Because of my focus on plumbing repairs and maintenance, which tend to be small jobs, I charge by the hour. However, if you want to compare my pricing with the 'going rate', as it were for plumbers in general, it is helpful to start by considering day rates. According to Checkatrade's Plumber Cost Guide, which was last updated in April 2023, a plumber's day rate was typically in the range between £325 and £375, with an average of £347.50. According to MyBuilder it is significantly higher, but let's work with Checkatrade's rate and round it to £350 for simplicity of numbers. From the customer's perspective, this is what you should typically expect to pay a plumber for a full day's work. From the plumber's perspective, this is essentially their daily target of what they hope to take in labour on a good day. How that translates into an hourly rate depends what type of plumbing they do. Essentially, there are three main types of plumber. Also, let's assume that including travel time and admin time, a plumber works a nine hour day on average (equivalent to an office worker doing nine to five, with a half-hour commute at each end).

1) Plumbing installers
Most plumbers are primarily installers, focusing on larger-type jobs that ideally last all day, or even for several days. This approach means they can maximise the proportion of their work day which is 'on-the-tools' and therefore chargeable, and minimise travel and admin time. A plumbing installer can achieve a £350 day rate by doing seven chargeable hours at £50 per hour. In a nine hour total work day, that leaves an hour for travel time, often including a stop at a plumbing merchant, and an hour for admin time (quoting, invoicing, bookkeeping, and communicating with customers and enquirers). According to Checkatrade, £50 per hour is the average hourly rate for a plumber, but although they don't clearly state it, bear in mind that it applies primarily to this category, of all-day installation-type jobs, since that is what most plumbers do most of the time. In terms of their hourly rate, installers are at the cheap end of the pricing spectrum. In practice, very few plumbing installers actually publish their hourly rate - instead they price their work 'by the job' in the form of a quote.

2) Emergency plumbers
An emergency plumber is likely to only do one or two jobs in a day, and these will typically each be short in duration. Their total working hours will be much less than other plumbers, but they need to be on call pretty much 24/7. To achieve a £350 day rate with two jobs, they would have to charge £175 per hour. In practice, emergency plumbers typically charge a callout fee which is chargeable from the moment they arrive, plus an hourly rate on top of that for the time they spend actually fixing something. According to Checkatrade, the average emergency callout fee is £110, and the average hourly rate for an emergency plumber is £112.50. That means that a half-hour callout will cost you £166.25 plus parts, and a one-hour callout will cost you £222.50, on average! In terms of hourly rate, emergency plumbers are obviously at the expensive end of the pricing spectrum. It's not that you get a better or more experienced plumber. Rather what you are paying for is that a plumber will arrive at your door within about an hour or two of you calling them. Plumbers can only deliver that kind of service if they spend most of their day waiting for the phone to ring.

3) Maintenance plumbers (like me!)
Based on an average plumber day rate of £350, how much should you pay for a small non-emergency plumbing callout? Based on ten years' experience of focussing on small plumbing repairs, I find that within a 9 hour working day (including travel and admin), I can schedule in four small jobs. Some jobs will be completed within an hour, and some will go over a bit, so on average four small jobs amount to about five chargeable hours in a day. To make £350 per day with five chargeable hours, I need to average £70 per hour for my chargeable time. If I charge £75 for the first hour, then £60 per hour for any additional time, then in a typical day I earn about (4 x £75) + (1 x £60) which is close to the daily target of £350. Accounting for business running costs, about £300 of that is profit. In a 9 hour working day, if only about 5 are chargeable, what am I doing with the other 4 working hours? Firstly, four jobs per day means five single journeys per day compared to two for an all-day job, so there's typically about two hours' travel time per day. Secondly, four jobs per day on average only works if I get a high volume of calls and enquiries, so I normally spend two hours of my day doing admin (responding to enquiries, invoicing, bookkeeping, sourcing and restocking of parts).