For plumbing contractors
What it shows
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.
Service calls and diagnostics
Short, high-volume, and usually the type most sensitive to drive time — the hours between jobs land here first.
Drain cleaning
Often the quiet earner: modest tickets, low materials, and a high share of the hour left over.
Water heater replacement
Big ticket, heavy materials. The margin lives in the labor hours, and the ticket size tends to hide it.
Repipe and remodel
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 after-hours
Whether the premium actually covers the true cost of an unsociable hour is a question the report answers directly.
Fixture install and repair
Wide spread inside one label. Usually worth splitting once the records show what's 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
A licensed plumber costs your company considerably more than the hourly wage on their check. On top of the wage sit FICA, federal and state unemployment, and workers' compensation — and in plumbing, comp is the line that varies most. The rate depends on your state, your classification code and your own claims history, and the spread between a clean file in a cheap state and a poor one in an expensive state is wide enough to move a floor rate by several dollars an hour on its own.
License requirements shape the cost a second way. Where a jurisdiction requires a licensed journeyman on a job that an apprentice could physically perform, you are paying journeyman labor for apprentice work, and the hourly cost of that job type is higher than the schedule suggests. Continuing education, license renewals and the master's license the company holds are overhead, not job cost — but they are real, and they belong in the divisor.
None of this is guessed at in the report. You give us the wage and the loads you actually carry; every one is shown as a separate line with its own rate, so you can see which of them is moving your floor.
The arithmetic
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 5 field staff and 5 trucks. Yours will differ — the method won't.
$30.00 × (1 + 18.15%) = $35.45
FICA 7.65%, unemployment (FUTA + SUTA) 1.50%, workers' comp 5.00%, paid time off 4.00%. Rates vary by state and by carrier; use your own.
$35.445 ÷ 67.5% = $52.51
You pay for 40 hours and invoice 27. The other 13 — drive time, estimates, the supply house, the no-show — still get paid for, so every invoiced hour carries them. Skipping this step is the most common way a rate ends up too low.
$140 × 5 × 52 = $36,400/yr ÷ 7,020 hrs = $5.19
$5,200 × 12 = $62,400/yr ÷ 7,020 hrs = $8.89
Illustrative figures, not a benchmark — we have no basis for telling you what a typical plumbing contractor's floor is, and neither does anyone quoting one at you. Workers' comp alone varies enough by state and class code to move this number several dollars. The point is the method, which is written out in full on the floor rate page.
And what it does when you get busier
| Invoiced hours a week, each | Utilization | Floor becomes |
|---|---|---|
| 21 | 52.5% | $85.61/hr |
| 24 | 60.0% | $74.91/hr |
| 27 — this example | 67.5% | $66.59/hr |
| 30 | 75.0% | $59.93/hr |
| 33 | 82.5% | $54.48/hr |
What we need
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
If you run fewer than about three techs, 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 year, costed and checked.
$650 / £500 · 12 months of your jobs · 5 working days · refunded in full if nothing material is found
$650 / £500 · refunded in full if it finds nothing material.