The Ultimate Plumbing Pricing Manual for Your Service Business

The plumbing business market size will be valued at $112,427 million by 2023 and is expected to grow by 4% from 2019 to 2029.

With the rise in demand, the prices in the industry can fluctuate drastically, which can impact your business.

You need to ensure that you have set your prices based on the industry standards that can help you improve your plumbing business services and help you drive great profits.

A well-thought plumbing pricing manual can help you align with your pricing fundamentals and ensure that you effectively manage your plumbing service business prices for better business results.

Factors that Need to be Considered for Calculating Plumbing Price

Before you can create your plumbing business pricing manual, there are a few factors that you need to consider while finalizing your service prices. Have a look

• Labor Rate

  The vital factor for your business in setting your plumbing pricing manual is calculating the labor rates. If you get it wrong, you can create an unfortunate pattern, resulting in business losses. Different plumbing service businesses and contractors mostly miscalculate the labor rates. 

  Contractors overlook the unbillable time factor that reduces the overall profit of the business and results in inefficient business workflow. 

  Different factors like:

  • The employee training time.
  • The time between driving to the location, meetings, and planning the task’s completion.
  • The hours put in to wash the trucks and maintain the equipment.

  These nonbillable variables should account for the overall labor cost and play a decisive role in increasing your profits. Finalize these additional hours your workforce puts in and check the frequency to create a reasonable fixed labor price for your business.

  You should neither overprice your labor costs and gradually lose your customers to your competitors nor underprice the labor rates to drain your profits.

• Overhead

  You need to consider the overhead pricing of your business in the final pricing manual. You can’t ignore taxes, rent, salaries, tire replacements, vehicle repair, insurance, marketing, material carrying cost, utilities, and other overhead factors.

  Multiple contractors and plumbing service providers are unclear on effective prices and allocate overhead. But you can stand out and perform the calculation effectively.

  Analyzing the cost of products precisely and accurately can enable you to calculate appropriate overhead prices. You have two basic ways to calculate the price, either as a function of labor or sales.

  Different contractors choose one of the two options, but attributing overhead to labor can deliver better results.

  Because labor drivers are overhead, different businesses have more overhead than others. For example, the labor cost of plumbing is higher compared to construction because of more customer service reps’ demands, more drive time, and multiple other factors.

  If you choose to go with the function of sales, chances are you’ll allocate a disproportionately high percentage of costs. It may be misleading to set the plumbing price too low, which can shrink your profits and result in business losses.

  Choose the best option to ensure that the prices are standard, and that can help you increase your business profits while being reasonable to the customers.

• Membership agreements

  Different plumbing businesses or contractors offer maintenance agreements or memberships to their clients to provide a discount as a loyalty incentive.

  

  It’s a great and effective plumbing marketing strategy, but the online issue with these plumbing contractors is that they tend to apply discounts on top of the baseline prices.

  It can erase the work that went into calculating profitable pricing for your plumbing service business in the first place.

  You need to set your plumbing service prices to incorporate the membership discount to make the membership price the baseline price. 

  If the client wants to avail of services beyond the membership agreement, they should be charged accordingly. It can help you keep your profits intact and increase your customer retention for a longer time.

You need to consider these plumbing pricing factors while calculating your price. Here are a few steps you can follow for price calculation.

Steps to Price Plumbing Service Cost

1. Determine your base hourly rate

You need to reverse engineer your pricing to calculate the hourly rate and avoid using flat rate pricing because it doesn’t give a precise number for your plumbing service.

For example, if you want to provide plumbing services to a client at $800 per week while putting in 40 hours of work.

Then you need to consider that you’ll lose 10-12 hours of billable productivity because of handling administrative tasks, driving, and other factors.

Now you have only 28 hours of productivity work, and if we divide $800 per week by 28 billable hours, that’s equal to $28.57.

Now, you have a minimum charge per hour for your work. But you should add different unbillable factors like vacation, insurance, and taxes, among others, to round off the hourly price to $40 per hour.

