Hiring technicians is difficult enough. Keeping them is often harder.
For trade contractors, technician retention affects far more than staffing levels. It influences training investment, customer experience, scheduling consistency, and long-term growth capacity. Yet many contractors lack reliable benchmarks for what “good” retention actually looks like in their trade.
To better understand those benchmarks, we analyzed technician employment records across HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and garage door contractors on the ServiceTitan platform. The analysis measured two things: how long technicians tend to stay at the same company (tenure), and how often they leave (turnover rate), across commercial and residential operations within each trade.
The technician turnover and tenure numbers, trade by trade
Across the four trades analyzed, turnover rates range from 12% to 21% and average tenure ranges from 3.2 years to 3.96 years. Electrical contractors had the highest turnover rate at 21%. Garage door contractors had the lowest at 12%. That gap held consistently across the dataset and represents a meaningful difference in the retention challenge contractors face depending on the trade they operate in.
For this analysis, tenure refers to how long a technician stays with the same company, measured from when they were added to the platform through the end of the analysis period or their departure. Turnover rate measures the share of technicians who departed during the trailing 12-month period.
Trade | Turnover rate | Average tenure | Median Tenure |
Electrical | 21% | 3.44 years | 2.9 years |
Plumbing | 18% | 3.96 years | 3.47 years |
HVAC | 16% | 3.54 years | 3.06 years |
Garage door | 12% | 3.2 years | 2.74 years |
Why this matters beyond the staffing headache
Every contractor knows turnover is expensive. The recruiting cost, the onboarding time, the months before a new tech is actually productive.
What gets talked about less is the customer experience side. When a technician leaves, the customer relationship often goes with them. The dispatcher who built a schedule around knowing which tech worked well in which area has to start over. The training investment walks out the door. And the new hire who replaces that person takes six months to a year to get back to baseline.
Tenure is a proxy for many things: operational consistency, customer trust, and how well your business actually knows the systems it maintains. A team with an average tenure of under three years is constantly rebuilding institutional knowledge.
The compounding case for A-players goes beyond job performance. The best technicians become your best recruiters — they bring in referrals, generate better reviews, and raise the average ticket. Retention of the right people isn't just an HR metric. It shows up in revenue.
Questions worth asking about your own shop
The benchmarks only mean something if you run them against your own numbers.
What's your current average tenure? If it's falling well below the range for your trade and segment, that's worth investigating. It’s not a reason to panic, but a reason to look closer at what's happening in your first 12 months of employment.
Where does turnover concentrate? Early departures usually point to hiring or onboarding problems. Technicians who leave at the three- or four-year mark are often telling you something about compensation, advancement, or leadership. Those are different conversations with different solutions.
How ServiceTitan helps contractors support technician retention
Technician retention is shaped by compensation, leadership, career growth, workload, and day-to-day operational experience. Better visibility into scheduling, performance, communication, and technician experience can help contractors spot issues earlier and create a more consistent work environment.
ServiceTitan helps contractors support that foundation with tools for scheduling visibility, performance tracking, dispatch coordination, and operational reporting. When combined with strong management practices and clear career paths, those insights can help contractors better understand where retention challenges exist and where to act. See how ServiceTitan helps trade contractors build and retain high-performing field teams.
The ServiceTitan Future of the Trades hub offers additional resources for tradespeople at every stage of their careers, from comparing the financial return of trade careers and college pathways to earning industry certifications that build long-term professional credibility.
Based on internal analysis of aggregated, anonymized data from participating ServiceTitan customers' technician records, trailing 12 months through January 2026. Tenure is calculated from a technician's creation date in the ServiceTitan platform to the analysis cutoff or deactivation date. Turnover rates reflect the share of technicians deactivated during the trailing 12-month period. These metrics describe observed patterns across trades and market segments and do not imply that any specific trade, segment, or practice caused the observed tenure or turnover outcomes. Some trade-segment combinations reflect a smaller number of participating businesses and may be less representative. Individual results will vary.
