How many billable hours do you really make as a consultant? Utilisation, rate and what an hour costs

A consultant sells time. But far from every hour you work can be billed. Business development, proposals, administration, training and internal meetings are work, but not revenue. The share of available hours that you do bill is called utilisation or billability.

That one ratio determines what an hour costs you and which rate you need. There are no official Dutch figures on billable hours. But with CBS figures on costs, wages and prices you can work out for yourself where your limit lies.

In this article

1. What is the difference between hours worked, available hours and billable hours?
2. How many billable hours are realistic?
3. What does an employed consultant cost per billable hour?
4. Which hourly rate goes with your utilisation?
5. Do consultancy rates rise as fast as wages?
6. What does research say about managing by billable hours?
7. How do you manage utilisation as a small firm?

What is the difference between hours worked, available hours and billable hours?

Available hours are the hours you can work, after holidays and public holidays. Billable hours are the hours you invoice to a client. Utilisation is the number of billable hours divided by the available hours. If you bill 1,100 of 1,840 available hours, your utilisation is about 60%.

The rest of the time is not lost, but it does not produce revenue directly. Think of finding new clients, writing proposals, administration, keeping up with your field, training a colleague and being ill. Hours you do spend on a client but do not bill, for example because the assignment overran, also belong to that rest.

If you are self-employed, the hours criterion for income tax does not only count billable hours. You must spend at least 1,225 hours a year on your business, and all hours for the business count, including writing proposals and keeping the books. Merely being available without working does not count (Belastingdienst, hours criterion). So record those hours as well.

How many billable hours are realistic?

For most consultants it lies somewhere between half and two thirds of available hours. There is no official Dutch standard. CBS, UWV and the professional associations publish no figures on billable hours of consultancy firms.

What does exist is a benchmark by a software vendor among more than 250 Dutch consultancy firms of up to 110 FTE. In it, on average 61% of the hours of all employees are billable, including support staff. At the medium-sized firms that is 55% (Consultancy.nl, 6 October 2025). It is not an independent sample, and the method is not public. Use it as a rough comparison at most.

Worked example: a 40-hour week gives 2,080 hours a year. Take off six weeks of holidays and public holidays and 1,840 available hours remain. At 50% utilisation you bill 920 hours, at 60% about 1,100 hours, at 70% about 1,290 hours. The six weeks are an assumption. Use your own holiday days and your own hours from previous years.

What does an employed consultant cost per billable hour?

On average about € 97,000 per FTE per year in staff costs, at management consultancies in 2024. That follows from the CBS table with labour and financial data per industry: € 9,588 million in staff costs over 98,800 FTE employees (CBS, table 81156ned, our calculation). It includes gross wages, social security charges, pensions and other staff costs. It is an average across small and large firms, not a standard.

Divide that amount by the billable hours and you see what utilisation does. At 50% utilisation an hour costs about € 105 in staff costs, at 60% about € 88, at 70% about € 75 and at 80% about € 66. Premises, software, travel, insurance and profit come on top of that.

The hourly wage itself is much lower than what an hour costs. The median gross hourly wage of employed business analysts and organisation consultants was € 38.70 in 2025. A quarter earned € 29.80 or less, a quarter € 48.50 or more (CBS, table 86355NED). That hourly wage excludes holiday pay, bonuses and overtime, and is calculated over hours excluding holidays. The gap with the cost per billable hour comes from employer charges and above all from the hours you do not bill.

Which hourly rate goes with your utilisation?

A rate that covers all costs and a profit at the utilisation you actually achieve. So work backwards: add up all costs for a year, add the profit you want to make, and divide by the billable hours. How to do that step by step is explained in the article on the hourly rate of a tradesperson. The arithmetic is the same for a consultant.

Worked example: a firm with one employed consultant counts € 97,000 in staff costs and € 20,000 in other costs for that consultant (assumption). At 1,100 billable hours the cost price is about € 106 per hour, still without profit. If the consultant bills only 920 hours, the cost price is about € 127. The same rate then suddenly produces a loss.

