What's the difference between apprentice, journeyman, and master plumber rates?

In most provinces, an apprentice plumber on a job site bills out at roughly 40-60% of a journeyman's rate, mostly because a licensed plumber still has to supervise. A journeyman (fully licensed) in 2026 sits in the $110-160/hr range in most Canadian markets. A master plumber, who carries the shop and is usually the one pulling permits, often charges $150-200/hr or only takes flat-rate work. These are rough bands, not quotes - urban commercial work skews higher, rural residential lower.

Should I charge different rates for residential vs commercial plumbing?

Yes, and most established shops do. Commercial work usually carries more overhead (WSIB clearance, extra insurance riders, COR certification in some cases, longer AR cycles) so the hourly rate is typically 15-30% higher than residential. The counter is that commercial jobs tend to be longer and more predictable, so unbillable windshield time is lower. If you're doing both, track them as separate lines in your books or you'll never know which one is actually paying you.

Is flat-rate pricing better than hourly for plumbing?

For most residential service calls, flat-rate wins. Customers hate the meter running while you diagnose, and you get paid for skill rather than speed (fixing a leak in 20 minutes shouldn't pay less than taking two hours). Hourly still makes sense for open-ended work - renovations, commercial service contracts, emergency after-hours jobs where scope is genuinely unknown. A lot of shops end up hybrid: flat-rate book for common repairs, hourly with a minimum for everything else.

How much does location affect plumber hourly rates?

A lot. In 2026, a journeyman in downtown Toronto or Vancouver can bill $160-200/hr without blinking. The same work in smaller Ontario towns (Collingwood, Owen Sound, parts of Muskoka) tends to sit around $120-150/hr. Rural and small-town rates are usually $90-130/hr. The gap isn't just demand - urban shops carry higher rent, higher vehicle costs, and longer drive times between jobs, so their break-even is higher too.

How does overhead change what I should charge?

Overhead is the whole game for solo plumbers. If your truck, tools, insurance, fuel, phone, software, and unbillable admin time cost you $4,500/month, and you realistically bill 110 hours in a month (not 160 - the rest is driving, quoting, invoicing, and dead time), your break-even is already $41/hr before you've paid yourself a dollar. Charging $95/hr sounds healthy until you run those numbers. The calculator below does this math for your specific inputs.

What plumbers really charge per hour in 2026, why the "average" rate misleads solo operators, and how to price...

What Should a Plumber Charge Per Hour in 2026? (With Calculator)

By Lasse PettersenApril 19, 20269 min read

Every plumber I've talked to in Collingwood has a version of the same story. A customer calls three shops, two quote $110/hr, one quotes $145/hr, and the customer picks the middle one because it "feels right." Meanwhile the plumber who quoted $110 is working 55 hours a week and can't figure out why there's nothing in the bank account at the end of the month.

The honest answer to "what should a plumber charge per hour in 2026?" is that there is no single number. There's a number for your market, your license tier, your overhead, and the kind of work you do. The industry averages you'll find on most websites are useful as a sanity check and almost useless as a pricing decision.

This is a walk through what plumbers are actually billing in 2026, what's hiding inside those numbers, and how to land on a rate that pays you properly without scaring off your customer base.

What plumbers are actually charging in 2026

These ranges are pulled from what I'm seeing across Ontario shops and cross-checked against a few operators in Alberta and BC. They should be broadly true across most of Canada, though the US ranges are typically 15-25% higher at the same tier (different insurance market, different labour supply).

