Know your numbers: the KPIs that actually run a plumbing business

Plenty of busy plumbing shops aren’t profitable, and plenty of owners don’t find out until the accountant tells them in April. Revenue is a vanity number: you can run trucks flat-out all year and still net almost nothing. The handful of KPIs below are the ones that actually tell you whether the business is healthy and where the money is leaking. You don’t need a finance degree; you need to know these numbers, their rough benchmark ranges, and what to do when one is off. This is the dashboard. It ties together the specific playbooks: flat-rate pricing, hiring and keeping plumbers, lead generation, water heater replacement as a profit center, and field-service software for the reporting.

The numbers, with 2026 benchmark ranges

KPI	What it is	Rough benchmark	Red flag
Gross margin	Revenue − direct job cost (labor + materials), ÷ revenue	Overall ~45-65%	Under ~45%
By job type		Service/repair & drain 55-65%+; remodel/new-construction installs lower ~45-55%	Service under 55%
Net profit	What’s left after all costs	Owner-run shops often 5-10%; well-run 15-20%+	Under ~5%
Revenue per truck/tech	Annual revenue ÷ field plumber (truck)	Roughly $160k-$300k, higher for emergency-heavy shops	Well under range / under ~3-4× burdened cost
Billable efficiency	Share of paid field hours that generate revenue	Utilization 60-70% average, 75-85% top; true revenue-hour share is usually lower	Chronically low / unmeasured
Average ticket	Revenue ÷ completed job	Trend it up over time	Flat or declining
Overhead	Non-job operating cost ÷ revenue	Keep it lean	Creeping and unexplained
Booking rate	Booked ÷ answered calls	Aim high (60-70%+)	Losing calls you paid to generate
Marketing spend	Marketing ÷ revenue, tracked to booked jobs	Commonly ~5-10%	Spending untracked

These are 2026 industry benchmark ranges, not laws. Treat them as targets, but your own trend matters more than the absolute number. Track them quarterly (monthly for the fast movers like booking rate and revenue per truck); quarterly is enough to catch margin compression before it becomes a crisis. Two definitional notes: these ranges are for residential service-and-replacement work (commercial, new-construction, and heavy sewer/excavation behave differently), and “per truck/tech” means field plumbers who touch revenue-generating jobs, not apprentices riding along, office staff, or an owner who’s mostly dispatching.

The formulas (so you can actually calculate these)

• Gross margin = (Revenue − direct job costs [field labor + materials + permits/subs]) ÷ Revenue
• Fully-burdened plumber cost = wages + payroll taxes + benefits + truck & fuel + insurance + tools + phone + training
• Revenue-per-truck target = a healthy multiple of fully-burdened plumber cost (aim well north of 3-4×)
• Break-even revenue = (fixed overhead + burdened labor) ÷ gross-margin %
• Average ticket = total revenue ÷ completed jobs
• Billable efficiency = revenue-generating field hours ÷ total paid field hours
• CAC (per channel) = channel marketing spend ÷ new customers won from it

Gross margin: are the jobs themselves profitable?

Gross margin is the first gate: if the work isn’t profitable before overhead, nothing downstream can save you. Split it by job type, because plumbing work varies enormously. Service and repair, drain cleaning, and water heater swaps are single-plumber, high-pricing-power work where you control the price and material cost is manageable with the right markup. These should run at the top of the range, 55-65%+. Remodel, repipe, and new-construction rough-in are labor-heavy, competitively bid, and material-intensive, so they sit lower, often ~45-55%. Excavation and sewer-line replacement carry big equipment and sub costs that eat margin if you don’t price the true burden.

If your service margin is soft, the cause is almost always pricing: an hourly rate or a flat-rate book that doesn’t cover fully-burdened labor plus the real cost of parts. Moving off hourly guessing onto a disciplined flat-rate price book is the single highest-leverage fix on this page. And notice which jobs carry you: a well-run water heater replacement is one of the most reliable margins an independent plumber can build around: know that margin cold and feed the calendar with it.

Net profit: the number that’s actually yours

Net is what survives after overhead, and here’s the trap: you can run a healthy 60% gross margin and still net 4% if overhead is bloated. Four trucks, a dispatcher, an office manager, a shop lease, insurance, and a stack of software subscriptions can eat a great gross margin alive. If gross margin is fine but net is thin, your problem is overhead, not pricing: audit it line by line. Owner-run shops commonly net in the 5-10% range; well-run operations clear 15-20%+. Under ~5% and something specific is broken. This dashboard will tell you which lever.

