How to price a plumbing job

In this article

This is the trade where the gap between what you charge and what you earn is widest, and it is not because plumbers are bad at maths. It is because almost everything that fills a plumber’s day — driving, diagnosing, parking, ordering, going back for the part, the call that turned out to be nothing — is real work that nobody is invoiced for.

So: the market rates first, then the number that actually decides whether you make money.

What people are actually charging

Item	Range	Notes
Hourly, general	$45–$200	Average about $90. Residential averages $80, commercial $100.
By licence level	$70 / $90 / $120	Average for apprentice, journeyperson and master. Bill the licence, not the person — a master’s hour is worth more even when the job is simple.
Trip or call‑out fee	$50–$300	$75–$150 is normal for residential. It pays for the drive, the diagnosis and the slot you gave away.
Service call	$100–$250	Usually includes the first hour. Decide up front whether it comes off an approved repair, and say so before you go.
Whole job	$182–$500	Average $340. That is the number most customers are braced for.
After hours	1.5–3×	Evenings, weekends, holidays. Or a separate emergency dispatch fee of $150–$350 before any repair cost.
Common jobs	$95–$2,000	Drain clearing $95–$500, toilet repair $100–$300, faucet swap $150–$600, water heater install $800–$2,000.

The number nobody counts

Billable efficiency is the share of the hours you pay for that end up on an invoice. The industry average is about 30%.

Work it through. You pay a plumber for an eight‑hour day. Two and a half of those hours get billed. If you set your price by thinking “he costs me $35 an hour, I’ll charge $90 and make good money”, you have priced 8 hours of cost against 2.5 hours of revenue — $280 of wage against $225 of billing, before you have paid for the van, the insurance, or yourself.

Every serious pricing decision in this trade comes back to that ratio. You can attack it from two directions: bill more of the day, or charge enough that the unbilled part is already paid for. Most people who make money do both.

Build your billable rate from underneath

Four lines. This is the calculation that most plumbers never do once, and it takes ten minutes.

• Overhead rate = annual overhead ÷ billable hours. Not hours worked — hours billed. $120,000 of overhead over 2,000 billable hours is $60 an hour before anybody has touched a wrench.
• True labour cost = (wage + payroll taxes + benefits) × hours. A $35 wage with 10% taxes and 15% benefits is $43.75, not $35. The median plumber wage nationally is around $34.70 an hour, so this is not a small number.
• Base cost = the two added together. In that example, $103.75 an hour. That is what an hour costs you to exist, with zero profit in it.
• Billable rate = base × your profit multiplier. Twenty per cent on $103.75 is $124.50 an hour. Notice how far that already is from the $90 average — and that the average includes plenty of people who have not done this sum.

If your answer comes out well above what your market pays, that is information, not a mistake. It means your billable hours are too low, your overhead is too high, or you are in the wrong segment — and no amount of working harder fixes any of the three.

The plumbing price calculator runs exactly this, including the billable‑share input, so you can see what happens to your rate when 30% becomes 45%.

Flat rate beats time and materials

Time and materials punishes you for being good. The faster you work, the less you earn on the same job — and the customer who watches the clock is watching you, not the work.

Flat‑rate pricing from a price book fixes both. The customer knows the number before you start. You are paid for the outcome rather than the duration. And it consistently lifts the average ticket by 20–30% against hourly billing, because a price book prices the whole job rather than the part you remembered to write down.

Building one is a weekend, not a project:

• List the thirty jobs you actually do most. Not everything — the thirty.
• For each, write the time it honestly takes including setup and clean‑up, and the parts it always needs.
• Price it from your billable rate, not from what the plumber down the road charges.
• Write a plain description of what the customer gets. This is the half that sells it.
• Review it twice a year, and every time your costs move.

Parts, trips and the premiums

Line	Normal	Why
Parts mark‑up	40–60%	Covers truck stock, ordering time, storage, handling and warranty risk. Small fittings carry a higher percentage; a water heater carries a lower percentage but more dollars.
Trip charge	$75–$150	Drive time, fuel, the diagnosis, dispatch, and the slot you can no longer sell.
Difficult access	+10–20%	Crawlspaces, slabs, anything you have to lie in.
Permits, multi‑day	+10–15%	Admin, inspection waits and mobilising twice.
Maintenance plan	$150–$250 a year	Only works if the fee covers the visits, the admin and the member discount. Never fund the discount out of your margin.

What the money should look like

Gross margin varies more by what kind of work you take than by how well you price it.

Work	Gross margin	What it means
Emergency	50–70%	The most profitable work in the trade, and the reason after‑hours cover is worth staffing rather than dreading.
Service and repair	35–55%	Your bread. A skilled plumber running four to six flat‑rate calls a day should be at the top of this.
New construction	20–30%	Volume work on thin margins and slow payment terms. It fills a diary; it does not build a business on its own.
Net profit, overall	15–25%	After everything, including a real wage for yourself. Below 10% and one bad receivable takes the quarter.

If everybody says yes, you are too cheap

The most useful pricing signal you have is your close rate, and almost nobody watches it. A quote acceptance rate near 100% does not mean your pricing is excellent. It means it is low enough that nobody has to think about it.

Two more that cost real money:

• Never start from a competitor’s rate. You do not know their billable hours, their overhead or whether they are quietly going out of business. Start from your own cost.
• Raise prices when costs move, not annually out of habit. Parts and wages do not wait for your review date.

Sources

Every figure above comes from one of these, checked in August 2026. We publish them because most pricing guides in this trade do not, which makes their numbers impossible to check.

• HomeAdvisor, cost to hire a plumber — hourly rates by licence level, trip and service fees, job averages and common repair costs. Built from homeowner‑reported project costs.
• US Bureau of Labor Statistics and PayScale — what a plumber earns, as distinct from what a plumber bills.
• The billable‑rate formula, the 30% billable‑efficiency figure, parts mark‑up, flat‑rate uplift and the gross‑margin bands by work type are drawn from how the plumbing trade’s own pricing and estimating guides teach it, cross‑checked across several independent ones. They are working benchmarks rather than survey data — your own last hundred jobs beat all of them.

Ranges move. If you are reading this a long way from 2026, re‑check HomeAdvisor first — it is updated yearly and built from what homeowners actually paid rather than from what anybody is selling.