Why no one can give you a number
Search for a coating production rate and you get confident figures with no context. They are not useful. Too many things sit between that number and your crew.
- Crew size. Two installers and three installers are not the same rate per person, and often not even proportional. A third person on a small garage can slow things down.
- Experience. A crew on its four hundredth garage and one on its ninth do the same work at very different speeds.
- System. A one day polyaspartic with a full broadcast, a metallic pour, and a densify and seal are three different days of work.
- Slab condition. The biggest one, and the subject of its own section below.
- Job spacing. Three floors in one subdivision and three floors across a county are different numbers of working hours.
Any published rate has silently picked all five. The useful number comes out of your own finished jobs, and it takes about ten floors to get.
Measuring your own rate
Two fields on every finished job. Square feet coated, and crew hours worked. Divide one by the other. That is the whole method.
Three things to get right so the number means something.
- Count all the hours. Loading, driving, setup, grinding, coating, cleanup, driving back. Count only the hours the crew was coating and you measured a fantasy, then estimated from it.
- Record the slab condition. Same four buckets you use on an estimate. Without it you are averaging different jobs together.
- Record the system. So you can sort by it later.
After ten jobs, sort by condition. Now you have three or four rates instead of one. That is the point. One average rate describes a floor you never actually do. A rate per condition describes the floors in front of you.
This falls out of job costing for free. If you already capture material and hours against jobs, the rate is sitting in the data waiting to be divided.
Condition is the thing that matters
Of everything that moves your rate, slab condition moves it most. It is also the only one that changes job to job.
The same 600 ft² garage is a comfortable day on clean, solid concrete. It is a day and a half with a failing coating to remove, six spalls to patch, and oil soaked in where the car sat. Same square footage. Same system. Same crew. And on a residential floor that extra half day is usually most of the profit.
So condition has to show up in two places, consistently.
- In the estimate, slowing the assumed rate so the price covers the real day. The price calculator uses a condition factor for exactly that.
- In how you measure the crew, so a hard floor is not recorded as a slow day by a crew that did nothing wrong.
Get that second one wrong and you have built a quiet reason for your best installer to dodge hard jobs. Then the difficult floors end up with whoever could not get out of them.
Where the day actually goes
Shops that measure honestly for the first time are usually surprised by the same thing. The coating hours are fine. It is everything around them.
- Showing up without the right material. The expensive one, because it is a round trip in the middle of a working day.
- A slab the customer did not clear. Boxes, a freezer, a workbench. Agreed in writing on the proposal, or paid for by you in crew hours.
- Setup and cleanup nobody has timed. Time it once. It is usually bigger than anyone guesses, and it is the same on a small floor and a big one. That is why small floors cost more per square foot.
- Waiting. On power, on water, on a homeowner to move a car, on the second guy to show up.
- Driving between jobs. Two floors booked across town instead of across the street is an hour you will never invoice.
Every one of those can be scheduled or prevented. None of them needs anyone to work faster. That is the right place to push, not at the grinder.
Do not squeeze prep time. It is the most tempting place to find hours and the most expensive place to find them.
Prep shortcuts do not show up on handover day. They show up six weeks later, as a coating lifting off a floor you already got paid for. That costs you crew time, material, a schedule slot, and a customer whose story about you just changed. The most expensive hour in coating is the one you spend going back.
What to do with the number
Once you have a rate per condition, it does three jobs for you.
It prices every floor
Square feet divided by the rate gives you crew days. Crew days times your loaded crew cost gives you labor. Labor is your biggest cost. Everything downstream of that in your pricing depends on this one number being honest.
It makes the schedule real
A calendar built on hopeful rates produces the same week every time. A job runs over. The crew turns up late to the next one. A customer who was promised a morning start is annoyed. A schedule built on measured rates holds.
It tells you who needs help
When you can compare installers on the same condition of slab, the differences mean something. Usually it is not effort. It is one technique or one habit, and it is coachable once you can see it. That is what crew performance tracking is for. Production per person, start times and callbacks, on a board the crew can see on a phone.
Worth being clear which direction that goes. A leaderboard works when the crew can see it and thinks it is fair. A production number the owner keeps on a laptop and brings up in reviews is a complaint, not a system.
Measure it without the evening spreadsheet
CoatHQ records square feet and crew hours against each job automatically, and reports production per installer on a board the crew can see. Free to active Resinwerks partners. You buy the resin.
Get the software free with ResinwerksCoatHQ is free to active Resinwerks partners. You buy the resin. No subscription and no platform fee. Resinwerks makes its money on resin, not on software.
Common questions
How much should a coating crew produce per day?
There is no industry figure worth using. Output depends on crew size, experience, the system you install, the slab condition and how far apart the jobs are. What matters is that you measure your own rate from finished jobs and estimate from it. A shop estimating from a number it never measured is guessing in the exact spot its biggest cost lives.
How do I measure my crew production rate?
Record square feet coated and crew hours on every finished job, then divide. Do it for ten jobs and sort them by slab condition. You will get three or four rates, one per condition. Those are far more useful than one average, because the average describes a floor you never actually do.
Why does slab condition matter so much?
Because bad concrete costs you time before it costs you material. An old coating to remove, heavy patching or soaked in oil can add hours of grinding to an otherwise identical floor. On a one day residential job, half a day of extra prep is usually most of the profit. That is why condition belongs in the estimate, not as a surprise on site.
Should I push my crew to produce more?
Push the right thing. The fastest place to save time on a coating job is prep, and prep shortcuts arrive weeks later as peeling on a finished floor, at your cost. Push setup time, travel, second trips to the supply house and material handling instead. Those are pure waste. Treat grinding time as something to get right, not something to squeeze.
What slows a coating crew down most?
Rarely the coating. It is the things around it. Showing up without the right material. A slab the customer did not clear. A second trip to the supply house. Waiting on power or water. Setup and cleanup nobody has ever timed. Most shops that measure honestly find the productive hours are fine and the surrounding hours are where the day went.
No production figures on this page, on purpose. We do not publish square feet per day numbers because we do not have verified data across crew sizes, systems and markets. A confident wrong figure would get built into somebody’s pricing and stay there.
The method above gives you your number in about ten jobs. Yours is the one that matters.