Plumber Salary: What You Actually Take Home

$96 an hour sounds like a lot. Break it down.

People hear that number and their eyes go wide. $96 an hour, that's almost $200,000 a year, right? No. Not even close. Here's how it works. My total package through UA Local 130 is $96.42 an hour. Of that, $52.18 is my taxable wage. That's what I see on my paycheck. The other $44.24 goes to my benefits package: health insurance, pension fund, annuity, training fund, and a few other line items. I never touch that $44. It goes straight from the contractor to the fund. So when people say plumbers make $96 an hour, what they really mean is the contractor pays $96 an hour for me. I make $52.

Now $52 an hour is still good money. At 40 hours a week for 50 weeks, that's $104,000 gross. But I don't work 50 full weeks. There's weather days, especially in the winter. There's between-job gaps where the contractor doesn't have work lined up yet. Last year I worked about 2,080 hours on paper but my actual paid hours were closer to 1,940. Gross pay was $108,000 and change. After federal taxes, state taxes, and my union dues, which run about $82 a month, my take-home was $87,000. That's real money in my checking account.

Your brother-in-law makes $140,000 working from home.

Yeah. Tyler. He's a software developer for some company in Austin. Works remote from his house in the suburbs. Makes $140,000 base, plus stock options or whatever they call it. He told me at Thanksgiving his total comp is around $165,000. I was eating turkey and doing the math in my head. He sits in his home office in athletic shorts. I was on a job site the day before Thanksgiving running 4-inch cast iron in a parking garage in 28-degree weather. My Milwaukee M18 ProPress was so cold the battery kept dying. I had to keep rotating batteries from the heated truck cab.

My wife Belinda teaches fourth grade. She makes $54,000. Our combined household income is $141,000. Tyler and his wife make about $220,000 combined. That's an $80,000 gap. And it shows. They took a trip to Portugal last year. We went to Wisconsin Dells. I'm not complaining. We're comfortable. But the gap is there and I think about it more than I should.

What's your path from here money-wise?

The union scale goes up every year. We negotiate a new contract every three to five years with the mechanical contractors association. Last contract got us a $3.80 raise spread over three years. So my hourly goes up about $1.25 a year on the wage side. In five years I'll probably be at $58 or $59 an hour on the check. That's the ceiling unless I become a foreman. My foreman Chet makes about $6 more an hour than journeyman scale, plus he gets a company truck. His gross is probably $125,000 to $130,000. But Chet also works 50 to 55 hours a week and deals with all the headaches I don't want.

The other option is overtime. When it's available, overtime is time and a half on my $52 base, so $78 an hour. During a big job last spring, a hospital renovation, I was pulling 55-hour weeks for about six weeks straight. Those were $3,500 paychecks after taxes. That's the best money I've ever made. But it's not consistent. Some months there's 20 hours of overtime available. Some months there's zero. My apprentice coordinator Vic always told us, "Don't budget for overtime. Budget for 40. Treat overtime like a bonus." He was right. The guys who buy trucks based on overtime checks are the guys who can't make payments in January.

Side work?

Technically the union doesn't love it. But everybody does it. I do maybe $8,000 to $12,000 a year in side jobs. Water heaters, fixture replacements, small repipes. A water heater swap takes me three hours and I charge $1,800 parts and labor. The water heater itself costs me $650 from my supply house contact. Fittings and miscellaneous, call it $80. So I net about $1,070 for three hours of work. That's $356 an hour. Cash. Compare that to my $52 on a union job. The math is obvious. But I can't do it full time because I need the benefits, the pension, and the steady 40 hours. The side work is gravy. The union job is the meal.

What is it about money in plumbing?

The benefits package is golden. But it's invisible. My health insurance through the union is worth about $1,400 a month for my family. Belinda's teacher insurance is $680 a month and worse coverage. My pension, if I make it to 30 years in the local, will pay me about $4,200 a month for life starting at age 55. That's real. That's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars over a retirement. But I can't spend it today. I can't put it toward the trip to Portugal. I can't use it to close the gap with Tyler.

So when someone asks if plumbers make good money, the honest answer is: the total compensation is excellent. The take-home is good but not great. And the gap between those two things creates this weird feeling where you know you're well-compensated on paper but your actual lifestyle doesn't match what people assume when they hear "$96 an hour." Belinda's friends think we're loaded. We drive a 2019 F-150 with 68,000 miles on it. We're not loaded. We're stable. There's a difference, and explaining it gets old.

Walk us through how commission plumbing pay works.

I get a base of $18 an hour. That's my floor. If I showed up and did absolutely nothing all day, I'd still get $18 an hour. At 40 hours a week, that's $720 a week, about $37,400 a year. That's poverty wages for a licensed plumber. But that's not the real pay. The real pay is commission. I earn 22% on everything I sell, parts and labor combined. Every time I go into a house and present options to a customer, whatever they buy, I get 22 cents on the dollar.

