Nobody can tell you, and we are going to show you why rather than make one up. A plumber's WAGE is known exactly: $30.67 an hour, median, and we have your state's figure. A plumber's BILLED RATE does not exist in the federal statistics, because the only trade class that contains plumbers is 40.9% heating and air-conditioning and just 25.2% plumbing.More
A billed rate is receipts divided by hours, and only an industry class publishes both. The Census does break this class's receipts down by kind of business, which is how we know it is a quarter plumbing. It does not break the HOURS down the same way: that file carries receipts and nothing else. So the denominator a plumbing rate would need is not published, by anyone, anywhere. We checked the obvious escape route rather than assuming it was shut: BLS does publish hours for this class every month, and has since 2006, but they are the CLASS's hours, which is the number we already have. Nobody cuts the hours by kind of business, and that cut is the whole problem. What we can give you is the rate of the trade class that contains your plumber ($114.20 per worker-hour), labelled honestly as what it is, and the wage of an actual plumber, which is exact. Everything else on the internet is somebody's survey of their own customers, or somebody's guess.
There is no plumber's hourly rate in the federal statistics, and this page is the explanation
rather than a workaround. A billed rate is receipts divided by hours, and only an industry CLASS
publishes both. The only class that contains plumbers is 40.9% heating and air-conditioning and
just 25.2% plumbing. So the rate above is the rate of the trade class that contains your plumber,
and that class is mostly not plumbers.More
Here is the precise reason nobody can fix it, and you can check it in a minute. The Census
DOES break this class's receipts down by kind of business: that is how we know it is a quarter plumbing. It does
NOT break the HOURS down the same way. Open the file and it carries receipts and nothing else: no hours, no
employment, no payroll. A rate needs a denominator, and at the plumbing level the denominator is not published.
Not by us, not by anyone. And we did look in the place that would embarrass us: BLS publishes this class's hours
every month, and has done since 2006, so the hours are not missing at all. They are just the CLASS's hours, which
the Census already gives us and which is where the $114.20 comes from. Nobody cuts the hours by kind of business,
and that cut is the entire problem. Every confident "average plumber hourly rate" you have read is either
somebody's survey of their own customers or somebody's guess, and neither is a bad thing to be, as long as they
say so.
What IS exact is the wage. BLS surveys the OCCUPATION and never has to go through an industry
bucket to find a plumber. 465,840 of them, median $30.67 an hour. Your state's figure is in the box. That is the
part of this comparison that is not an approximation, and it is the half that most pages get wrong in the other
direction, by quoting a national average as though your state did not exist.
Where the $114.20 goes, and every line is published. $36.91 is the workers' wages and $10.84 is
their benefits, so what the trade's workers cost is $47.75. Then $15.99 is office and supervisor
wages, $4.70 their benefits, $11.58 other operating expenses, $4.46 power and fuel, $3.06 rent, $2.86
depreciation. What is left is $23.81, a fifth of the bill, and that is an UPPER BOUND on margin
rather than margin: it still has to cover the hours nobody pays for, which in this trade means driving to you,
quoting you, and the emergency you cancelled.
And it is a class mean, so it does not bound your quote. The middle 80% of state means run
$97.01 to $126.27. Real firms spread wider than state averages do, always. A quote at double this is
information, not proof.
§ 02 The return
The trade class bills, per worker-hour$114.20
Worker-hours you are billed for2
What a plumber earns an hour here (BLS)$30.67
Billed rate over what the trade's workers cost2.39
The billed rate and the breakdown are the Census's, for the trade CLASS, which is mostly not plumbers. The plumber's wage is BLS's, for the occupation, and it is exact. The job hours are OURS and there is no federal source for them. The call-out and the parts are yours.
Where the money goes
Labour (1.5 worker-hours at $114.20)$171
By the numbers
There is no plumber's hourly rate in the federal statistics, and the reason is a missing denominator, not a missing file.More
A billed rate is receipts over hours. The Census publishes this class's receipts by kind of business (that is how we know it is 25.2% plumbing) but publishes hours only for the class as a whole, and BLS, which publishes hours for this class monthly and has since 2006, does not cut them by kind of business either. So a plumbing rate has a numerator and no denominator. Of the 14 construction classes that contain any plumbing work at all, not one is majority plumbing: the highest is this one, at a quarter. And a caution about our own arithmetic: the 18.3% filed as mechanical contracting is not a third trade sitting in the class, it is the line a firm reports when its piping and its heating work cannot be split apart, so plumbing-and-piping is somewhere between 26.8% and 45.1% of the class rather than a single figure. Either way, heating and air-conditioning is the largest single thing this class sells.
