Calculator
Plumber day rate: what you pay, and what you have to charge
The record
- Benchmark wage
- £16.71 an hour
- Charged out at
- £27.07 an hour, £216.56 a day
- Agreement
- JIB-PMES National Working Rule Agreement, 5 January 2026
What the 35% is made of
What the wage does not show, and none of it is optional.
- Employer's National Insurance15% above £5,000 a year
- Holiday pay12.07%
- Pension, auto-enrolment minimum3%
- CITB levy0.35% of payroll
- Sick pay, training and employer's liability insurancethe remainder
At 0% you are pricing a CIS subcontractor's labour - National Insurance, holiday and pension are then theirs to carry, not the job's.
Working for yourself is a different sum and the tool knows it: 25% rather than 35%. Lower than an employer's 35% because there is no employer's National Insurance on your own labour - that 15% is the whole of the difference.
Where the wage comes from
Plumbers are graded under the JIB-PMES National Working Rule Agreement at the plumber, mechanical pipefitter, gas fitter, craftsperson rate of £16.71 an hour, effective 5 January 2026. Derived, and deliberately recorded as derived: Promulgation 195 sets the grade rates from 6 January 2025, and JIB-PMES published a 3.4% uplift from 5 January 2026 without republishing the table. Basic Plumber grade £16.16 x 1.034 = £16.71. Replace with the 2026 promulgation's own figure when it publishes.
That is an agreement rate - the negotiated floor for a graded operative, not what the market pays. The market pays more, and how much more is the thing nobody publishes. It is what the figures contributed through this page are measuring.
What does a plumber get paid an hour?
An employed plumber at the basic graded rate is on about £16.71 an hour in 2026, rising to roughly £19.46 as an Advanced Plumber and £21.61 at Technical Plumber. Those come from the plumbing and mechanical engineering agreement, which is a different agreement from the one covering general construction trades and a different one again from the electricians’.
The grades are worth understanding before you price, because the gap between the bottom and the top is nearly five pounds an hour - around thirty per cent. A firm quoting at the basic rate and sending a technical plumber to a commercial heating job has priced the wrong person.
Why a plumber’s hourly rate is the least useful number they own
Because most plumbing is not sold by the hour. A leaking valve is sold as a call-out, a bathroom is sold as a job, a boiler swap is sold as a fixed price, and only maintenance work and site work are genuinely sold by the day. The hourly figure is what you build those prices from, not what you put on the quote.
The call-out is where this bites hardest. A first hour that has to cover travelling to the job, parking, diagnosing the fault, the parts on the van and the drive to the next one is not one hour of work, and pricing it as one hour of work is how a busy plumber ends a busy year with nothing in the bank. Work out what an hour costs you, then decide how many of them a call-out really contains.
What is in a plumber’s costs that is not in the wage
Registration, and it is the largest single trade-specific cost on this page. Gas work requires registration that has to be paid for and renewed, with assessment every five years, and none of it is optional. Nor is it recoverable on any single job - it is a standing cost that only gets paid for by being inside your hourly rate.
- The van as a stockroom. A plumber carries stock so that a job is finished on the first visit. That is money sitting on wheels, and it depreciates and gets nicked.
- Certification of what you fit. Notification and certification of gas appliances and unvented systems is time and a fee against the job.
- Welding tickets. Where they apply the agreement carries a supplement for them, which is the industry saying plainly that a certificated welder is worth more per hour.
The calculator above is labour only. Registration and van stock are overheads, so they belong in the overhead and profit percentage rather than in the wage - and if your overhead figure has never been checked against what those things actually cost you in a year, that is the number to go and check.
Questions people ask
What should a self-employed plumber charge per hour?
Start from what you want to earn, not from what somebody else charges. If you want the equivalent of £20 an hour in your pocket, you still have to cover holiday nobody funds, sick days, a pension, public liability cover and quiet weeks - around 25% on top - and then your overheads and profit. That puts the charge-out near £30 an hour before you have accounted for registration or van stock.
How much should I charge for a call-out?
Enough to cover the hours it actually consumes. A call-out that takes twenty minutes of work usually consumes an hour of travelling, an hour of diagnosis and parts, and a share of the stock on the van. Price the real hours at your worked-out rate rather than pricing the twenty minutes.
Is a plumber paid the same as an electrician?
No. They are covered by separate national agreements with separate grades, and in 2026 the basic plumbing grade sits about £1.67 an hour below the electricians' Electrician grade. The gap widens at the top grades. That is why this site prices them from different figures rather than a single trade rate.
Pricing a job like these?
HubTrack is where small construction firms keep their compliance documents, their jobs and their evidence trail in one place - method statements and risk assessments prepared for you to check and sign off, and a record of who signed what and when. The same engine that reads the contract documents behind this page reads yours inside HubTrack.