If you manage a locate operation, the math hasn’t worked for at least three years. Ticket volumes across North America have increased 30 to 40 percent year over year, driven by infrastructure investment, higher 811 compliance rates, and an expanding network of buried utilities. Meanwhile, the workforce has been essentially flat. The industry lost significant headcount during the Great Resignation, and it hasn’t recovered.

The result is a simple but painful equation: dramatically more work, roughly the same number of people to do it.

Most locate contractors are managing this gap with overtime, and it shows. Burnout rates are climbing. Turnover is expensive. Quality is under pressure. And the cycle feeds itself — overworked locators leave, which increases the load on those who remain, which accelerates burnout, which drives more turnover.

But a small number of contractors have found a different approach. They’re handling 30 to 40 percent more tickets with the same headcount — without overtime, without quality compromises, and without burning out their best people.

The difference isn’t that they found more locators. It’s that they stopped wasting the ones they have.

Where Locator Time Actually Goes

To understand the solution, you first need to understand the problem at a granular level. When you break down a typical locator’s day, the picture is revealing.

A skilled utility locator’s core job is reading the ground, interpreting signals from electromagnetic equipment, making judgment calls about what’s buried where, and marking it accurately. That work requires training, experience, and attention. It’s the reason these professionals are valuable and hard to replace.

But in most operations, the actual locating — the skilled field work — represents only about 60 percent of a locator’s productive day. The other 40 percent is consumed by activities that have nothing to do with finding buried utilities.

That 40 percent includes transcribing depth readings and field notes into reports, manually entering ticket data, assembling completion documentation, filing positive response records, driving between sites due to inefficient routing, and communicating ticket status back to the office via phone calls and text messages.

In concrete terms, a locator working a standard 8-hour day might spend 3 or more hours on documentation and administrative tasks. Over a five-day week, that’s 15 or more hours that a skilled professional is spending on work that doesn’t require their expertise.

The Paperwork Tax

Think of this non-locate work as a tax on your operation’s capacity. For every locator on your payroll, you’re only getting about 60 percent of their potential ticket throughput because the other 40 percent is consumed by paperwork, communication overhead, and administrative tasks.

When ticket volumes were lower, this tax was manageable. You had enough capacity in the system to absorb the inefficiency. But at today’s volumes, the paperwork tax is the difference between keeping up and falling behind.

The math is straightforward. If a locator can complete eight tickets per day and spends 40 percent of their time on non-locate activities, the paperwork tax is consuming the equivalent of three to four tickets per day. Across a crew of ten locators, that’s 30 to 40 tickets per day that your operation can’t get to — not because you lack skilled people, but because those skilled people are filling out forms.

Over a month, the accumulated capacity loss can represent over 600 tickets. At a billing rate of $50 to $80 per ticket, the revenue impact of the paperwork tax is substantial.

What Changes When You Eliminate the Non-Locate Work

The contractors who have solved the ticket volume problem didn’t hire their way out of it. They engineered the paperwork tax out of their workflow.

Here is what that looks like in practice. A locator arrives on site, performs the locate, and captures the field data as a natural part of the locate process itself. GPS coordinates, depth readings, utility identification, photo documentation, and completion details are all recorded automatically during the work — not transcribed after the fact.

When the locator finishes the locate, the documentation is already done. There is no separate data entry step. No handwritten notes to decipher later. No end-of-day report assembly. The positive response is generated and filed automatically. The ticket status updates in real time without a phone call.

The locator’s next action after completing a locate is simply driving to the next site.

This is not a marginal improvement. When you eliminate the paperwork tax entirely, a locator who was completing eight tickets per day can handle eleven to twelve. Same person. Same skill set. Same working hours. The only thing that changed is that they’re spending their entire day doing the work that requires their expertise.

The Workforce Multiplier Effect

The compounding impact of this change is what makes it transformative rather than incremental.

When each locator handles 30 to 40 percent more tickets, you don’t just close the capacity gap at today’s volumes. You build headroom for the volume increases that are still coming. Infrastructure spending bills are still rolling out. 811 awareness continues to climb. The ticket volume trend line is going up, and it’s not reversing.

Contractors who have eliminated the paperwork tax are positioned to grow revenue without proportionally growing headcount. They’re not winning the staffing war by recruiting harder. They’re winning it by making every locator on their team more productive.

There is also a retention benefit that compounds over time. Locators who spend their day doing skilled field work — not paperwork — are more engaged, less frustrated, and less likely to leave. Reduced turnover means lower recruiting costs, less training time for new hires, and a more experienced average crew. All of which feeds back into higher quality and higher throughput.

What This Means for Your Operation

If you’re managing a locate operation and the ticket volume math isn’t working, the answer probably isn’t to find more locators. The answer is to look at what your current locators are doing with their time and ask a hard question: how much of their day is spent on work that doesn’t require their skills?

The contractors who are thriving at today’s volumes are the ones who’ve answered that question honestly and done something about it. They haven’t just adopted new technology. They’ve redesigned their workflow so that every minute of a locator’s day is spent on the work that actually matters.

Your best locator didn’t get into this industry to fill out forms. And at today’s ticket volumes, you can’t afford for them to.