The Level Index
Benchmarks for contractors
Financial and operational data from 2,200+ contractors and service businesses. See where you stand against real, sourced quartile data, not generic advice.
2,200+
Service businesses analyzed
7
Industries covered
50+
Financial & operational metrics
Free
Always
Pick your industry
Each index page is built from primary sources for that vertical: association studies, public company filings, and the founding team's operator analysis. Contractors break out by trade, tagged below.
Contractors (all trades)
Most popularThe aggregated contractor index across HVAC, plumbing, electrical, mechanical, roofing, and GC. Job margins, collection rates, billing speed, quote conversion, utilization. Break out by trade in the cards that follow.
HVAC
Contractor tradePublic commercial-mechanical margins (Comfort Systems 24.1% GM), tech wages, DSO, and the service-vs-install margin gap. Where residential service out-earns new install.
Plumbing
Contractor tradePlumber wages ($62,970 median, BLS), MEP public-company margins, and the service-vs-new-construction spread. Repair work carries far higher gross margin than install.
Electrical
Contractor tradePublic electrical-contractor margins (IES Holdings 25.5% GM), electrician wages, and how commercial project work runs thinner than service.
Mechanical
Contractor tradeThe public pure-plays that ARE mechanical contractors: Comfort Systems, EMCOR, Limbach. Margins, revenue per employee, and DSO straight from their filings.
Roofing
Contractor tradeRoofer wages, installation-trade margin proxies (IBP, TopBuild), ~$92B market, and honest caveats where firm-wide net margin is genuinely contested.
General contractors
Contractor tradeThe pass-through model: CFMA nonresidential net 4.1% (the thinnest segment), public GC gross margins, and DSO. Margin lives in overhead control, not gross spread.
Healthcare Practices
Medical, dental, PT, chiropractic, specialty. Net collection rate, days in A/R, overhead %, denial rate, revenue per provider FTE.
Restaurants
Independent + multi-unit. Prime cost, food cost, labor %, occupancy, same-store sales, hourly turnover.
Cleaning & Facility Services
Janitorial, BSC, residential. Labor ratios, pricing per sq ft, account retention, turnover, workers' comp exposure.
Staffing Agencies
Light industrial, professional, IT, healthcare. Segment GM, time-to-fill, DSO, recruiter productivity, fill rate.
Landscape Companies
Commercial maintenance, design-build, lawn care. EBITDA margin, labor cost ratios, route density, maintenance mix, H-2B exposure.
Ecommerce & DTC
Shopify, Amazon, Etsy, multi-channel. Contribution margin, CAC, LTV, return rate, ad spend efficiency, inventory turns.
Contractor operating benchmarks
Financial ratios tell you where you stand. These tell you why: how your labor, sales, pay, and systems actually perform. The numbers that make your team better, not just your books cleaner.
Labor Productivity
Hours vs budget, job-level margin, labor share of revenue, closeout lag. 40% of jobs run over their labor-hour budget, see where your crew ranks.
Sales & Quote Performance
Quote conversion and speed-to-close. Winning quotes close in 2 days; losers linger 29. 62% of quoting effort produces zero revenue.
Compensation Design
How to structure technician and crew pay so incentives protect gross margin instead of eroding it. Labor is ~29% of revenue, so design it on purpose.
Finance Software Evaluation
A vendor-neutral guide to the contractor accounting + field-software stack. Most job-costing failures are integration failures, not software failures.
Collection Gap & DSO
Collection rate, DSO, billing speed, and aged AR. The median contractor collects just 85.1% of what it bills; the gap is cash you already earned.
Change Orders & Scope Creep
Best-in-class contractors approve 95%+ of change orders before doing the work. Unpriced scope creep is the largest invisible margin lever in contracting.
Service Calls
Margin, callback rate, tech utilization, and visit economics on demand service work. The highest-margin work most contractors under-measure.
Maintenance Contracts
Service agreement gross margin (median 37.9%), renewal rates, and pull-through. The most scalable recurring-margin engine in contracting when priced right.
Service Agreement Profitability
The full SA margin distribution, from -30% to 70%+, plus renewal and lifecycle economics. Most shops underprice agreements or misreport the margin.
Time & Materials
T&M margins, quote-to-invoice variance, scope-change capture, and unbilled labor. The job type where scope creep quietly eats the most margin.
Install Projects
Install/replacement margins, progress billing timing, retainage, and estimate-vs-actual variance. Lumpier work where cash timing decides survival.
Commercial Projects
Commercial GC/specialty margins, WIP discipline, jobs open without invoice, and bonding ratios. Where slow closeout and unbilled WIP trap the most cash.
Worked Example
A fully worked $6M contractor P&L with the exact math behind every metric, job margin, WIP, labor variance, collection rate, and quote conversion. Re-run it on your own books.
