How to Reduce Technician Drive Time in Jobber

Drive time is the easiest cost in field service to ignore, because nothing bills for it and nothing on the schedule flags it. A technician driving 40 minutes between jobs looks identical on the calendar to one driving 10.

The good news is that Jobber has more routing capability than most teams use, and several of the biggest wins cost nothing beyond a settings change. This guide covers six methods, ordered by effort; the first three take under an hour.

1. Fix your map pins before anything else

Every routing decision Jobber makes depends on where it thinks your properties are. If a pin is wrong, the route built around it is wrong, and no amount of optimization fixes it.

Jobber flags the worst cases for you. In the map view, a property that can't be located appears with a red pin icon in the task list. Those are the obvious failures. The more expensive ones are pins that resolve to something: a street centroid, a neighboring building, or the wrong end of a rural road, and look fine until a technician arrives.

To correct one, go to the property, then More Actions and Adjust Map Location. You can drag the pin manually and save.

Worth doing as a batch exercise: pull your most-visited properties and check each one. Commercial addresses, new builds, and rural properties are the usual offenders.

2. Use anytime visits wherever the customer doesn't need a fixed time.

This is the single biggest unlock, and most teams don't realize it.

Jobber's route optimization only works on anytime visits, visits without a scheduled start or end time. Per Jobber's own documentation, a visit with a set time is excluded from routing entirely.

So if your dispatcher books every job at a specific hour out of habit, you've turned the feature off without knowing it. A day of fixed-time visits cannot be optimized, no matter what plan you're on.

The fix is a booking policy rather than a software change:

• Fixed time: only when the customer genuinely requires it, or when there's an SLA

• Anytime: everything else, with an arrival window communicated to the customer instead

Most residential work doesn't need a fixed hour. It needs a window and a heads-up call. Converting even half your day to anytime visits gives the optimizer something to work with.

3. Turn on route optimization and actually run it

Route optimization is available on select Jobber plans. Check your plan under Gear Icon → Account and Billing. 

In the new schedule, go to the day view and select the vertical view. In the anytime visits section, select the Optimize anytime appointments icon, choose the dates and the team members you want to optimize, and click Optimize. Add the map to the day view afterwards to see what changed.

Two things teams get wrong here. First, they run it once, decide the result looks odd, and never return. Second, they optimize a single technician instead of the team, which reorders one person's stops without addressing whether the right person has the right jobs.

For a deeper walkthrough of what the optimizer does and doesn't handle, see our guide to Jobber route optimization.

4. Set the start and end points of each day

An optimized route that starts from the wrong place isn't optimized. If Jobber assumes a technician begins at the first job rather than at home or the shop, the first leg of the day is unaccounted for.

When you run optimization, you can control this. Drag the appointment you want to begin with to the top of the list and the one you want to finish with to the bottom, then check "Keep first appointment at start of route" or "Keep the last appointment at end of route" before optimizing.

There's a useful trick in Jobber's documentation for anchoring to a physical location: create an anytime visit for your office or shop address and drag it to the top or bottom of the list before running the optimizer.

This matters most for teams where technicians take trucks home. The last job of the day should be the one closest to where the technician sleeps, and that only happens if you tell the system where that is.

5. Cluster recurring work by geography, not by customer preference

Recurring maintenance is where drive time compounds quietly. A contract booked in March for "the second Tuesday" sits on the calendar for years, and nobody revisits whether it still fits the route.

Do a periodic audit:

• Export your recurring visits and group them by area.

• Look for days where one technician crosses the service area for a single maintenance call.

• Where the customer is flexible, move that visit to the day the area is already being served

You won't be able to move all of them. Moving a third of the movable ones usually pays for the afternoon it takes.

This is also the highest-value thing to do before peak season, when there's no slack left to absorb bad routing. If you run HVAC scheduling specifically, do this audit in the shoulder months; once demand spikes, nobody has an afternoon to spare.

6. Re-optimize when the day changes, not just when you build it

The schedule you build at 6am rarely survives the morning. A callout, an emergency, or a job that runs long invalidates the sequence for everyone downstream.

Most dispatchers patch: move the affected job, absorb the disruption, and leave the rest untouched. The remaining day is now suboptimal, and nobody has time to rebuild it manually.

You can re-run Jobber's optimization midday on the remaining anytime visits, and it's worth building the habit of a standing check at 11am, after the morning's disruptions have landed.

Where Jobber's routing stops

Everything above works within one important constraint: Jobber's optimization improves the order of visits that have already been assigned to a technician.

In other words, Jobber helps answer:

“What order should this technician drive in?”

But it doesn't fully answer the questions that come before that:

• Should this job be assigned to this technician at all?

• Is one technician carrying significantly more work than everyone else?

• Could a different assignment reduce unnecessary drive time?

• Is the current schedule likely to create overtime later in the day?

• Does the closest available technician actually have the right skills for the job?

That's the difference between route optimization and schedule optimization.

Route optimization improves the sequence of stops within an existing assignment. Schedule optimization looks across the team and asks whether the assignments themselves could be improved.

That distinction matters because inefficient assignments can create costs and service problems that better routing alone won't solve: unnecessary fuel and drive time, technicians running late to customer appointments, and overtime at the end of the day.

If your technicians are already well matched to their work and the main problem is simply the order they're driving, Jobber's built-in routing may be all you need. Apply the methods above and measure the results.

If drive time, late arrivals, or overtime remain a problem after routing improves, the opportunity may be in the assignments themselves.

FieldOps Co-Pilot is designed for that next layer. It connects to your Jobber account and analyzes your live schedule for drive time, workload imbalance, and assignment opportunities. It then recommends specific schedule changes your dispatcher can review, approve, or reject—helping reduce unnecessary fuel and travel, improve the likelihood that technicians arrive within their expected appointment windows, and reduce avoidable technician overtime.

Get a free 30-day schedule analysis pilot

See how FieldOps Co-Pilot analyzes your Jobber schedule for unnecessary drive time, workload imbalance, and assignment opportunities—and identifies ways to reduce fuel costs, improve on-time arrivals, and limit avoidable overtime.

Apply for the free 30-day pilot 

Start here

If you do nothing else from this list, do the first three. Fix your pins, convert what you can to anytime visits, and run optimization across the whole team rather than one person at a time.

Then measure. Pull a week of drive time now, apply the changes, and pull the same week next month. Without a baseline you'll have opinions instead of a number, and if you'd rather not build that baseline by hand, use your existing Jobber job and time data to establish a baseline, then compare it after making the changes.

Frequently asked questions

Does Jobber have route optimization?

Yes. Route optimization is available on select Jobber plans and lets you optimize assigned anytime visits from the schedule. Check your plan under Gear Icon → Account and Billing. The important limitation is that only anytime visits qualify; any visit with a scheduled start or end time is excluded from routing.

Why isn't route optimization working on my schedule?

The most common reason is that your visits have fixed times. Only anytime visits can be optimized. Check whether your dispatcher is booking specific hours out of habit rather than because the customer requires them.

Can Jobber reassign jobs between technicians automatically?

No. Jobber's optimization reorders stops within a technician's existing assignment. Deciding which technician should have which job remains a manual decision, which is where most workload imbalance and overtime originates.

How often should I rerun route optimization?

At minimum when you build the schedule. Better is a second pass mid-morning, once the day's callouts and overruns have landed, since the original sequence is usually invalid by then.

Does reducing drive time actually reduce costs?

It reduces fuel and vehicle wear directly, but the larger saving is usually labor. Drive hours are paid hours that generate no revenue, and they're often what pushes a day into overtime. Calculate at the fully loaded hourly cost, not the base wage.