The CBS figures for the industry as a whole are not a good yardstick for your margin. At management consultancies in 2024 only about half of the people working were employees: 118,700 of 248,400 jobs. The pay of self-employed people and owners is then not in staff costs but in the result (CBS, table 81156ned). So compare your own figures mainly with your own previous years.

Do consultancy rates rise as fast as wages?

No, not in recent years. The CBS price index for business management consultancy rose from 100 in 2021 to 108.6 in 2025. In the second quarter of 2026 the index was 0.5% higher than a year earlier (CBS, table 85817NED).

The median hourly wage of business analysts and organisation consultants rose over the same years from € 31.80 to € 38.70, about 22% (CBS, table 86355NED, our calculation). The two figures do not measure exactly the same thing. The median also shifts when different people enter the occupation. But the gap is large enough to take into account: if wages rise faster than prices, utilisation or the rate has to go up, or the margin shrinks.

What does research say about managing by billable hours?

If you manage only by billable hours, you get behaviour aimed at hours, not always at the firm. Alvehus and Spicer followed a large accounting firm in Sweden, with 42 interviews at all levels. Billable hours were the main yardstick for appraisal there. Work that was not billable, such as bringing in work for colleagues, was soon seen as work without value (Alvehus & Spicer, 2012).

In that study, employees also passed less rewarding hours on to others and sought out the assignments with the most billable hours. Lupu and Empson interviewed 36 experienced accountants in France. Even people with a lot of freedom and a senior position felt trapped in long working weeks (Lupu & Empson, 2015). Both studies are qualitative and concern large accounting firms. They show how an hours target plays out, not how often that happens in a small consultancy.

How do you manage utilisation as a small firm?

By recording all hours, including the non-billable ones, and looking each month at where the time went. Only then can you see whether low utilisation comes from too little work, too many internal hours, or hours you did work but did not bill.

• Record non-billable hours on a few fixed codes, such as business development, proposals, training, internal and sick.
• Record how many recorded hours you do not bill. That written-off share says a lot about your proposals and your pricing model.
• Agree a separate target per role. A junior is still learning and a partner brings in work. One standard for everyone does not work then.
• Calculate next year's rate using the utilisation you actually achieved this year, not the utilisation you hope to achieve.
• If you are self-employed: also record the hours for business development and administration. They count towards the 1,225 hours of the hours criterion.

A fixed price per assignment changes the question. Then it is not how many hours you record that counts, but how many hours the assignment really takes. Which pricing model suits which assignment depends on how well you know the scope in advance.

Sources

• CBS (Statistics Netherlands), Business sector: labour and financial data, by industry, SBI 2008 (table 81156ned), 702 Management consultancy activities, 2024, accessed 31 October 2026. cbs.nl
• CBS (Statistics Netherlands), Employees: hourly wage and occupation (table 86355NED), occupation 0413 Business analysts and organisation consultants, 2021 to 2025, accessed 31 October 2026. cbs.nl
• CBS (Statistics Netherlands), Service prices: commercial services and transport, index 2021=100 (table 85817NED), CPA 702 Business management consultancy services, accessed 31 October 2026. cbs.nl
• Belastingdienst, Conditions of the hours criterion (in Dutch), accessed 31 October 2026. belastingdienst.nl
• Consultancy.nl, Best performing consultancy firms break the € 200,000 per employee barrier (in Dutch), 6 October 2025 (analysis by Simplicate, a software vendor, more than 250 firms). consultancy.nl
• Alvehus, J. & Spicer, A. (2012). Financialization as a strategy of workplace control in professional service firms. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 23(7-8), 497-510. doi.org
• Lupu, I. & Empson, L. (2015). Illusio and overwork: playing the game in the accounting field. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 28(8), 1310-1340. doi.org