Most plumbers set their hourly rate the same way: have a think, ask a mate, glance at what the bloke down the road charges, round it to something that sounds about right.
Then they wonder why a decent year’s turnover doesn’t feel like a decent year.
The number you charge isn’t a personality trait. It’s arithmetic, and the arithmetic is not complicated. It’s just that nobody sits you down and does it.
The mistake: pricing off a 40-hour week
Here’s where it goes wrong. You want to earn, say, £60,000. You reckon you work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. That’s 2,080 hours, so £29 an hour will do it.
Two problems with that, and they’re both big.
You don’t work 52 weeks. Knock off holiday, bank holidays, the week you had flu and the days nobody booked. Call it 46 weeks if you’re honest.
You don’t bill every hour you work. This is the one that gets everybody. Driving between jobs. Picking up parts. Quoting. Chasing the customer who’s gone quiet. Invoicing. Doing your books on a Sunday night.
Most one-van plumbers bill somewhere around 60–65% of the hours they work. The rest is real work that no one pays you for.
The maths that actually works
Same £60,000 target, done properly:
| Working weeks | 46 |
| Hours worked per week | 40 |
| Total hours worked | 1,840 |
| Chargeable at 62% | ≈ 1,140 hours |
Now the bit people forget: overheads come out before you get paid.
| Typical annual overheads | |
|---|---|
| Van (finance, fuel, servicing, tax) | £6,000 |
| Public liability + tools insurance | £600 |
| Gas Safe registration + tickets | £500 |
| Tools and replacements | £1,500 |
| Phone, software, accountant | £1,800 |
| Materials wastage, sundries, workwear | £1,200 |
| Total | ≈ £11,600 |
So you need to collect £60,000 + £11,600 = £71,600 across 1,140 chargeable hours.
That’s £63 an hour. Not £29. You were about to undercharge yourself by more than half.
Run your own numbers rather than borrowing mine — but run them, because that gap is where the “busy but skint” year comes from.
Why hourly is still the wrong unit
Now that you know your rate, mostly stop quoting with it.
Hourly punishes you for being good. You’ve done a thousand boiler services, so you’re quick, so you earn less than the bloke who takes twice as long. It also invites an argument about your speed instead of a conversation about the job.
Price by job for anything you do repeatedly. Boiler service, leak repair, blocked drain, radiator swap. Work out what it typically takes, apply your rate, add a bit for the ones that go sideways, and that’s the price. Same number every time.
Three things get better immediately: you stop re-deciding prices when you’re tired, you stop underquoting the jobs you happen to price at 9pm, and you can quote in thirty seconds from the van.
Keep hourly for genuine unknowns — chasing a leak through a floor, old pipework nobody has a drawing for. Price those as an initial diagnostic hour, then quote the fix properly once you can see it.
Charge for urgency, and put it in writing
Same day is worth about +25%. Genuine out-of-hours, weekends and bank holidays are worth +50%, or time and a half.
Most plumbers know this and still don’t do it consistently, because it feels awkward to say out loud on the phone. Which is exactly why it should be a line on the quote instead: “Emergency call-out (+50%)”. Nobody argues with a line item. They argue with a number that appeared for no visible reason.
If you’re getting out of bed at 2am, that’s the job you should be best paid for, not the one you resent.
When to put prices up
Two triggers, and neither is “once a year because inflation”.
You’re too busy. A full diary three weeks out isn’t a badge, it’s a pricing signal. If you can’t take work on, you’re too cheap. Put your prices up 10% and see what actually happens — usually you lose the customers who were hardest work anyway.
You keep winning everything. If you’re getting near enough every quote you send, you’re leaving money on the table. A win rate somewhere around half is roughly right. Winning everything means you’re the cheap option, and cheap attracts the customers who’ll haggle over the final invoice.
The bit that wins more work than price
The plumbers doing well are rarely the cheapest. They’re the ones who reply first with a clear number.
Most enquiries go to whoever answers quickly with something the customer can actually understand. If you take three days to send a vague figure, the job’s gone, no matter how good you are on the tools.
That’s the whole reason I build quoting software: not to make you cheaper, but to make you faster and more consistent than the three other plumbers who got the same enquiry.
Getting your prices down on paper
Once you’ve done the maths, write it down somewhere that isn’t your head.
Our plumber quote template has the common jobs, urgency uplifts and add-ons already set up — you swap in your numbers and the maths is handled. There’s a free online version that sits on your website and lets customers price their own job, or a £7 spreadsheet if you’d rather keep it offline.
And if you want to sanity-check your figures against the market, here’s what plumbers actually charge across the UK in 2026.
Do the arithmetic once. Then stop guessing.