The Level Index
Benchmarks for contractors
Financial and operational data from 2,200+ contractors in the founding-team research universe, alongside independent sources for other industries. Every metric has its own eligible sample. Interpretation reviewed October 7, 2026; observation periods vary by source. Inspect available distributions and dated public observations with their source and denominator limits.
2,200+
Contractor research universe
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 proprietary research includes HVAC, plumbing, electrical, mechanical, refrigeration and fire protection. Job margin, collections and labor metrics have distinct eligible samples. Roofing and GC cards add separate public-source references.
HVAC
Contractor tradePublic commercial-mechanical margins (Comfort Systems 24.1% GM), tech wages, DSO, and the service-vs-install margin gap. Compare service and install work only after matching price, scope and full costs.
Plumbing
Contractor tradePlumber wages ($62,970 median, BLS), MEP public-company margins, and the service-vs-new-construction spread. These sources do not establish a universal repair-versus-install profit advantage.
Electrical
Contractor tradePublic electrical-contractor margins (IES Holdings 25.5% GM), electrician wages, and the scope differences between public project operators and private service work.
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%, public GC gross margins and DSO. Test job gross profit and overhead separately; a public firm is not a matched SMB peer.
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
Operating distributions identify which records to investigate. Match the source population and denominator before attributing a margin, cash or productivity outcome to an operating cause.
Valuation Multiples by Trade
EBITDA multiples across 13 trades and 3 scale brackets, every range externally sourced, paired with the operating numbers that decide where inside the range you land and how a buyer tests each one.
Labor Productivity
Hours vs budget, job-level margin, quoted labor-revenue share and closeout lag. 40% of usable-budget jobs run over; match populations before attributing margin outcomes.
Sales & Quote Performance
Quote conversion and status timing: the retained published cycle medians are 2 days for won quotes and 29 for lost quotes. Median company all-quote conversion is 38.1%; the median company decided-quote win rate is 73.9% (about 74%, n=794). Pending quotes remain in the all-quote denominator; quote counts do not measure estimating effort or permanent lost revenue.
Compensation Design
Test technician pay against matched costs and completed-job outcomes. The ~29% quoted labor-revenue share is not payroll cost or evidence that an incentive plan protects margin.
Finance Software Evaluation
A vendor-neutral guide to the contractor accounting + field-software stack. Test source identity, cost coverage and sync acceptance before attributing a job-costing gap to the product.
Collection Gap & DSO
Collection rate, DSO, billing speed, and aged AR. The median collected-to-billed ratio is 85.1%. Reconcile aging, credits and cutoff before treating a gap as recoverable cash.
Change Orders & Scope Creep
Use 95%+ advance approval as a practitioner control target, not a measured best-in-class percentile. Trace approved scope to price, authorized work and final invoices.
Service Calls
Margin, callback rate, tech utilization, and visit economics on demand service work. Compare delivered revenue and complete cost for the same service calls before ranking margin.
Maintenance Contracts
Service agreement gross margin (median 37.9%), renewal rates, and pull-through. Recurring work still requires supported scope, cost and renewal economics; the margin distribution does not measure scalability.
Service Agreement Profitability
The full SA margin distribution, from -30% to 70%+, plus renewal and lifecycle economics. A low recorded margin calls for a pricing, scope and cost-coverage review; the distribution does not establish the cause.
Time & Materials
T&M margins, quote-to-invoice variance, scope-change capture, and unbilled labor. Match authorized scope, eligible hours, final billing and complete costs before attributing a margin gap.
Install Projects
Install/replacement margins, progress billing timing, retainage, and estimate-vs-actual variance. Review project cash timing against obligations and liquidity before drawing a solvency conclusion.
Commercial Projects
Commercial GC/specialty margins, WIP discipline, jobs open without invoice, and bonding ratios. Closeout and WIP are different measures; match completion, billings and collections before sizing a cash gap.
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
Mixed rate-card medians: helper $34/hr to journeyman $76/hr across 18,000+ employees; company median $79/hr. Match wage, loaded-cost or billing definitions before comparing.
Pricing & Markup
Quoted line margins across 2.2M+ records: labor 47.7%, materials 31.5%, equipment 25.5%, subs 23.6%. Not realized job margins or proof that changing service mix increases profit.
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.
HVAC/Mechanical Revenue Per Building
What one commercial building is worth per year to the HVAC or mechanical contractor who services it, by building type, size and age, across 25,912 buildings. These coefficients are trade-specific and are not applied to plumbing, electrical or roofing.
Commercial Building Market by Metro
Serviceable commercial building stock across 100 US metros, with plumbing/HVAC competition explicitly labeled as a scoped Census comparison.
Commercial Building Market by State
Compare serviceable commercial buildings, revenue at full capture, buildings per competing plumbing and HVAC location, and nominal construction growth across all 50 states plus DC.
Trades Reputation
Star ratings, review counts, claim and closure status across 90,000+ listings in five published trade categories. The current HVAC review median is 9 nationally, 26 in California and 4 in Arkansas. In the state-eligible HVAC aggregate, 36.7% differ by over 10 percentile points between national and state ranks; ranking differences do not measure workmanship.
State and permit market research
Size service demand by state, compare commercial building opportunity, or use national permit activity to see contractor concentration and seasonality. Each view answers a different market question and states the limit of what its data can support.
Total service demand by state
Annual service demand, employer firms by revenue tier, and financial anchors for roofing, HVAC, and commercial cleaning.
Compare service demand →Commercial building opportunity by state
Serviceable commercial buildings, modeled revenue at full capture, buildings per rival, and construction growth.
Compare commercial buildings →Permit market benchmarks
Operating tiers by permit volume and geographic spread, contractor concentration, roofing seasonality, and downloadable evidence.
Explore permit demand →Individual state benchmark pages
Open one state for its combined bill rates, labor market, service demand, and commercial building stock. National operating benchmarks are clearly separated from locally measured or allocated data.
Contractor benchmarks by metro
Open one of the 100 largest US metro areas for serviceable commercial buildings, modeled revenue at full capture, competing plumbing and HVAC locations, and local trade employment growth.
Need to compare systems instead? Browse the contractor software pricing and capability directory for published pricing, estimated seat cost, and finance fit.
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). Named vendor and industry publications also appear as labeled directional references. They do not establish measured benchmark populations or Level client results.
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. When sources differ, compare their observation periods, samples and definitions before drawing a conclusion.
Quartile-based, not averages
Where supported, inspect bottom-decile, P25, median, P75 and top-decile distributions. Other sources report means or separate reference values. Compare like-for-like definitions; a percentile is not automatically a target.
Refresh cadence
Each page states its review date and observation period. A review does not mean every figure was newly collected. Check the displayed snapshot and definitions 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 page identifies its review date and source observation period. A review date does not mean every figure was newly collected. Public-company comparisons retain their filing period and methodological limits; verify the displayed source rather than assuming a fixed refresh schedule.
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). They support operating questions and valuation comparisons; neither establishes your company's value or an investor's offer.
Simple pricing
Three tiers, one ladder.
$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.
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Drop your info and we’ll show your real margin after callbacks and rework, which crews and jobs are worth the time, and how much cash is sitting in work you have already finished.
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