Does an Impact Driver Replace a Drill? A Milwaukee Buyer's Perspective

One of the first questions I ask when a project manager orders tools isn't about torque. It's about the actual job. Last month, a PM asked me, 'Do I need to add a drill to the crew kit, or can we just get by with impact drivers?' I told him I needed to see his purchase history before answering. Because 'does an impact driver replace a drill?' is not really a tool question. It's a cost question.

I'm a procurement manager for a 42-person commercial mechanical contractor. I've managed our tool and fastener budget for about six years—$240,000 a year, give or take—negotiated with 25+ vendors, and documented every order in our cost tracking system. I'm not an engineer. I'm the person who signs the P.O. and then explains to ownership why we had to redo something that should have been done right the first time.

The Surface Problem: One Tool vs. Another

When someone asks whether an impact driver can replace a drill, the first thing they usually compare is specs. The impact driver has higher peak torque. The drill has a chuck. Both are true. But they're not helpful if you're trying to control cost over a quarter.

A drill is made to make holes. An impact driver is made to drive fasteners. You can put a hex-shank drill bit in an impact driver and make it act like a drill. In a pinch. That pinch is exactly where the hidden cost starts.

The Deeper Problem: This Is Not a Tool Comparison

When I first started in procurement, I thought this was a tool-spec question. Three budget overruns later, I realized it's a tool-system question. People assume buying one tool instead of two saves money. What they don't see is the labor cost of using the wrong tool.

If you're driving self-tapping screws into steel framing all day, an impact driver is the right choice. It's faster, easier on the wrist, and does a cleaner job in that task. If you're boring a 3/4-inch hole through a top plate, you want a drill. The impact driver may spin a spade bit, but the action is a pulsing rotation, and the bit gets less steady support. When the bit grabs, the work-piece can split. The repair costs far more than the difference in tool price.

From the outside, the surface illusion is that this is a one-time buying decision. The reality is that decisions like this show up in rework labor, damaged material, trips to the supply house, and a tool that still gets bought later. I've circled back to that exact purchase more times than I'd like to count.

When 'Getting By' Shows Up in My Spreadsheet

In my first year, I made the classic rookie mistake: I approved a one-tool kit for a service truck because the tech said he'd been using an impact driver for everything. The initial purchase saved about $110. Three weeks later, he tried to bore through a pine header with a hex-shank spade bit. The bit grabbed, the header split, and someone had to go back to fix it. That fix cost $350. We bought the drill anyway. Net loss: $240 plus the pain of explaining it to the owner.

That pattern shows up in the data, too. When I audited our 2023 purchases, the categories I flagged were 'emergency shipping' and 'replacement material'. Together they were about 11 percent of our tool and fastener spend. None of it was caused by one major failure. It was caused by crews trying to make one tool do two jobs and then buying the right tool after the fact.

Concrete anchors are the clearest example. A Kwik Bolt TZ expansion anchor has a published hole size and torque setting. You need a clean hole drilled to the right depth. If someone uses an impact driver with a masonry bit because that's the only thing on the truck, the hole is ragged. The anchor may seat, but it may not expand the way Simpson Strong-Tie's setting table says it should. Then it fails under load, and now you're looking at re-fastening an entire rack. The labor and inspection time is never in the original quote.

The small parts get the same treatment. A bag of fender washers costs less than a lunch order. But if the job calls for 2-inch fender washers and the nearest ones are 40 minutes away, that's an expensive trip in a work truck. The least expensive part of a job is the part. The most expensive is the extra trip and the hour of downtime.

The Part Nobody Puts on a P.O.

What I've learned is that the real cost isn't the tool or the fastener. It's availability. A tool that's in a warehouse 200 miles away might as well not exist when a crew is standing around at 7 a.m. That's why we changed some of our buying workflow around local supply. Ace Hardware carries Milwaukee tools, and for us that means a lot. If someone loses the 11-in-1 Milwaukee screwdriver on the job, we can order another for pickup and have it before lunch. We can add fender washers, anchors, and a drill bit to the same order, instead of paying freight and waiting two days.

The 11-in-1 Milwaukee screwdriver is also a pretty good reminder: That is a tool that actually replaces other tools. It handles multiple driver sizes and bit types in one handle, costs a fraction of a power tool, and saves time every single day. But no screwdriver, no matter how clever, is going to drill a 1/2-inch hole in a steel stud. There is no substitute for the right tool for the right process.

What Actually Saves the Most Money

So, does an impact driver replace a drill? The honest answer is: not for the jobs that need a drill. It can handle a lot of screw-driving. It can make some pilot holes. But if you're drilling concrete, boring through framing, or making clean holes in steel, you need a drill—or a rotary hammer for concrete. If you try to skip it, you're betting labor against tool cost, and the labor wins almost every time.

The better approach is to think in systems. Milwaukee's M12 and M18 batteries work across both drills and impact drivers. You don't need to double the charger setup to have both tools on the truck. That is the whole point of a battery platform. Buy the impact driver for fastening. Buy the drill for holes. They share batteries, and the total cost of owning both is lower than the cost of one redo.

Our simple rule now: every service truck gets an impact driver and a drill/driver. Not one or the other. We also keep a stock of the small stuff—fender washers, anchors, driver bits, the 11-in-1 screwdriver—because those parts are cheap and the trip to get them isn't. If you're already ordering from Ace Hardware for Milwaukee tools, add those items to the same pickup. It takes an extra minute and saves an extra trip.

Bottom Line

Bottom line: An impact driver does not replace a drill. It replaces the screwdriver in your hand, not the hole-making tool in your kit. The real question is not 'Which one tool can do everything?' It's 'What is the total cost of having the wrong tool on site?' That number is usually higher than the price of the right tool. Buy for the job. Buy from a local Milwaukee retailer when you can. And put the fender washers, anchors, and the 11-in-1 screwdriver on the same P.O. That is how you actually control costs.