If you run an HVAC, plumbing, or electrical business, you may already know you’re short-staffed. What you probably haven’t done is put a dollar figure on it. A new industry study just made that easier, and the number is worth sitting with before you spend another dollar on recruiting.
The Labor Shortage Is Bigger Than Your Shop
Plumbing Manufacturers International and LIXIL commissioned economic impact studies, published September 4, 2026 and researched by John Dunham & Associates, projecting a shortfall of roughly 550,000 unfilled plumbing positions by 2027 (HVAC/P Products has the full breakdown of the numbers). The same research found that adding just 16,400 plumbers nationwide would cut plumbing costs by nearly $1.27 billion a year, which tells you how much leverage a relatively small number of skilled workers has on the whole industry right now.
Owners in the trade press are describing the same thing in plainer language. “We don’t have the manpower to take on anybody else,” one Massachusetts HVAC owner told a local paper. Another put it simply: “There are not nearly enough technicians in this area.” A third called finding experienced people “a never-ending problem” (the Greenfield Recorder talked to several New England contractors about it). An electrical contractor summed up what he hears from other owners constantly: “You can’t find anyone [to work] these days” (21 Hats has more from him and other owners on the hiring crunch).
Why hiring won’t fix it
Here’s the uncomfortable part. If the shortage is this wide, hiring your way out of it isn’t really a plan you control. You can raise wages and run more recruiting ads, and you might still lose the race to a competitor with deeper pockets or a bigger name in your market. Demand for technicians is outpacing supply everywhere, not just in your shop.
The lever you do control is what you get out of the technicians you already have. That shift in thinking, from “we need more people” to “what’s our best output from the people we’ve got,” is the one worth making before your next budget cycle.
What one empty technician seat really costs
To make this concrete, look at what happens when a shop loses just one experienced technician. TradeSworn built a detailed field model for a nine-year senior technician and added up the real costs: lost gross profit while the seat sat open for twelve weeks, overtime and subcontractors covering the gap, recruiting and onboarding a replacement, and a six-week production ramp before the new hire performed like the old one. The total visible cost came to $67,732 (see TradeSworn’s full cost breakdown).
That number doesn’t even include the harder-to-measure risk: that technician was tied to 11 service accounts, $310,000 in open repair and retrofit work, and $187,000 in annual service agreement revenue. Losing him doesn’t just cost what it takes to replace him. It also puts a chunk of your existing customer relationships at risk.
Calculate What Your Labor Gap Is Costing You
You don’t need a study to know your own version of this number. It takes one sitting with your schedule.
- Pull last week’s dispatch schedule for every technician.
- Count the technician-hours that went unbooked, meaning no job was assigned, and nobody was in the truck.
- Multiply that by your average revenue per labor hour.
- That total is your real weekly cost of the labor gap, not a guess, not a feeling.
Once you have that number, you can compare it honestly against what a schedule-efficiency fix, a dispatch change, or simply keeping one more technician from quitting would be worth. Hiring might still be part of the answer eventually. It just stops being the only lever you’re pulling while you wait for the phone to ring with a qualified applicant on the other end.
The Number Worth Watching Every Week
The technician shortage isn’t going away by 2027, according to the same research, and no single shop can hire its way around an industry-wide gap of 550,000 workers. What separates the owners who feel stuck from the ones who don’t is whether they can see, in their own numbers, exactly where the labor gap is costing them and where a small change in scheduling or retention would pay for itself many times over.
That’s the habit DataTurk is built to support: turning the numbers already sitting in your ServiceTitan data into a clear answer to “what is this actually costing me,” instead of a gut feeling about being short-staffed.
