Plumbing has a pricing problem the other trades do not have, and it is worth naming before we get into the book.
Half your work arrives as an emergency. Somebody has water coming through a ceiling or a main line backing up into a basement, and they are calling four numbers off Google in the order the results loaded. Whoever answers with a real number first tends to win, and the contractor pricing from memory in that moment is the contractor who is either too high to get the call or too low to be glad he got it.
A book is what lets you answer fast without guessing. Here is what is inside ours.
All numbers below are Philadelphia metro calibration for 2026.
320 services, and why the count runs higher than the other trades
The plumbing book carries 320 line items against 250 for electrical and 190 for HVAC. That is not padding. It is that plumbing fragments harder.
A drain call is not one service. It is a single-fixture clog, a main line snake, a hydro-jet, a camera inspection, a root cut, and a grease trap, and those are six genuinely different jobs with different equipment on the truck and different time on site. Water heaters split by fuel, by capacity, by tank versus tankless, and then by whether the venting and gas line can be reused. Every one of those forks is a line item, because the moment two different jobs share one price, one of them is wrong.
One line built all the way through
The 50-gallon gas water heater at $1,820 breaks down like this.
The tank itself runs $400 to $700 wholesale depending on brand and warranty tier. Add the flex connectors, the drain pan, the venting components, the gas connector, sediment trap fittings, and the disposal fee for hauling the old one away, and materials land near $545 with markup applied. Labor is roughly four hours for a straightforward swap, which covers drain-down, disconnect, removal, set, connect, vent, fill, purge, light, and test. Overhead recovery and profit ride on both.
That is $1,820, and the useful thing about seeing it laid out is what it tells you about the add-ons. The expansion tank at $340 is not four hundred dollars of parts. It is twenty minutes of work and a fitting, priced to carry its share of the same overhead every other line carries. Price add-ons off the cuff and you will consistently underprice them, because they feel small in the moment and the overhead does not care how small they feel.
The triage question the book actually answers
Most plumbing calls start on the phone with a customer describing a symptom, not a job. "The toilet is running." "Water is coming up in the shower when the washer drains." "There is a puddle by the heater."
With a book in front of you those turn into a short branch. Running toilet is a $180 to $240 repair or a $610 replacement depending on age and what is failing. Shower backing up when the washer runs is not a fixture clog at all, it is a main line, so it is the $420 snake and probably a conversation about the $420 camera. Puddle by the heater is either a $250 T and P valve, a $340 expansion tank situation, or the start of an $1,820 replacement.
Three symptoms, nine possible numbers, and you can give a range on the phone with confidence because somebody already did the arithmetic. That is the difference between quoting and guessing, and the customer hears it.
Worth saying that a range on the phone is not a quote and you should say so out loud. "Sounds like a main line rather than a fixture, those run around four hundred to snake and I will confirm when I see it" is honest, it is fast, and it is enough to get you the call. The number that loses you the job is no number at all, and the number that costs you money is one you commit to before you have seen the cleanout.
Real line items from the plumbing book
Drain and sewer
- Single-fixture clog clear: $210
- Main drain snake, up to 50 feet: $420
- Hydro-jet, residential: $560
- Hydro-jet, heavy commercial duty: $840
- Camera inspection, standalone: $420
- Grease trap cleaning: $320
- Backwater valve install: $1,360
- Sewer line spot repair: $1,700
Water heaters
- 50-gallon gas tank, like-for-like: $1,820
- 50-gallon electric tank, like-for-like: $1,580
- Tankless gas, tankless-to-tankless or clean conversion: $2,950
- Tankless electric: $2,000
- Thermal expansion tank, where code requires: $340
- T and P relief valve replacement: $250
- Recirculation pump install: $730
Fixtures
- Toilet, standard floor-mount like-for-like: $610
- Toilet, pressure-assist: $930
- Toilet, wall-mounted: $1,340
- Reseat existing toilet with new wax ring: $300
- Bidet seat, electric: $580. Non-electric attachment: $180
The drain block is the one to study. A contractor with one drain price in his head quotes $210 because that is the number he remembers, then arrives to multiple fixtures backing up and a job that needs a $560 hydro-jet. He now has three options and all of them are bad: eat the difference, have an awkward conversation on the customer's basement stairs, or do a $560 job for $210. The book turns that into a two-minute phone triage before the truck moves.
The emergency multiplier, built in rather than improvised
Every line carries an after-hours and emergency multiplier instead of leaving you to invent one at 11pm.
A $420 main drain snake at eleven at night is $630. A $210 single-fixture clear becomes $315. The multiplier applies to the work, so it scales with the job rather than being a flat callout fee that feels like a penalty on small jobs and a bargain on big ones.
The reason this belongs in the book and not in your head is that the 11pm version of you negotiates worse than the Tuesday-afternoon version of you. You are tired, the customer is upset, and the number you pick under those conditions is reliably too low. Deciding the multiplier once, in daylight, and then just reading it off, removes the worst pricing decision in the trade from the worst possible moment to make it.
Three tiers on a trade where customers think there is only one answer
Every one of the 320 lines carries Good, Better, and Best.
On a water heater that is a like-for-like swap, then the swap plus an expansion tank and a new T and P valve, then a tankless conversion. On a recurring drain problem it is the snake, the snake plus a camera to find out why it keeps happening, or the jet plus the camera plus a quote for the repair the camera is going to reveal.
Plumbing customers arrive believing there is exactly one fix and the only question is price. Three tiers is how you show them that is not true without appearing to upsell, because the options are on paper before you have any idea which one they will pick.
IPC alignment, precisely stated
Service categories follow IPC organization, so venting, slope, cleanout, and relief valve work group the way the code groups them. When an inspector cites something, the related line items are together.
It is a pricing document, not a code reference. For what actually gets cited, the IPC Plumbing Code Quick Reference is the truck document, and the five mistakes plumbers get cited for covers the ones that come up most.
What it does not do
- No app, no dispatch, no integration. It is an Excel workbook. Multi-truck shops running field service software need field service software.
- No automatic price feed. When copper or a water heater line moves, you move the inputs.
- It arrives calibrated to one market. Philadelphia metro. Quoting these numbers unedited anywhere else is the main way people get this wrong.
- It does not price your repipes and remodels for you. Large project work is estimated, not flat-rated, and any book claiming otherwise is selling you something. The book covers service, repair, and standard installation.
The bottom line
320 plumbing services across service, repair, drain, and installation. Tiered pricing on every line, emergency multipliers built in, IPC-aligned categories, service codes ready for QuickBooks, and a settings sheet that reprices the catalog from one field.
The point of it is not that the numbers are correct for you on day one. They are not, until you put your rate in. The point is that after an hour of setup you never again have to invent a price standing in somebody's flooded basement.
Running more than one trade? The four-book bundle is $198.