By license tier (Canadian journeyman, 2026)

Apprentice (supervised): $55-85/hr billed out
Journeyman (licensed): $110-160/hr
Master plumber / shop owner: $150-200/hr (or flat-rate only)
After-hours / emergency: 1.5x to 2x the base rate, often with a minimum callout of $200-350

By region (journeyman residential service, 2026)

Downtown Toronto / Vancouver: $145-200/hr
GTA suburbs / Ottawa / Calgary: $125-165/hr
Mid-size cities (Hamilton, London, Kitchener): $115-145/hr
Smaller towns and cottage country (Collingwood, Muskoka, Kingston): $110-140/hr
Rural / remote: $90-130/hr (but mileage is usually billed on top)

Two caveats before anyone screenshots this. First, these are rates customers are paying, not rates plumbers are taking home (huge difference, we'll get there). Second, flat-rate shops won't look like this on paper because they bill by the job - a running-toilet repair at $285 flat works out to whatever the tech's actual speed produces, which can be anywhere from $140/hr to $400/hr on the clock.

Why the "industry average" number is misleading

If you Google "average plumber hourly rate" you'll see numbers like "$85/hr nationwide." That number is technically true and operationally useless.

Here's why. That average blends in employed plumbers at large commercial shops (who get paid a wage while the shop bills their time out at 2-3x), apprentices, handymen who happen to do plumbing, and plumbers in very low cost-of-living markets. If you're a solo licensed operator running your own truck, that number has almost nothing to do with your actual economics.

The useful frame isn't "what's the average?" It's "what does my shop need to charge to stay alive, pay me a real wage, and have something left for the truck replacement fund?" That's a different question with a different answer.

Free tool

Figure out your real hourly rate in under two minutes

Plug in your overhead, target income, and realistic billable hours. You'll see your break-even rate, your target rate, and a margin-safe rate side by side. No email gate, no signup.

Open the hourly rate calculator →

What's actually inside a plumber's hourly rate

The mistake most solo plumbers make (and I've watched this happen in real time with friends in the trades) is treating the hourly rate like it's their wage. It isn't. The hourly rate has to cover five things before a single dollar hits your pocket.

Your truck and tools. Financing or lease, fuel, maintenance, tires, winter changeover, specialty tools that wear out, the augers and cameras you replace every few years. For most shops this is $1,200-2,500/month all-in. I wrote a full breakdown in the true cost of running a mobile service van if you want the line-by-line.
Insurance and licensing. Liability, WSIB or equivalent, vehicle commercial coverage, continuing education, trade license renewal. Call it $400-900/month depending on your province and coverage limits.
Admin overhead. Phone, software (dispatch, invoicing, accounting), bookkeeper, bank fees, the time you spend quoting and chasing invoices. $300-600/month in hard costs, plus the unbillable hours you eat.
Unbillable time. This is the one that kills people. In a 40-hour week, most solo service plumbers actually bill 22-30 hours. The rest is driving, quoting, parts runs, admin, and the job that fell through. If you only charge for billable hours but pay overhead for all 40, your real rate is much lower than the one on your invoice.
Your actual wage. What you want to take home after all of the above. If you want $90k/year, that's $7,500/month, and it comes out after items 1-4.

Run those numbers honestly and a lot of plumbers find their true break-even is somewhere between $55/hr and $80/hr just to keep the lights on. Charging $95/hr and thinking you're "making $95" is how you end up with a full schedule and an empty bank account.

Break-even, target, and margin-safe - the three numbers you need

A useful pricing exercise (the one the hourly rate calculator walks you through) is to stop thinking about a single rate and start thinking about three.

1. Break-even rate

The number below which you are literally losing money. Overhead divided by realistic billable hours. If your overhead is $5,000/month and you bill 110 hours, break-even is ~$45/hr before you pay yourself anything. Everything you charge above that goes toward your wage and profit.

2. Target rate

Break-even plus the wage you actually want. Same shop, wanting $8,000/month take-home: (5,000 + 8,000) / 110 = ~$118/hr. That's your target - the number where you're hitting your income goal if the month goes as planned.

3. Margin-safe rate

Target plus a cushion for the months when it doesn't go as planned. Slow weeks, unpaid invoices, truck repairs, a tech quitting, a cancelled commercial contract. Most advisors suggest 15-25% on top of target. Same shop: ~$140-150/hr is the margin-safe number.

That's your honest pricing range - $118/hr floor, $150/hr target. Anything below $118 and you're subsidizing your customers. Anything above $150 and you're building real savings into the business.

