For plumbing and heating firms

Which work makes money, and which just fills the diary.

Twelve months of your jobs, split by type and costed against what an hour of a qualified engineer actually costs your firm — not the wage, and not the rate in your job software. Delivered in five working days, reviewed by a person, £500. Refunded in full if it finds nothing you'd act on.

What it shows

Your year, split the way you actually work.

Every job from the last twelve months, sorted into the types below — whatever your records happen to call them — then costed against the hours each type consumed. The output is a profit figure per type, an hourly return per type, and a defensible price range for each.

Callouts and diagnostics

Short, high-volume, and the type most sensitive to travel — the hours between jobs land here first.

Boiler servicing

Often the quiet earner: an hour on site, almost no parts, and a high share of the hour left over. Usually underpriced because it feels small.

Boiler swaps and installs

Big ticket, heavy materials. The margin lives in the labour hours, and the size of the invoice tends to hide it.

Bathrooms and full installs

Multi-day work where a day of overrun is a day nobody invoiced. The most common place a healthy-looking type turns out to be the diary filler.

Emergency and out-of-hours

Whether the premium actually covers the true cost of an unsociable hour is a question the report answers directly.

Radiators, valves and small works

Wide spread inside one label. Usually worth splitting once the records show what is in it.

The list is not fixed. If your records carry a type that isn't here, it gets its own row — the classification follows your work, not a template.

What drives your costs

Your engineers cost more than their wage, and the gap is growing.

A qualified engineer costs your firm considerably more than the hourly rate on their payslip. On top of the wage sit employer's National Insurance, the auto-enrolment pension, and statutory holiday — and holiday is the one most firms leave out entirely, because it is not a line on a payslip. Twenty-eight days spread across the days actually worked is an uplift of roughly a ninth on every hour, before anything else is added.

Employer's NI is the line that has moved most. A rise applies to every hour you pay for, including the ones that never reach an invoice, so its effect on your floor is larger than the headline percentage suggests. Gas Safe registration, scheme memberships, insurance and continuing assessment are overhead rather than job cost — real, and belonging in the divisor rather than in a rate somebody typed once.

None of this is guessed at in the report. You give us the wage and the loads you actually carry; each one appears as its own line with its own rate, so you can see which is moving your floor rather than being handed a single loaded figure to trust.

The arithmetic

What does an hour of your capacity cost?

The report's central number is your floor rate: the lowest hourly rate at which an average hour covers its own cost. Here it is at figures typical of a firm with 4 field staff and 4 vans. Yours will differ — the method won't.

Step 1

The wage you pay an engineer£21.00/hr

Step 2

Plus what employing them costs on top£27.31/hr

£21.00 × (1 + 30.07%) = £27.31

employer's National Insurance 15.00%, auto-enrolment pension 3.00%, statutory holiday 12.07%. Rates change — use your own current figures.

Step 3

Divided by the share of paid hours that get invoiced£42.02/hr

£27.31 ÷ 65.0% = £42.02

You pay for 40 hours and invoice 26. The other 14 — travelling, quoting, the merchants, the customer who wasn't in — still get paid for, so every invoiced hour carries them. Skipping this step is the most common way a rate ends up too low.

Step 4

Plus vans£4.04/hr

£105 × 4 × 52 = £21,840/yr ÷ 5,408 hrs = £4.04

Step 5

Plus overhead£7.54/hr

£3,400 × 12 = £40,800/yr ÷ 5,408 hrs = £7.54

Floor, per invoiced hour£53.61/hr

Illustrative figures, not a benchmark — we have no basis for telling you what a typical plumbing and heating firm's floor is, and neither does anyone quoting one at you. These are the figures before VAT: if you are registered, the rate you charge carries VAT on top and the floor below is what has to be covered underneath it. The method is written out in full on the floor rate page.

And what it does when you get busier

Invoiced hours a week, each	Utilisation	Floor becomes
20	50.0%	£69.69/hr
23	57.5%	£60.60/hr
26 — this example	65.0%	£53.61/hr
29	72.5%	£48.06/hr
32	80.0%	£43.55/hr

Nothing changes but the invoiced hours. The full explanation, and the method written out step by step, is on the floor rate page.

What we need

What you send us.

A year of jobsDate, job type or description, what it invoiced, and time on site if your system records it. An export from Tradify, Commusoft, Payaca, Joblogic or similar is ideal; a spreadsheet is fine.

Six numbersWage, the loads you carry on top of it, hours paid per week, hours you believe get invoiced, van costs, and monthly overheads. Typed answers — no payroll files.

Nothing elseNo accounts, no VAT returns, no bank statements. A merchant statement sharpens the materials figures if you have one to hand; it isn't required.

A spreadsheet export is fine. So is a messy one — reconciling records that disagree with each other is most of the work, and it is work you are paying us to do rather than work you have to do first.

Before you buy

When this is the wrong purchase.

If you run fewer than about three engineers, there are not enough comparable jobs for the analysis to be sound. If a franchisor sets your prices, you cannot act on the half of the report that matters. If you need it tomorrow, five working days is five working days. The full list, with the reasoning, is on who it's not for — and the comparison page sets out when a spreadsheet or your existing software answers this better.

Your plumbing and heating year, costed and checked.

£500 · 12 months of your jobs · 5 working days · refunded in full if nothing material is found

£500 · refunded in full if it finds nothing material.