Labor Rates by Role
Median rate-card rates by field role: helper $34/hr to journeyman $76/hr, across 18,000+ tracked employees. Company-level avg bill rate median is $79/hr.
Pricing & Markup
Gross margin by cost type across 2.2M+ quote line items: labor 47.7%, materials 30%, equipment 25.5%, subcontractor 23.6%. Revenue mix decides your blended margin.
Invoicing & Collection
The 0.7% of invoices over $100K carry 38% of revenue. Invoice size distribution and collection percentiles from 2.5M+ invoices worth $11.6B. Chase the big ones first.
Service Agreement Value
1.4% of service agreements carry 50% of SA revenue; the top tier averages $520K. ACV distribution and renewal benchmarks from 83,535 agreements.
How big is your market?
Serviceable annual demand, competitor density by revenue tier, and healthy-financials benchmarks for roofing, HVAC, and commercial cleaning in every state. National totals tie to published market sizes; public-company FY2025 filings anchor the financials.
Contractor market size by stateContractor Benchmarks by State
Bill rates and market context for all 50 states plus DC. National operating metrics apply everywhere; local rate and labor markets do not.
Check your own numbers
Use the public benchmarks. Then check your own numbers against them.
Public benchmarks are useful. Your own books are where the money is. Send the number you trust least and Level will show whether it is normal, fixable, or a warning sign. Your numbers stay yours, we never publish or share client data.
In the free audit, we check:
- •your margin, cash, labor, or revenue metric against the peer range
- •whether the underlying books are clean enough to trust
- •the first operating gap worth fixing before the next month closes
We use this to prepare your audit before the call. Your numbers stay private.
Methodology
How we built the Level Index
Primary sources
We use the leading association studies for each vertical (MGMA, HFMA, ADA, NRA, BSCAI, ISSA, SIA, ASA, NALP), public company SEC filings, and government statistics (BLS, Census, USCIS), never repackaged blogs or sponsored white papers.
Founding-team analysis
Layered with the founding team's analysis of 2,200+ contractors ($13.25B in revenue) across operating, private-equity, and CFO roles. Where our data conflicts with industry surveys, we cite both and explain the reconciliation.
Quartile-based, not averages
Averages hide what good looks like. We publish bottom-decile, P25, median, P75, and top-decile so you can see where you rank, not just a "typical" number.
Refresh cadence
Each industry page shows its last refresh date. Operating benchmarks are reviewed quarterly. Public-company multiples refresh each earnings cycle in our Market Monitor.
Open & machine-readable
Every metric is published as downloadable JSON with its definition, sample basis, and source, so it is reproducible and citable. Start at the data index. Aggregates only, no individual company is identified.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Level Index?
The Level Index is a free public benchmark library covering seven service-business verticals: contractors, healthcare practices, restaurants, cleaning companies, staffing agencies, landscape companies, and ecommerce/DTC. Contractors break out further by trade (HVAC, plumbing, electrical, mechanical, roofing, and general contractors). It's built from the founding team's analysis of 2,200+ contractors ($13.25B in revenue) across operating, private-equity, and CFO roles, plus published industry data (MGMA, NRA, BSCAI, SIA, NALP, BLS, and public-company SEC filings).
Where does the data come from?
Each industry page lists its specific sources. Contractor data comes from the founding team's analysis of 2,242 contractors across operating, private-equity, and CFO roles. Other industries draw on the leading association studies and public-company 10-Ks for their vertical, with the founding team's operator analysis layered in where applicable.
How often is it updated?
Each index page shows its last refresh date. Most metrics are refreshed quarterly when new association data is released. Public-company comparables (in our Market Monitor) are updated each earnings cycle.
Is there a Level Index for my industry?
We currently cover contractors (with per-trade breakouts for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, mechanical, roofing, and general contractors), healthcare, restaurants, cleaning, staffing, landscaping, and ecommerce in depth. We also write extensively about professional services and trucking on our blog. If your industry isn't covered, the underlying operating playbook still applies, book a free audit and we'll show you.
How is this different from the Level Market Monitor?
The Level Index covers private-company operating benchmarks (what an owner-operated business looks like). The Level Market Monitor covers public-company financials and M&A deals (what investors and acquirers pay for businesses in your industry). Together they tell you both how to operate and what your business is worth.
Simple pricing
Three tiers, one ladder.
$99-$500/mo
Bookkeeping
The clean data layer: monthly books, reconciliations, and organized financials AI can work with.
$1,500-$5,000/mo
Scale
The full AI operating layer: custom agents, weekly actions, and benchmarks to grow margin per hour.
Custom
Platform / Multi-Office
Multi-branch benchmarking and scorecards for PE-backed and multi-location groups.
Make more money with the crew you already have
Drop your info and we’ll show where your team’s time is turning into margin, where it is getting wasted, and where cash is trapped in open jobs. Free audit included.
No commitment. Real numbers, not generic advice.