88% fixed on the first visit — how we counted
Plenty of trade websites carry a "fixed first time" percentage. Ours used to be an honest estimate too. In August 2026 we stopped estimating and measured it, and this page explains exactly how — so you can judge the number for yourself.
Where the data comes from
Every job we do is recorded in our job management system (ServiceM8): the booking, the engineer's check-in when they arrive at the property, and the completion. We measured directly from those records. No jobs were hand-picked — the count covers every boiler, heating and hot-water repair job marked completed in the system.
What we counted
All 580 repair jobs completed between October 2023 and August 2026 (our system records begin in October 2023). Of those, 505 have attendance records — engineer check-ins from the mobile app for 92% of them, diary entries for the rest. The other 75 jobs have no attendance records either way (mostly early, office-handled entries), so we left them out rather than guess.
A visit is a calendar day on which an engineer attended the job. A repair counts as fixed on the first visit only when every minute of attendance on that job falls on a single day — diagnosis, parts and repair included.
The result
447 of 505 repairs — 88.5% — were completed on the first visit. We publish it as 88%, rounding down. The rate has been steady in every year we measured:
| Year | Fixed on the first visit |
|---|---|
| 2023 (from October) | 38 of 41 — 92.7% |
| 2024 | 85 of 95 — 89.5% |
| 2025 | 206 of 234 — 88.0% |
| 2026 (to 23 August) | 118 of 135 — 87.4% |
Of the repairs that did need more than one day: 46 took two visits, 11 took three, and one stubborn fault took four.
The hard question we asked ourselves
Could a return visit hide as a brand-new job in the system? To test that, we recounted the harshest way possible: treating every repair we completed at the same address within 30 days of a previous one as if it were the same fault dragging on — even though, with older boilers, a second breakdown a few weeks later is very often a genuinely different part failing. Counted that brutally, the figure is still 80%. With a 7-day window it is 83%. The truth sits between those floors and 88.5%; we publish the per-job measurement because it is the direct answer to the question customers actually ask — "will my repair be sorted in one visit?"
Why the number is high
Two habits, mainly. We diagnose before we replace anything — flue gas analysis, flow and return temperatures, gas rate, electrical checks — so the part that gets fitted is the right one. And the van carries the spares that fail most often, so once the fault is found the fix usually happens there and then instead of waiting on an order and a second appointment.
Measured 26 August 2026 from complete ServiceM8 job records, October 2023 – August 2026. We re-measure periodically and update this page and the figure across our sites when we do. The same figure applies on our specialist repair site, birminghamboilerrepair.co.uk — same engineers, same diary, same data.