I now charge a flat rate of £60 per hour for Monday to Friday within 10 miles of Salisbury, minimum 1 hour charge and then to the nearest 0.1 hour.

If you've used my services in the past you will notice this is a significant step-increase to my pricing. I have made this page to explain my reasoning, and hopefully you won't just think that I have suddenly become greedy!

The last time I increased my pricing was in 2015, and since then I have always been reluctant to charge more than £50 as my minimum callout. Consequently by 2021 I had become a lot cheaper than the average plumber, many of whom charge £75 or £80 for a call out. Recently, that has impacted my ability to provide the kind of small plumbing repairs service that I like to. By being too cheap I have been getting more and more booked up for larger jobs, particularly radiator jobs, leaving me little time to attend the smaller and often more urgent ones like toilets, taps, leaks and blockages. In the last quarter of 2021 I was finding it impossible to stay on top of demand.

It became clear that a price correction was overdue. Consequently, I have made two changes. The first is the increase in my minimum call out rate from £50 to £60, which is equivalent to 2.63 % annual inflation since 2015.

The second is that I have decided not to offer a lower hourly rate after the first hour as I used to. This is to make my pricing less attractive to people wanting larger jobs like radiators, and will help me to focus more on the smaller ones.

On the water side of plumbing (i.e. not counting Gas Safe engineers who tend to focus more on boilers) there are basically 3 types of plumbers, with 3 different pricing tiers:

1) Emergency plumbers whose pricing starts at about £100 for a half-hour call out, but who provide an important service to people who have a real emergency and need an immediate response.

2) Maintenance plumbers like me who aim, ideally, to be available within a few days for slightly less urgent jobs. These kind of plumbers are quite rare, so it is hard to know average pricing for this category. I think my new pricing is about right.

3) General plumbers who are more focussed on installation. They mostly pursue the larger jobs, and are usually too booked-up to have much time for smaller maintenance jobs. They may be slightly cheaper than the above but are usually not available for at least a week or two.

As a plumber, you have to set your pricing to match the kind of service you want to offer. If your price is too high or too low it doesn't work well. Time will tell if my new pricing is right for the service I want to offer, and I will keep it under review.

In my ten years of plumbing, I have gained more 5-star reviews on Google than any other individual UK plumber that I can find. I hope to continue that same level of service, and that my customers will continue to find my pricing fair and reasonable.

But is £60 per hour not a bit excessive?
If you read my reviews, you will see that many people comment on how reasonable my prices are. I think that's because they are aware of how much many other plumbers charge. So it is very rare that I feel I have to justify my rates. But from time to time, I inevitably do get a comment from someone who thinks I am overpriced. For example, they might point out that £60 per hour is about what a junior doctor earns. That is true, but people who make such comparisons don't usually understand the difference between employment and self-employment. If a junior doctor earns £60 per hour and works a 10 hour shift, they make £600. In a typical busy plumbing day, I leave the house at about 8:45am, and get home between about 5:30 and 6pm, having completed about five small jobs for which my labour adds up to £300. I still have at least an hour of admin to do in the evening after supper. So I work about a 10 hour day. Subtracting £40 which is my average daily running cost for the business, I make £260 for the day. So although I charge £60 per hour, only about half my working hours are chargeable, and I average about £26 per hour of actual earnings. Being self-employed, there's no paid holiday leave, sick leave, or employer's pension contribution. It's enough to make a decent honest living and I am very happy doing what I do, but it isn't quite as lucrative a job as people sometimes suppose.