What a plumber EARNS is exact, and by state: $30.67 an hour, median, with the middle 80% between $21.22 and $52.13.More
BLS surveys the occupation (47-2152), which needs no industry class at all, and that is precisely why the wage is knowable when the rate is not. 465,840 of them. Even so, the occupation is 'Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters', and pipefitters work in refineries rather than bathrooms.
You are billed per WORKER-hour. Two plumbers for two hours is four billed hours, and your invoice will not explain that.More
The Census field is 'construction workers annual hours'. A firm that sends a plumber and a mate bills for both, and a blocked drain does not clear twice as fast. Ask how many people are coming before they arrive.
The trade bills $114.20 per worker-hour. Its workers cost it $47.75, once you count benefits and not just wages. The residual, after every published expense, is $23.81.More
Published, per worker-hour: office and supervisor wages $15.99, their benefits $4.70, other operating expenses $11.58, power and fuel $4.46, rent $3.06, depreciation $2.86. What is left is $23.81, a fifth of the bill, and that is the MOST margin could be, because it still has to cover the unbilled hours.
The most expensive thing on a plumbing bill is often not the plumbing. It is the call-out, and the Census does not measure it.More
The Economic Census prices the WORK, not the terms of business, so a minimum charge or an out-of-hours premium is simply not in the data. On a one-hour drain unblock a call-out fee can exceed the labour. It sits at zero on this page until you type what you were actually quoted, and we are not going to invent one.
Sourced: the class's billed rate, its workers' cost and every line of the
breakdown, from the 2022 Economic Census (NAICS 238220) in 2025 dollars. The plumber's wage, from BLS, surveyed
at the occupation, by state. Ours: the JOB HOURS. There is no federal source for how long it
takes to clear a drain, so those are our estimates and they are the first box on the page, where you can
overwrite them.More
What we refuse to do. We will not present the class rate as a plumber's rate. It is the
rate at which firms in this class bill an hour of labour, and whether a PLUMBING hour bills above or below that
class average is not knowable from published data. We do not know, and we are not going to model it and then let
the model wear the Census's clothes.
Even the wage is broader than it sounds. BLS 47-2152 is "Plumbers, Pipefitters, and
Steamfitters". Pipefitters and steamfitters work in refineries and power stations, not in your bathroom, and they
are inside that median. We would rather tell you that than let $30.67 look more precise than it is.
A sentence we almost wrote, and it would have been false. "The Census class wage is a blend of
plumbers and heating engineers, so it must sit between them." It does not. The class wage is $36.91, ABOVE both
the plumber mean ($34.70) and the HVAC mean ($31.14). The Census's construction workers include working foremen,
its wage figure includes overtime premium which BLS hourly wages exclude, and BLS counts the occupation across
every industry, including lower-paying ones outside contracting. We shipped that error's twin on our electrician
page: a plausible mechanism with the wrong sign is still wrong.
Rule 24. The Census counts WORKER-hours, so the rate is per person per hour. Two plumbers for
two hours is four billed hours.
Rule 18. Materials are removed from the rate before dividing, so it is a labour-and-overhead
quantity and takes a LABOUR index: ECI construction compensation, 1.1129 from 2022 to 2025. It is not pure
labour, and only $36.91 of the $114.20 is wages, so we do not call it that.
Who the trade is really billing. 29.5% of this class's construction work is subcontracted IN
from other contractors, so roughly three hours in ten are billed to a builder rather than to a householder. The
rate is an average across both.
And we went and found the one source that could have embarrassed this page. BLS publishes a
Producer Price Index for exactly this class, which is its own measure of what these firms CHARGE, and we had not
opened it. It does not rescue a plumbing-specific rate, because it is an index rather than a dollar figure and it
is class-level like everything else. But it is the right check on our deflator, and it passes: the PPI puts the
2022-to-2025 move at 1.1112 against our compensation index's 1.1129, which would make the rate $114.03 instead of
$114.20. Two agencies, two instruments, seventeen cents apart.
