Building a flat-rate price book

In this article

Time and materials punishes you for being good. The faster you work the less you earn on the same job, and the customer spends the visit watching the clock rather than the work. A price book fixes both, and it is the single artefact that turns your rate into money on every van rather than just in your head.

What one entry looks like

Five fields. That is the whole format, and getting these five right for thirty jobs beats getting three hundred half‑right.

Field	Example	Why it earns its place
Task name	Replace kitchen mixer tap	Short enough to find in ten seconds while a customer watches you.
Plain description	“Remove the existing tap, fit a new mixer supplied by us, renew the flexible connectors, test and clean down.”	This is the half that sells it. It also defines the scope, so “while you’re here” is a separate line rather than a favour.
Labour hours	1.25	Honest hours, including set‑up and clean‑down. Not the best you have ever done it in.
Material allowance	$60	A budget, not a receipt. Small variances even out; large ones mean the task needs splitting.
Flat price	$330	One number the customer approves before you start. No clock, no argument.

The formula

Every entry is built the same way:

(labour hours × your fully loaded rate) + (material allowance × your mark‑up) + overhead allocation + profit

Three of those are decisions you make once, not per job:

• Your fully loaded rate — overhead per billable hour plus wage plus taxes and benefits. If you have not built it yet, do that first in how to price a plumbing job; the plumbing price calculator will run it for you. The whole price book inherits this number, so an error here is an error on every job you quote for a year.
• Your parts mark‑up — 40–60% is what the trade runs. It pays for truck stock, ordering time, storage, handling and warranty risk, none of which are free.
• Your profit target — if you want 20% net above break‑even, work out the cost of the task and divide by 0.80. Dividing is not the same as adding 20%, and the difference is your margin.

Then sanity‑check the answer against the market. A price book that consistently lands well outside what people pay is telling you something about your billable hours or your overhead, not about your greed.

Start with thirty, not three hundred

The mistake that stops most price books ever being finished is trying to catalogue everything. You do not need everything. You need the jobs that fill your week.

• Pull your last hundred invoices and count what actually repeats. It will be a shorter list than you expect — usually thirty jobs cover most of the diary.
• Write those thirty first. Ship it. An unfinished perfect price book earns nothing; a finished rough one starts earning on Monday.
• Leave a “custom quote” entry for everything else, priced hourly on the spot. That is not a gap, it is the correct answer for unusual work.
• Add tasks as they repeat. The third time you quote something from scratch, it belongs in the book.
• Split anything where the price keeps being wrong. “Clear a blockage” is not one task — a sink and a mainline are different jobs and need different entries.

Give three options, not one number

The strongest thing a price book lets you do is stop asking a yes‑or‑no question. Present the same job three ways and the conversation changes from whether to which.

Option	What it is	What it does
Good	Fix the immediate fault. Standard part, warranty as standard.	Anchors the bottom. Somebody choosing this still chose you.
Better	Fix it, plus the thing that will fail next — the shut‑off valve, the connectors, the tired flexi.	Usually wins, and it is genuinely the right advice. Say why in one sentence.
Best	Better‑grade parts, longer warranty, and the related work done at the same time.	Some people want the problem gone permanently. If you never offer it, you never find out who.

None of this is a hard sell. It is one visit instead of three, which is cheaper for the customer and far more profitable for you, because the drive and the set‑up are already paid for.

The descriptions do the selling

A price book with bare task names is a rate card. What makes it work is that a customer can read exactly what they are buying while you stand there.

• Write it in plain language. No trade shorthand and no part numbers.
• Say what is included and what is not. “Does not include repairs to tiling or cabinetry” prevents an argument you will otherwise have twice a year.
• State the warranty on the line. It is worth more than a discount and it costs nothing to print.
• Keep it to two or three sentences. Longer and nobody reads it, which defeats the point.

Keeping it alive

A price book is a living document, and a dead one is worse than none because everybody quietly stops trusting it.

• One version, in one place. The moment there is a printed copy in a second van, you have two price books and one of them is wrong.
• Review twice a year, and immediately when costs move. Parts and wages do not wait for your review date.
• Compare book hours against actual hours on the jobs you did. This is the only thing that makes a price book more accurate, and almost nobody does it.
• Watch your close rate per task. If something is accepted every single time, it is too cheap. If something never is, it is wrong or it is badly described.
• Never discount off the book on the doorstep. Change the option, not the price — that is what having three is for.

What breaks a price book

• Building it on a rate you never checked. Every entry inherits the error, so it is wrong three hundred times instead of once.
• Optimistic hours. Use what the job honestly takes on an ordinary day, not your personal best.
• Forgetting the drive and the paperwork. They belong in the loaded rate. If they are not in there, they are coming out of your margin on every single line.
• Letting each tech “adjust” on site. Then you do not have a price book, you have a suggestion.
• Never updating it. A two‑year‑old price book is a pay cut you gave yourself and forgot about.

Sources

Every figure above comes from one of these, checked in August 2026.

• Plumber Magazine, flat‑rate pricing — the break‑even‑plus‑margin method, including why you divide by 0.80 rather than adding 20%.
• US Bureau of Labor Statistics — what a plumber earns, which is the first input to your loaded rate.
• The price‑book structure, the 20–30% ticket uplift over hourly and the 40–60% parts mark‑up are drawn from how the plumbing trade’s own pricing references teach it, cross‑checked across several independent ones. They are working benchmarks rather than survey data.

Deliberately few links here. Almost everybody writing about plumbing price books is selling one, and the entire point of this article is that yours should be built from your own last hundred invoices — which no vendor has.