Workforce and Labor

A DIY Way to Track Welder Arc-On Time Without Buying Software

Arc-on time is the share of a welder's paid hours with the arc actually burning, and in most shops it is far lower than anyone guesses. You do not need a monitoring system to find out. You need one afternoon and a stopwatch.

Arc-on time, sometimes called operating factor or duty cycle, is the fraction of a welder's paid time during which the arc is actually established. It is the most revealing productivity number in a fabrication shop and one of the least measured, largely because the commercial systems that track it are priced for large operations. You can measure it without buying anything. What you cannot do is guess it, because the guess is almost always high and the gap between guess and reality is where the money is.

Why the number is worth chasing

Manufacturing average hourly earnings currently sit at $30.35/hour (Jul 2026, BLS), and a welder in a skilled fabrication role typically commands a premium to that. Apply a mid-range 35% burden to the national benchmark and the fully loaded hour costs roughly $41. Over a 2,080-hour year, the difference between a shop running 20% arc-on and one running 35% is 312 additional arc hours per welder, which is roughly $12,783 of deposited weld obtained from the same payroll. Nothing about that requires a faster welder. It requires less waiting.

• Manufacturing wage, Jul 2026 (BLS): $30.35/hour
• Loaded hour at a 35% burden: $41
• Arc hours gained per welder per year: 312 h

Three methods, cheapest first

Pick the one that matches how much rigour you need

• Work sampling with a clipboard. Walk the shop at randomized times, record for each welder whether the arc is on, and after a few hundred observations the proportion is your arc-on time. Statistically sound, costs nothing, and is usually enough to prove the problem exists.
• Wire feeder counters. Many feeders log wire consumed. Divide wire mass by deposition rate for the process and you get arc hours without touching the welder or the workflow.
• A clamp-on current sensor with a data logger on the welding lead. Current above a threshold means the arc is live. This is the accurate method, it costs less than a day of the welder's time, and it produces a timestamped record you can correlate with the schedule.

The number is not the point. The reasons are.

Finding that arc-on time is 22% is only useful if you also record what the other 78% was. Log the reason alongside the observation: fixturing, material handling, waiting on a crane, tacking, grinding, inspection, looking for a fixture, or genuinely idle. In most shops the largest single bucket is material handling and setup, which means the fix is a fixture or a crane schedule rather than a productivity conversation with the welder. Measuring arc time without measuring the reasons produces a number that reads as an accusation and drives nothing.

Low arc-on time is almost never a welder problem. It is a fixturing, material handling, and scheduling problem wearing a welder's name.

What to do with a bad reading

Treat the first measurement as a baseline, not a verdict, and publish it as such. Then attack the largest non-arc bucket with something physical: a dedicated positioner for the highest-volume weldment, a staged material cart, a second fixture so setup happens off the machine. Re-measure with the same method after the change. The reason to prefer a cheap repeatable method over an expensive one is precisely this: you will want to run it several times, and a method you can repeat next month beats a more accurate one you will run once.

Use the labor cost calculator to convert arc hours into a fully burdened cost for your own rates. Price the labor

Published 2026-08-08.