A typical service call might look like this: I show up for a clogged kitchen drain. The diagnostic fee is $89, which the customer already paid when they booked. I run my camera, find the problem, and present options. Option one: clear the clog for $289. Option two: replace the corroded section of pipe for $680. Option three: repipe the whole kitchen drain line for $1,400. Most customers pick option two. My commission on $680 is $149.60. That call took me about 90 minutes including drive time. If I run four calls like that in a day, I'm at $598 in commission plus my $144 base for an 8-hour day. That's $742. On a great day, $93 an hour. On a slow day with one call and a no-show, maybe $200 total.

$11,400 in your best month. What happened?

July. Peak season in Texas. AC units are dying, which means HVAC is slammed, which means plumbing gets the overflow calls. And in July everyone's running their garbage disposals overtime, kids are home flushing things they shouldn't flush, people notice their water heater is making noise because they're actually home to hear it. I ran six to seven calls a day for most of that month. My dispatcher Lenny was feeding me back-to-back. I had three water heater replacements that month at $2,800 to $3,400 each. My commission on a $3,200 water heater job is $704. I did a whole-house repipe for $8,900. My cut on that was $1,958. That single job paid more than my base for the entire month.

My worst month was January. $3,800 total. Post-holiday, nobody wants to spend money. Call volume dropped to two or three a day. Half of those were warranty callbacks that don't pay commission. I was basically working for $18 an hour for three weeks straight. My son Terrell needed new basketball shoes that month and I remember thinking, "I hope February is better." It was. $6,200. But that January sat in my gut for a while.

$78,000 for the year. How does that compare to your HVAC days?

I made $62,000 my last year doing HVAC. Plumbing pays better because the ticket averages are higher. An AC tune-up is $89 and there's not much to upsell. A plumbing call can easily turn into a $2,000 job if there's a real problem. The company also pays a higher commission rate for plumbing, 22% versus the 18% I was getting on HVAC installs. My branch manager Dwight recruited me to switch over. He said the top plumber in the company made $118,000 the year before. I'm not there. That guy runs seven calls a day and sells like a car dealer. I'm more of a four-to-five call person who explains options and lets people decide. I leave money on the table. I'm fine with that.

What's the ceiling?

At this company, the top residential service plumber in the DFW market made $118,000 last year. Nationally, the company's top earner did $142,000. Those are the rockstars who sell whole-system replacements on every other call. For someone like me, who sells honestly and doesn't push people into things they don't need, $80,000 to $90,000 is probably my range. I could make more by getting more aggressive on the upsells, but I've been in the customer's house. I've seen the single mom with three kids who just needs the drain cleared. I'm not going to pitch her a $4,000 repipe she doesn't need so I can make $880 in commission. Dwight would love it if I did. I won't.

The other path is management. Dwight makes about $95,000 salary plus a small bonus based on branch revenue. But he works six days a week, handles customer complaints, and hasn't held a wrench in four years. That's not plumbing. That's middle management. I'd rather be wet and making $78,000 than dry and making $95,000 while apologizing to angry homeowners all day.

What is it?

The company makes three to four times what I make on every call. That $680 drain repair I sell? My commission is $149. The parts cost the company maybe $45. Labor cost to the company, including my base, benefits, truck, gas, and insurance, is roughly $200 for that 90 minutes. So the company's gross profit on that call is about $285, and my share is $149. I'm OK with that math because they provide the truck, the marketing, the call center, the insurance, and the brand name that gets me in the door.

What I'm less OK with is that the company charges the customer a $89 diagnostic fee, which I don't get any commission on, and if the customer declines the repair, I just spent 45 minutes driving and diagnosing for $18 an hour. The company still collected $89. I got $13.50 for that half hour. So the incentive structure pushes me to sell on every call, because if I don't sell, I'm working below minimum wage on a per-call basis while the company profits regardless. Nobody explains that to you when you sign the commission agreement. You figure it out around month three when you have two no-sales in a row and your daily take-home is $144 for eight hours of work. That's $18 an hour for a licensed plumber. It'll make you consider flipping the whole thing and starting your own shop. Which is what I think about at least once a month.

$620,000 in revenue sounds like a lot for two vans.

It sounds like a lot because people don't understand the expenses. Let me walk through it. $620,000 gross revenue. Materials and parts cost me about $148,000, so roughly 24 cents of every dollar goes right back to the supply house. I have one full-time licensed tech, Rico. I pay him $52,000 salary plus $6,200 in payroll taxes and $4,800 toward his health insurance. So Rico costs me about $63,000. I have a helper, Blaine, part-time to full-time depending on the season. He cost me $36,000 last year. Two work trucks: insurance, fuel, maintenance, and the lease payment on the newer one, that's $18,000. My general liability and workers comp insurance is $14,000. Office expenses, phone, software, advertising, my Google Ads budget, that's another $22,000. Licensing and continuing ed, $2,400. My accountant and bookkeeping, although my wife Sheree does most of the day-to-day books, the CPA costs $3,800 a year. Miscellaneous, tools, uniforms, supply house account fees, call it $8,000.