The owner-comp trap: pay yourself a market-rate salary and pull it out as an expense before you calculate net. If your own labor is “free” (or you just take whatever’s left at the end of the month), your net profit is a fiction. You’re hiding a real cost and you can’t tell whether the business is profitable independent of you. This is the single most common way owner-operators fool themselves, and it matters the day you want to hire out of the field, sell, or simply take a week off.

Revenue per truck: the single most diagnostic KPI

If you track one number, track this. Each field plumber (each truck) should generate a healthy multiple of their fully-burdened cost. In dollar terms most shops land somewhere around $160k-$300k per plumber per year, with emergency-and-replacement-heavy operations trending toward the top. When it’s low, the cause is almost always one of two things, and the fix differs:

• Billable efficiency: how much of the hours you pay for actually turn into invoiced work. Utilization benchmarks vary a lot by how you define them, but the direction is what matters: paid hours lost to driving, hunting parts at the supply house, redoing callbacks, or sitting idle between calls all drag this down. Fix it with tighter dispatch and scheduling, stocked trucks, and callback reduction. Your field-service software should be reporting drive time and on-site time so you can see where the day goes.
• Average ticket: revenue per completed job. Low ticket usually means missed opportunities: not offering the water heater flush, the whole-home shutoff, the second option, or the fixture upgrade the customer would have said yes to. Fix the sales process with good-better-best options and honest add-ons, not with high-pressure tactics.

Diagnose a low revenue-per-truck reading by asking which of those two it is before you assume you need more trucks. Adding a truck that runs at low efficiency just multiplies the leak.

The front-of-funnel numbers feed everything

Two upstream KPIs quietly determine the rest:

• Booking rate (booked ÷ answered calls). Aim high: a well-run home-service phone should be converting the clear majority of genuine service calls. This is the cheapest revenue you’ll ever find: you already paid the marketing dollars to make the phone ring, so a plumber calling in sick to answer or a voicemail box on a Saturday is money on the floor. Missed and abandoned calls are pure leakage.
• Marketing spend: a commonly cited rule of thumb is roughly 5-10% of revenue, but the percentage matters less than this: track it to booked jobs so you know your cost per acquired customer by channel, not just what you spent. See lead generation for plumbers. Untracked marketing spend is the easiest money in the business to waste, and the channels plumbers overpay for are rarely the ones actually booking work.

And the cheapest revenue of all is recurring: a base of service agreements / maintenance members (annual inspections, water-heater flushes, drain maintenance) stabilizes cash flow in slow months and lifts every other number. Track active members and revenue per member alongside these.

Build the habit

• One dashboard, reviewed on a schedule. Pull these into a single sheet (or your field-service software’s reporting) and look at them quarterly, monthly for booking rate and revenue per truck.
• Know your break-even. How much revenue must the shop do each month to cover fully-burdened labor plus overhead? If you don’t know this number cold, you’re guessing every time you quote or hire.
• Trend, don’t obsess over one reading. A single quarter is noise; the direction over three or four is the signal, especially with a seasonal, emergency-driven call mix.
• Act on the diagnosis, in order. Each red flag points to a specific playbook: margin → pricing, net → overhead, revenue/truck → efficiency (dispatch) then ticket (sales), booking rate → whoever answers the phone. Sequence it: if gross margin is soft, fix pricing before anything else; if gross is fine but net is thin, cut overhead line-by-line before touching price. And know the cheap wins: lifting booking rate on your existing call volume is often the highest-ROI move on the whole board, because you’ve already paid for those calls.

Checklist

• Calculate gross margin overall and by job type (service/drain/water-heater vs. remodel/new-construction); fix soft service margin at the price book.
• Track net profit with a market-rate owner salary already expensed; if gross is fine but net is thin, audit overhead.
• Track revenue per truck; diagnose low readings via billable efficiency (dispatch) and average ticket (sales) before adding trucks.
• Track booking rate and marketing spend (tracked to booked jobs + CAC by channel).
• Know your monthly break-even cold.
• Put it all on one dashboard, review quarterly (monthly for the fast movers), and act on the trend.

The bottom line

Busy isn’t the same as profitable, and revenue tells you almost nothing on its own. The plumbing shops that make money know a small set of numbers (margin by job type, net, revenue per truck, billable efficiency, overhead, booking rate), and they review them on a schedule instead of hoping at year-end. Each one, when it’s off, points straight at the lever to pull. Learn these, watch the trend, and you stop running the business by feel and start running it by the numbers.

General information for plumbing business owners, not financial advice. Benchmark figures are rough 2026 industry ranges that vary by market, size, service mix, and country (US and Canada). Track your own numbers and trends, and work with an accountant on the financials.