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Average utilization at architecture and engineering firms in Deltek's 2026 Clarity study of 896 US and Canadian firms, and still falling.
Deltek Clarity 2026Firm utilization
How much of your team's time goes to chasing information?
Enter your firm's size, rates and the hours a typical person loses each week to finding files, checking revisions and re-sending documents. You will see what that costs across a year in salary, utilization and operating profit.
Your firm, over a year
Salary spent chasing
Of operating profit
Utilization lost
Salary spent on chasing information
Cumulative cost through the year, against the cost of one person's working year.
Salary spent
One person-year
Tighter process
Per person
Each hour a weekAcross the firm, per year
Each utilization point
Each month you waitIn salary spent chasing
Where the hours go
Hours a year across your project staff, valued at loaded cost.
What one source of truth for project information is worth
Cut the time spent finding, checking and re-sending information.
Firm size, rates, profit and the share charged to overhead stay as entered. The dashed line on the chart shows this case.
Industry data
Why lost hours matter more now
Published figures from Deltek, McKinsey Global Institute and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Each links to its source.
Average operating profit in the 2026 study, down from a 10-year high of 21.4% reported a year earlier.
Deltek Clarity 2026 and 2025Staff turnover at these firms, while headcount grew only 1.2%. Deltek describes delivery capacity as a constraint, so recovered hours are hard to replace by hiring.
Deltek Clarity 2026 releaseFirms that expect to lose market share within two years without significant digital transformation, up from 33% the year before.
Deltek Clarity 2026 releaseShare of their time knowledge workers spend tracking down information, including searching their own email. The example on this page assumes about half that.
McKinsey Global Institute, 2012Median hourly wage for US architects in May 2025, before benefits and payroll taxes. Every hour spent chasing information is paid at that rate or more.
BLS wage data, via WagedexHow this is calculated
Hours lost a year are the people on project work, times the hours each loses a week, times working weeks. Salary spent is those hours at your loaded cost. Full-time equivalent staff are the hours divided by one person's working year (working weeks times 40 hours).
Utilization lost counts only the hours charged to overhead, divided by the paid hours of all staff (2,080 a year each). Hours charged to projects do not lower utilization; they use up fee instead.
Operating profit is net revenue times your operating margin. The chart spreads the salary cost evenly across the year. The scenario cuts every task's hours by the same share.
The operating profit and utilization defaults come from Deltek's 2026 study, and the wage reference from BLS. The staff count, revenue, rates, hours per task and the overhead and billable shares are illustrative, so replace them with your own.
The result is a planning estimate for one firm. It is not accounting or legal advice.
Glossary
Terms used on this page
Plain definitions of the project information terms, money measures and sources above.
Money and time
- Billable hours
- Hours charged to client projects that the firm can invoice.
- Billing rate
- The hourly rate the firm charges clients for a person's time, averaged here across staff.
- Full-time equivalent
- Hours expressed as a number of people working full time. Here, one person's working year is your working weeks times 40 hours.
- Loaded cost
- What an hour of a person's time costs the firm: salary plus benefits and payroll taxes.
- Net revenue
- Revenue the firm earns from its own work, after taking out consultant and other pass-through costs.
- Operating profit
- What the firm keeps from net revenue after paying its operating costs.
- Overhead
- Time and costs not charged to any project, such as administration, marketing and internal meetings.
- Utilization
- The share of paid staff hours that are billable to projects.
Project information
- Project log
- A running list used to track items such as questions from the contractor, submittals or open issues, often kept by hand in a spreadsheet.
- Revision
- A new issued version of a drawing or document, numbered so everyone knows which one is current.
- Single source of truth
- One shared place where the current version of every project file and record lives, so nobody has to ask which copy is right.
- Transmittal
- A formal record of which documents were sent to whom, when, and for what purpose.
Organizations and studies
- Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
- The US government agency that publishes wage and employment data by occupation.
- Deltek Clarity
- An annual benchmarking study of architecture and engineering firms by Deltek, a project-management software company.
- McKinsey Global Institute
- The research arm of the consulting firm McKinsey, which studied how knowledge workers spend their time.