Add all that up and you get roughly $315,000 in expenses. $620,000 minus $315,000 is $305,000. That sounds like my take-home, right? No. I also paid $68,000 in materials on jobs I completed in December but didn't collect on until January. Cash flow is not the same as profit. My actual distributable profit last year, what I could take out of the business and call income, was $134,000. I took $112,000 and left $22,000 in the business account because I need a new RIDGID SeeSnake camera and the one I want is $16,000, and the rest is a cushion for January when call volume drops and payroll doesn't.

$112,000. How does that feel at 49 with 26 years in?

Complicated. I've been doing plumbing since I was 23. I've worked for three different companies. The most I ever made as an employee was $68,000, and that was working 50-hour weeks. So $112,000 as an owner is almost double. But I also work more. I'm the first one at the shop at 6:15 and the last to leave at 5:30 most days. I run calls, I manage Rico and Blaine, I do estimates, I answer the phone when Sheree can't, I handle the billing, I deal with the supply house when they short us on an order. If Rico calls in sick, I run his calls plus mine. There's no one above me. The job is mine to do or not do, and if it doesn't get done, we don't eat.

Sheree does the books part-time, about 15 hours a week. I don't pay her separately because we're married and it comes from the same pot. But if I had to hire a bookkeeper, that's another $20,000 to $25,000. So the real cost of my $112,000 includes my wife's free labor. I know that. She knows that. We don't talk about it much because we both agree this is better than when I was working for someone else and coming home frustrated every night.

Break down a typical service call for us.

Standard service call. Customer has a running toilet. I charge $150 for the trip and diagnosis. The repair, a fill valve and flapper, I charge $285 parts and labor. So total ticket is $435. My cost on the parts is about $28. Seems like a huge markup, and it is, because the labor is built into the flat rate price. The $285 isn't just for the parts. It's for the 45 minutes of skilled labor, the 20 minutes of drive time, the truck, the insurance, the warranty I offer on the work. If that call took me away from a bigger job, there's an opportunity cost too. But the customer sees $28 in parts and a $435 bill and the math in their head says I'm pocketing $407. The actual net on that call, after you allocate my truck costs, insurance, fuel, and the time I could have spent on something else, is maybe $140. And that's my gross margin, not my take-home. After self-employment tax, which is 15.3% up to the Social Security cap, and federal and state income tax, $140 becomes about $85 in my pocket. For an hour and fifteen minutes of work including drive time. That's $68 an hour. Which is good. But it's not $435-an-hour good like the customer thinks.

What's your ceiling?

With two vans, I can do about $650,000 to $700,000 in revenue. Getting above that means adding a third van, which means another tech at $52,000 to $60,000 plus another truck at $800 a month lease plus insurance. The jump from two vans to three costs about $85,000 a year before that third van generates a dollar of revenue. I've run the numbers with Sheree probably 15 times. The third van should generate $200,000 to $250,000 in additional revenue if the call volume is there. After that tech's salary, the truck, and the extra materials, I'd net maybe $50,000 to $70,000 more. But I'd also be managing three people instead of two, which means less time on the tools and more time on the phone. Every owner I know who went from two trucks to four says the same thing: "I stopped being a plumber and started being a manager." I didn't leave my last employer to become a manager. I left to be a plumber who controls his own schedule. Adding that third truck might make financial sense and lose the whole point.

What is it about the money?

No benefits. None. I don't have employer-subsidized health insurance. I buy it on the marketplace. For me and Sheree, it's $1,340 a month with a $6,500 deductible each. That's $16,080 a year just in premiums before I use it. No pension. No 401k match. No paid vacation. If I take a week off, I lose about $12,000 in revenue, which translates to roughly $4,500 in lost income after expenses. So a one-week vacation costs me about $4,500 in lost earnings plus whatever the trip costs. Last year we took five days off in September and went to Gatlinburg. Total cost was about $2,200 for the cabin and food, plus $4,500 in lost income. That vacation cost $6,700. We had a nice time. But I was thinking about the number.

When people compare my $112,000 to Dutch's $87,000 union take-home, they think I'm way ahead. But Dutch has a pension that'll pay him $4,200 a month for life. His health insurance costs him nothing out of pocket. His annuity fund has $180,000 in it. If you add the actuarial value of his pension and the insurance savings, Dutch's total compensation is probably within $10,000 of mine. He just can't see most of it. I can see all of mine. Both of us think the other one has it better. That's the trade. It's always been the trade.