How Much to Charge for Plumbing: Build the Number Yourself

Short answer: How much to charge for plumbing starts with the unit the job sells in — per fixture for replacements, per linear foot plus per fixture for repipes, a call-out fee plus hourly for service. Build the price from the bottom: crew cost per hour, material at supply house prices, overhead per billable hour, then margin. A 50-gallon heater swap at 5.1 crew hours and $865 of material lands near $1,950 at a 22 percent margin.

Nobody can hand you a plumbing price, because the two inputs that decide it are yours: what an hour of your crew costs and how many hours you actually bill in a year. What travels between shops is the method. This page walks one job all the way through — a water heater replacement in a second-floor closet — and then shows how to turn that result into a published per-fixture rate you can quote from the truck.

Which unit should the job be priced in?

The unit is the first decision and the one that determines whether you can quote fast later. Pick the thing the customer can count.

Job type	Sell it in	What actually drives the count
Water heater replacement	Per unit installed, by capacity and fuel	Venting, expansion tank, pan and drain, stairs
Repipe	Per linear foot plus per fixture reconnected	Material type, wall and ceiling access, number of floors
Bathroom remodel	Per fixture set, rough and trim separately	Whether drains move, slab or joist, tile schedule
Drain clearing	Per line, by access point	Cleanout present or not, camera and locate
Service and repair	Call-out fee plus hourly after the first hour	Diagnostic time, after-hours, parts on the truck

Mixing units on one job is fine and normal. A remodel can carry a per-fixture price for the rough-in and an hourly line for the demolition nobody could see behind the tile.

What does an hour of my crew actually cost?

Not the wage. Take the wage and apply your own burden factor — payroll taxes, workers’ comp at the plumbing class rate, general liability, vehicle, phone, uniforms, paid time off. Most shops land somewhere between 1.25 and 1.45 once they add it honestly.

	Wage	Burden 1.35	Loaded
Lead tech	$34.00	×1.35	$45.90
Helper	$21.00	×1.35	$28.35
Two-person crew hour			$74.25

Run your own burden number from last year’s payroll and insurance statements rather than borrowing 1.35. Workers’ comp alone moves this figure more than most owners expect, and it is trade-specific.

How much overhead does every billable hour have to carry?

Overhead is everything that happens whether or not a wrench turns: the shop or storage unit, truck payments and insurance, license and bond renewals, van stock you replenish without invoicing, the drain machine and the inspection camera depreciating, software, the phone that gets answered at 7 p.m., and the hours you spend quoting jobs you do not win. The IRS expense categories on Schedule C are a reasonable checklist for pulling the list together; Schedule C line items explained walks the same list in plain language.

Divide the annual total by the crew hours you actually billed last year — not the hours you paid for. A shop that pays 2,080 hours per person and invoices 1,480 crew hours with $61,000 of overhead is carrying $41.22 of overhead on every billable hour. That gap between paid hours and billed hours is where most plumbing shops quietly lose their margin, and no price increase fixes it.

What does the math look like on a real water heater?

The job: 50-gallon gas heater, second-floor utility closet, 14 stairs, old unit drained and carried down, thermal expansion tank required because the house has a pressure-reducing valve, pan and drain line because it sits over finished ceiling.

Step	Calculation	Amount
Crew time	4.5 hours on site + 0.6 hours travel and supply pickup = 5.1 crew hours
Labor cost	5.1 × $74.25	$378.68
Material at cost	Heater $624, expansion tank $58, pan and drain $46, gas flex and sediment trap $34, T&P line $12, connectors and unions $28, vent connector $41, misc $22	$865.00
Overhead	5.1 × $41.22	$210.22
Cost		$1,453.90
Price at 22% margin	$1,453.90 ÷ 0.78	$1,864.00
Permit, at cost, no markup	Pass-through	$95.00
Quoted price	Rounded	$1,950.00

That $1,950 is now your published price for one configuration: 50 gallons, gas, upper floor, expansion tank, pan and drain. The same heater in a garage on a slab with a straight vent and no pan is a different product and a different number. Build the second one the same way instead of discounting the first.

What is the difference between markup and margin?

This is the most expensive mistake in the trade. Markup is a percentage of cost. Margin is a percentage of price. They are never the same number, and using markup while thinking margin means you have been underpricing every job for years.

Markup applied to cost	Margin you actually get
20%	16.7%
25%	20.0%
30%	23.1%
40%	28.6%
50%	33.3%

To go the other way: divide the margin you want by one minus that margin. A 25 percent margin needs a 33.3 percent markup. A 30 percent margin needs 42.9 percent. On the water heater above, adding a 22 percent markup instead of taking a 22 percent margin gives $1,773.76, which is only an 18 percent margin — about $90 gone on one heater, and roughly $5,400 across sixty of them in a year.

How does pipe material change the number?

Enough that the material has to be named on the quote. Copper prices move with a commodity market, so a repipe quote written in copper has a shelf life; put an expiration date on it and re-price if the customer sits on it.