Residential vs commercial - different math

Residential service is high-volume, high-variety, and high-unbillable-time. Customer calls, you drive 20 minutes, you diagnose, you quote, you fix it in 45 minutes, you drive to the next one. The billable fraction is low but the rate per hour is typically good. Flat-rate works well here because customers don't want to watch the meter.

Commercial is the opposite. Longer jobs, more predictable, more paperwork, longer payment cycles (30-60 days is normal, 90 days isn't rare). Your billable fraction goes way up, but your AR risk goes up too. Shops that work both usually charge 15-30% more per hour on commercial to cover the financing cost of waiting to get paid, plus the extra certifications commercial work demands.

If you're running one shop that does both, track them separately. I've seen plumbers discover they were actually losing money on commercial because they were using residential rates on 60-day-pay work without realizing the financing cost was eating the margin.

Hourly vs flat-rate - when each one wins

Flat-rate pricing ("a running toilet repair is $285, a main shut-off replacement is $475") has become the default for residential service, and for good reason. It solves three problems:

Customers relax. They know the number before you start. No meter anxiety, no arguments about how long it "should" have taken.
You get paid for skill. A journeyman who fixes something in 30 minutes because they've done it 400 times shouldn't earn less than an apprentice who takes 90 minutes.
Pricing conversations get shorter. You quote the job, not the rate. "$285 to fix the toilet" is easier to sell than "$145/hr plus parts, probably 1-2 hours."

Hourly still wins for true unknowns. Renovations where you're opening walls, commercial service contracts, emergency after-hours where scope isn't defined, anything with significant diagnostic time on unfamiliar systems. A hybrid approach (flat-rate book for the top 30 most common jobs, hourly with a 1-hour minimum for everything else) is where most mature shops land.

For a deeper dive on structuring this, the repair shop pricing guide covers how to build a flat-rate book from scratch without pulling numbers out of the air.

Red flags that you're charging too little

A quick self-audit. If any of these are true (and I'd guess half of solo operators reading this will hit at least two), your rate is probably the problem.

You're booked out 2+ weeks and still can't raise prices without panic
You haven't taken a real vacation in over a year
You're the cheapest quote more than half the time
Your truck is older than your license and you can't afford to replace it
You keep meaning to start an RRSP / retirement fund and never quite get there
Customers rarely push back on your quote (price pushback is healthy - it means you're near the ceiling)
You're working 50+ hours a week and making less than $75k net

None of those individually mean you're undercharging. Together they're a pattern. The good news is that raising rates is almost never as painful as operators expect. A 10-15% rate increase in most markets loses maybe 5% of customers, and the ones you lose are usually the ones who were hardest to work with anyway.

So what should YOUR hourly rate be?

You already know the answer isn't on a chart. It depends on your overhead, your market, your license tier, and the kind of work you want to do. But the math isn't complicated once you've got your numbers in front of you.

The FixyFlow hourly rate calculator walks through exactly this. Plug in your monthly overhead, your realistic billable hours (be honest - most shops overestimate this by 20-30%), your target income, and the margin cushion you want. You'll see your break-even, target, and margin-safe rates side by side. No email, no signup, no upsell.

From there, you can sanity-check against the 2026 ranges above. If your calculator says you need $155/hr and your market tops out at $135/hr for journeyman work, you've got a structural problem (overhead too high, billable hours too low, or market too thin) and the fix isn't charging more - it's cutting overhead or moving to higher-value work.

The shops that run profitably for decades aren't the ones with the lowest rates or the highest. They're the ones who know their numbers cold, review them every quarter, and adjust before the pain shows up in the bank account. That's the whole game.

If you want to pair the calculator with actual job tracking - so next quarter you can see real billable hours, real unbillable time, and real revenue per job instead of guessing - start a free FixyFlow trial. Setup takes about two minutes. If nothing else, you'll stop losing invoices in your phone.

— Lasse
Built FixyFlow in Collingwood