The calculation process will give you a more holistic and accurate hourly pricing number that can increase your profits and ensure that you pitch a reasonable price.

2. Calculate your overhead

As discussed above, overhead pricing is an important factor that should be considered to ensure that you run a successful business in the long run. You can afford to compromise your plumbing service estimates, resulting in stagnation in your business growth.

Once the hourly price is calculated, you can add around 25-30% of the overhead price, increasing the net price to $52 per hour. The new price will help you break even your weekly wages and expenses.

But you want to earn profits from your plumbing business, right?

Now, you can add your profit margin to the new price. Suppose the previous price is $52 per hour, and assuming your profit margin to be 25%, the new price will be $65 per hour.

A fair and reasonable price can ensure that you have covered all your business expenses, and you are also looking towards growing your business with sufficient profits.

3. Compile your total cost

You need to figure out the required permit costs, taxes, material costs, extraordinary expenses, subcontracting, and multiple other factors that can play a vital role in your plumbing business operations.

You can’t ignore these factors because they’ll eat away the profits you may earn from pitching the hourly rates to your customers.

Suppose these expenses are around $850. Then you need to sum it up with the total labor rates.

But how to calculate the total labor cost?

4. Add your labor hours

You need to calculate the total labor hours your workforce will take to finish the task. Suppose if they take 10 hours, you need to multiply the number of hours by the hourly price calculated, i.e., $65.

Now the result is $650.

5. Sum it all

Add your business expenses ($850) with the total labor hours ($650) that gives you the plumbing estimate for completing a task in 10 hours = $1,500 + taxes.

You’ll be able to cover the taxes, wages, required materials, and overhead while earning a decent net profit.

You can communicate effectively with your customers and break down your pricing pattern to build strong relationships while maintaining great transparency.

You can build a larger customer base and stay ahead of your competition.

But with the rising clientele, you need a professional management ecosystem and dedicated software that can help you streamline your plumbing service business and its daily operations.

How Can Field Scheduling Software Help You Digitize Your Plumbing Service Business?

Digitization and automation can help you improve business efficiency as a plumbing contractor or business. You can handle the plumbing job more efficiently and increase overall productivity.

And field service scheduling software can help you maximize your plumbing service efforts. Here’s how

1. Track work hours

You can track the working hours of your team and ensure that they deliver effective results. With a quality reporting system, you can extract the performance reports of the employees that can help you analyze the areas of improvement that can be optimized in the future.

You can also use the information to calculate your pricing model for the next projects that can help you achieve precision and accuracy.

2. Track employees

You can track the employees’ real-time locations, which can help you manage them wisely. You can share the details with your customers to help them better understand the workers and keep them updated.

It can help you maintain transparency with your clients, which can help you strengthen your trust and build a healthy long-term relationship.

3. Schedule jobs

You can automate the job scheduling process with the help of a professional job scheduling software. The automation system can analyze the availability of the plumbing technicians and assign the service task based on that.

It can help you eliminate the need for manual processing which is prone to multiple errors. You can increase efficiency and channel your workforce resources towards the core business operations for better results.

4. Streamline communication

You can assist the on-ground workforce in bypassing different dynamic difficulties that hinder the smooth workflow. A service software can help you create a strong communication link between the management and the on-ground workforce.

It can help you strengthen your work ecosystem and help you achieve the desired business results.

5. Things are done faster & better

You can achieve your business results faster and better with increased productivity and efficiency. You can unlock your business goals and stand out from the competition.

A plumbing business software can help you to strengthen your business presence and optimize your operations.

FieldCamp is the Best Software for Your Plumbing Business

FieldCamp is the leading field service management software solution that delivers a quality management experience for your plumbing services.

You can increase your business productivity by 95% and digitize up to 90% of your operational tasks. You can create an effective communication channel for your on-ground workforce to connect with the management team.

FieldCamp offers an intuitive and effective interface that helps you to get centralized control over the operations and enables your team to adapt to the new technology with finesse.

You can scale your plumbing service business and strengthen your presence in the industry.

Avail of the 7-day FREE trial and transform the efficiency of your plumbing service management.