Material	What it does to material cost	What it does to labor time
PEX, crimp or expansion	Lowest per foot; a home-run manifold adds fittings and a manifold cost	Fastest; joints take seconds; fishes through closed bays, so fewer wall openings to cut and patch
Type L copper	Highest per foot, and the number moves month to month	Slowest; every joint is soldered or pressed; a press tool changes the labor math more than the material does
CPVC	Between the two	Cure time affects the schedule more than it affects labor hours
PVC or ABS drain, waste, vent	Cheap per foot even in large diameter	Fast to glue, slow to hang, slope, and support correctly

The right way to price this is not to argue about which is cheaper. Time your own crew on ten feet of finished run and on ten joints in each material, once, and you will have conversion factors that outlive every price list.

What do I do about the parts of the job I cannot see?

Write them into the quote as conditional lines with a price attached, so the customer agrees to the number before you open anything. A conditional line that resolves to zero costs nothing; a surprise that arrives with a price after the fact costs you the relationship.

Common ones: a broken closet flange found when the toilet comes up, galvanized branch discovered behind a wall, a shut-off valve that will not close so the whole house has to be drained, code items that get triggered the moment you touch the system — expansion tank, sediment trap, pan and drain on an upper floor, combustion air in a converted closet. Also price the two access lines explicitly: opening a wall or floor, and patching it back to taped and sanded but not painted. Say who paints.

How do I check the price before I send it?

Three checks, in this order. Reverse the price into an effective crew-hour rate and see whether it clears the number you need. Compare it against the last three jobs of the same type you actually completed, including the ones that went long. Then look at your win rate: winning nearly every quote is not a compliment, it is a pricing signal.

Published averages are useful only as an order-of-magnitude check. Water heater replacement figures on national sites can differ by more than a factor of two between metros, and they move with season, permit regime, and how far the truck drove. Your region, your access conditions, your supply house pricing, and your overhead decide the answer, not the average. If your computed number is far above what your market pays, look at billable hours and drive time before you touch the rate.

What records make next year’s prices better?

Your prices are only as good as last year’s data. Actual crew hours per job type, actual material cost per fixture, and the receipts backing both are what turn this method from a guess into a number. Most shops rebuild their rates from memory, which is why the rates drift low.

Keel is the cheap version of that discipline. Supply house receipts get photographed at the counter and read on the device by Apple Intelligence — no account, no bank connection, no cloud, and an App Store privacy label that reads Data Not Collected. Invoices go out from the truck the day the heater is running, with your own numbering and a payment link rendered as a QR code the customer scans. Every trip to the counter is a logged mile. The Freeboard view is the one that changes behavior on a job like this: it shows cash minus your tax reserve, minus what you have already committed, minus a buffer, so a $600 deposit never looks like profit — the same arithmetic behind how much to set aside for 1099 taxes, and the deductions worth capturing are in self-employed tax deductions. Keel is free with unlimited invoices, receipts, and mileage; Keel Pro is a one-time $249.99 Lifetime purchase, not a subscription.

Frequently asked questions

How do I calculate a plumbing price from scratch? Pick the unit the job sells in, then add four things: crew hours multiplied by your loaded crew cost, material at supply house prices, overhead allocated per billable hour, and margin applied by dividing the cost by one minus your target margin. Pass-through items like permits go on at cost, outside the margin math. Round the total, and record the round.

Should plumbers charge hourly or by the fixture? Flat per-fixture pricing for anything with a known scope, hourly for anything requiring discovery. Fixture pricing rewards you for being fast and stops the customer from watching the clock; hourly protects you when a wall could hide anything. Many jobs carry both, with the rough-in priced per fixture and the demolition billed hourly against a stated cap.

How much should I mark up plumbing materials? Set the markup so it produces the margin you actually want, since the two are different numbers. A 33.3 percent markup on material cost yields a 25 percent margin. Whatever you choose, apply it consistently and exclude true pass-throughs such as permit fees, which should appear at cost with the receipt available.

What should I charge for an after-hours plumbing call? Publish the rate before you need it, define exactly when it starts, and put both on the quote and the invoice. The premium is not arbitrary: night and weekend work costs you overtime burden, a tired crew the next morning, and supply houses that are closed, which means whatever is not on the truck becomes a second trip.

Why is my plumbing business busy but not profitable? Almost always billable hours, not price. Count last year’s invoiced crew hours against payroll hours; the gap is drive time, supply runs, quoting, warranty callbacks, and waiting on other trades. Every one of those hours has to be carried by the hours you do bill, which is exactly what the overhead-per-billable-hour step in this method is for.

How often should I re-price my plumbing rates? Review material costs quarterly and rebuild the full calculation once a year, plus immediately after any change in wages, insurance, or truck costs. Copper repipe quotes need their own expiration date because the commodity moves. Keeping quotes and receipts in one place makes the annual rebuild an afternoon rather than a guess.

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This article is general information, not professional or tax advice.