Where every number above comes from
US Census
Census, 2022 Economic Census (EC2223BASIC): receipts, materials, subcontracts, wages, benefits, operating expenses and construction-worker HOURS for NAICS 238220
Census, 2022 Economic Census, Kind of Business (EC2223KOB): NAICS 238220 is 40.9% HVAC and 25.2% plumbing. Receipts only, no hours, which is exactly why no plumbing-specific rate can be computed
BLS, Current Employment Statistics, series CEU2023822002: average weekly hours for NAICS 238220, monthly, back to March 2006. We cite it to say that it EXISTS and that it still does not give a plumbing rate: these are the CLASS's hours, undivided, and the missing cut is by kind of business
BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025: 47-2152 Plumbers, Pipefitters and Steamfitters. An occupation, surveyed directly, needing no industry class
Every one of these is a place the number could be off. They are here because you should be able to check our working, not because we are hedging.
The billed rate is the trade CLASS's, not a plumber's, and no amount of presentation can turn one into the other.
NAICS 238220 is 40.9% HVAC, 25.2% plumbing, 18.3% mechanical contracting. Whether a plumbing hour bills above or below that class average is not knowable, because the Census publishes hours for the class and not by kind of business.
The job hours are OURS. There is no federal source for how long it takes to clear a drain.
The Economic Census prices an hour of the trade's labour. It does not record jobs. So the rate is federal and the hours are ours, and we split them into separate boxes rather than blend them into one authoritative-looking figure.
Fringe benefits are the WORKER'S compensation, not the firm's overhead.
The Census reports 'construction workers annual WAGES' and reports fringe benefits in a separate field outside payroll entirely. We allocate benefits pro-rata by wage share: $10.84 an hour on top of $36.91 in wages.
The residual is an upper bound on margin. We do not call it profit.
After wages, benefits, office pay, other operating expenses, fuel, rent and depreciation, $23.81 an hour is left. It still has to cover the hours nobody pays for. Profit is at or below it, and anyone telling you exactly where is guessing.
2022 dollars are carried to 2025 with a LABOUR index (Rule 18), and the rate is not pure labour.
ECI construction compensation, 1.1129. Materials are out of the rate but overhead is not, so only $36.91 of the $114.20 is wages.
Three hours in ten are billed to a builder, not to you.
29.5% of this class's construction work is subcontracted in from other contractors. The rate is an average across householders' jobs and builders' jobs alike, and we say so rather than let 'your job' imply otherwise.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a plumber charge an hour?
Honestly: nobody knows, and we would rather show you why than invent a figure. A billed rate is receipts divided by hours, and only an industry class publishes both. The one class that contains plumbers is 40.9% heating and air-conditioning and only 25.2% plumbing, and the Census publishes that class's HOURS only in total, never broken out by plumbing. So the denominator a plumber's rate would need does not exist. What we can tell you is that the trade class bills $114.20 per worker-hour in 2025 dollars, and that a plumber himself earns a median of $30.67. Both are real. Neither is 'the plumber's hourly rate', and any page that gives you one to the cent is guessing.
How much do plumbers charge to unclog a drain or a toilet?
Take the trade's rate and the hours. A straightforward drain or toilet unblock is about an hour of one person's time, which at the national rate is roughly $114 of labour, and in most states somewhere between $97 and $126. Then add the call-out, which is frequently the larger number and which the Census does not measure at all. The hours are OURS, not a statistic: there is no federal source for how long a drain takes, and we are not going to dress our estimate up as one. If a second person comes, double the labour, because you are billed per worker-hour.
Why is the bill so much more than the plumber earns?
Because the rate is what the BUSINESS charges and the wage is what the person earns, and the person costs more than his wage. Out of $114.20 an hour: the trade's workers cost $47.75 (wages $36.91 plus benefits $10.84). Office and supervisor pay takes $20.69 with their benefits. Other operating expenses, fuel, rent and depreciation take $21.96 between them. That leaves $23.81, which still has to cover the hours nobody bills you for: driving to you, quoting you, the emergency you cancelled. Profit is somewhere at or below that, and we are not going to pretend to know where.
Then why publish the class rate at all?
Because it is a real published number from a federal statistical agency, and leaving it out would not make you better informed, it would just send you to a page that made one up. When you call a plumber you are calling a firm that the federal statistics count inside this class, and this is the rate at which firms in that class bill an hour of labour. What we will not do is file the label off and call it a plumber's rate. The honest position is: here is the class, here is exactly how much of it is plumbing, here is what the class bills, and here is what an actual plumber earns. You can see the joins.
