legitimately non-billable. Holding them to 65% utilization is unrealistic. Holding a project designer to 55% is leaving money on the table.

Role	Realistic Target	Red Flag Below
Principal / Firm Owner	35–50%	25%
Project Manager	55–65%	50%
Senior Designer	65–75%	60%
Designer / Staff LA	70–80%	65%
Intern / Junior Staff	75–85%	70%

These numbers assume a full-service firm doing design through CA. If your firm is heavy on construction administration, targets shift upward because CA hours are almost entirely billable. If you do a lot of master planning or grant-funded work with compressed fee structures, expect lower realized utilization even when hours are technically billable.

Why Utilization Drops and Where to Look First

Low utilization usually traces back to one of three places: project pipeline gaps, scope mismanagement, or time-tracking behavior.

Pipeline Gaps

When projects close out faster than new work comes in, utilization craters. The fix isn't just sales—it's forecasting. If you're tracking project close-out dates and proposal pipeline simultaneously, you can see the gap coming 6–8 weeks out and adjust staffing or accelerate BD before it hits your utilization numbers.

Scope Mismanagement

This is the more common culprit in established firms. Designers log hours to projects that are over-budget on fees but under-delivered on scope, so PMs stop coding those hours to the project and let them bleed into overhead. The utilization rate looks fine. The project profitability is destroyed. You need a system where over-budget hours are still logged to the project with a flag—not hidden in overhead—so you can actually see where scope creep is happening.

Time-Tracking Behavior

If your team logs time once a week from memory, your utilization data is fiction. Daily logging—even a 3-minute end-of-day entry—produces meaningfully more accurate data. Some firms use 15-minute increments; others use half-hour. The increment matters less than the frequency.

How to Calculate Firm-Wide Utilization

Individual utilization rates matter, but firm-wide utilization is what drives your overhead multiplier and tells you whether your fee structure is sustainable.

Firm-wide utilization:

Total billable hours (all staff) ÷ Total available hours (all staff) × 100

For a 6-person firm with 1,880 available hours each:

Total available: 11,280 hours
Target at 62% firm-wide: 6,994 billable hours
At a blended billing rate of $130/hour: $909,220 in billable time

That's the revenue ceiling before write-downs, collection issues, or unbillable overtime. Knowing this number tells you whether your current fee backlog is enough to sustain your team at target utilization—or whether you're heading into a cash flow problem in Q3.

Common Mistakes Firms Make

1. Using availability instead of capacity. Available hours and capacity aren't the same thing. A designer at 85% utilization has almost no capacity for unexpected RFI responses, client calls, or QC. Pushing utilization too high on key staff creates quality and retention problems.

2. Not separating billable from collected. A firm can have 72% billable utilization and still be cash-poor if clients are slow to pay or if write-downs are high. Track both numbers. The gap between them tells you about your billing and collections process.

3. Letting overhead hours go uncategorized. "Internal" is not a time code. Business development, marketing, proposals, staff meetings, and professional development should each have their own codes. Otherwise you can't see where non-billable time is actually going, and you can't make informed decisions about what to cut or invest in.

4. Setting the same utilization target for every role. Applying a blanket 70% target across principals and junior staff simultaneously either overworks your juniors or underutilizes your principals. Both outcomes are expensive.

5. Reviewing utilization monthly instead of weekly. By the time you see a monthly report, you've already lost three weeks of opportunity to reassign work, accelerate a phase, or have a conversation with a PM about time management. Weekly check-ins on utilization data are the minimum viable cadence.

6. Treating utilization as a performance metric rather than a planning tool. When staff feel their utilization is being watched as a measure of their worth, they start gaming it—logging hours to projects where they have budget headroom rather than where they actually worked. Use utilization for capacity planning and fee calibration, not as a stick.

Using Utilization to Set Fees

This is where the rubber meets the road. If you know your target utilization, your total available hours, and your overhead costs, you can back into a billing rate that actually covers your costs and produces a margin.

Simplified overhead multiplier:

Multiplier = (Direct Labor + Overhead + Profit Target) ÷ Direct Labor

If a designer earns $75,000/year and your overhead runs 1.6× direct labor, you need to bill at roughly 3.0–3.2× their hourly cost to hit a 20% profit margin. At 65% utilization, that designer's effective billing rate needs to be around $135–145/hour to make the math work.

When you underprice fees or overestimate how many hours you'll actually bill, you're not just losing on that project—you're subsidizing your clients with your staff's time.

How Phasewise Handles This

Phasewise tracks utilization at both the individual and project level in real time, so you're not waiting until month-end to find out a project manager is at 90% capacity while a senior designer is sitting at 48%. The budget-versus-actuals view inside each project also flags when logged hours are approaching fee limits, which is where most firms lose the data they need to catch scope creep before it becomes a write-down.