Most repair and property management companies handle dispatch one of two ways. They put someone on payroll, or they hire an outside team to take calls and assign jobs. Both are common. The right answer usually comes down to call volume, the hours you need covered, and how much of your process is already written down.
This post covers what each option costs, what each one handles well, and where each one tends to break.
The US Department of Labor classifies this work as dispatchers, except police, fire, and ambulance. The role covers scheduling and sending out workers, crews, and service vehicles, relaying work orders by phone or radio, answering customer questions about service, and keeping records of jobs and charges (O*NET, US Department of Labor).
Survey responses from people doing the job fill in the day. All of them said they are on the phone every day. 76% said they work under time pressure daily. 69% said they deal with angry or discourteous people daily. 75% said a typical work week runs longer than 40 hours (O*NET work context data).
That last number affects cost, and it comes up again below.
Start with wages. In the United States, the median wage for the role was $24.20 an hour, or $50,340 a year, in the May 2025 federal wage survey (Bureau of Labor Statistics data via O*NET).
In Canada, the national median is $28.00 an hour. Provincial medians run from $22.44 in Manitoba to $31.35 in British Columbia, and the national range across all workers is $20.00 to $41.76 (Job Bank, Employment and Social Development Canada).
Wages are not the full employment cost. Across US private industry in March 2026, wages and salaries averaged $32.60 per hour worked and benefits averaged $14.01, so benefits accounted for 30.1% of what employers spent on compensation (Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation). In Canada, 88.3% of dispatchers receive at least one non-wage benefit (Job Bank).
Overtime is the next line. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, covered non-exempt employees must be paid at least one and one-half times their regular rate for hours worked past 40 in a week (US Department of Labor, Fact Sheet #23). Evening callbacks and weekend coverage handled by a salaried desk person are usually paid at that rate.
Recruiting, training, and covering vacation and sick days sit on top of all of it. Those vary too much between companies to put a general number on.
A workweek is 168 hours, defined in the FLSA as seven consecutive 24-hour periods (US Department of Labor, Fact Sheet #23). One full-time position covers about 40 of them.
For business-hours-only coverage, one dispatcher plus a backup is usually enough. For evenings, weekends, or overnight, one person cannot do it. Full coverage takes three or four seats, or an arrangement for the hours nobody is at the desk.
This is the point where most companies start comparing the two models.
Accounts that need memory. When the dispatcher needs to know which property manager wants a call before a tech arrives, or which unit has a recurring problem, that knowledge builds faster in a room with the service manager.
Tight field coordination. Someone sitting near the shop can walk over and ask a question instead of sending a message.
Processes that are still moving. If routing rules change month to month, writing them down for an outside team is harder than adjusting them in person.
Lower call volume. If the phone rings a dozen times a day, one person can handle dispatch alongside other admin work.
Buying evening and weekend coverage is usually simpler than staffing a night shift and paying shift premiums.
Cold snaps, heat waves, and storms produce days with several times the normal call load. A team absorbs that. One person queues it.
Vacations, sick days, and turnover do not leave the desk empty.
A second service area does not have to mean a second hire on day one.
In-house dispatch breaks when the process only exists in one person’s head. If the routing rules, the on-call list, and the escalation thresholds were never written down, a resignation turns into weeks of missed and mishandled jobs.
Outsourced dispatch breaks when the handoff is thin. A team without access to your scheduling software, without a written definition of an emergency, and without an agreed escalation path will make judgment calls, and some of those calls will be wrong.
Both models depend on the same four documents: a list of job types and how each one gets routed, a written rule for what counts as an emergency, a current on-call roster, and a script for what to tell a customer when nobody can get there today. Companies that have these four things tend to succeed with either model. Companies that have none of them tend to struggle with both.
Writing out these five answers usually makes the decision clearer than a cost comparison on its own.
Our main guide covers how outsourced dispatch works day to day, what to hand over first, how the transition is usually sequenced, and what to measure once it is running.
Read the guide to dispatch outsourcing