Plumbing flat rate pricing book: a free flat rate plumbing price book you can re-price
A plumbing flat rate pricing book is every job you sell with one fixed price on it and the cost that price has to clear. You can pay for one, build one from a blank sheet, or start from the free 56-task book on this page and re-price it on your own numbers in an afternoon. Below is what the pages of that book look like, so you can tell whether it fits your calls before you download anything.
What the pages of the book look like
A working plumbing book isn’t a catalog of every fitting. It is the jobs your trucks run, grouped so a tech can find one at the kitchen sink. These are sample rows pulled straight from the free file, with the price the customer sees and the cost that stays in the office.
Diagnostics & drains
Task
What the customer is told
Flat rate
Cost
Diagnostic service call
Full plumbing diagnostic, written findings, repair options
Figures in these tables were priced at $45/hr loaded labor, 25% overhead and a 60% target gross margin, and were last reviewed in October 2026. They are the assumptions the template was priced on, not a market rate for your area.
Flat rate book, price list, pricing book: which one do you need?
Plumbers use all three names for what ends up as one file. The difference is which side of it you are looking at.
Name
What it means
Plumbing flat rate book
What the tech shows the customer: the task, a plain description and one price. It lived in a binder in the truck. Now it's the price book screen on a tablet. It never shows the cost.
Plumbing price list
The rows behind the book. One line per task with a name, description, price, cost and unit. This is what you import, export and re-price, and the CSV on this page is one.
Plumbing flat rate pricing book
Both together: the price list with the costs and margin worked out, presented as a book. Most shops asking for a pricing book have a list with the cost column empty.
The practical rule: build the pricing book, show the flat rate book. The tech and the customer only ever need the task and the price. The cost column and the margin math stay in the office.
How the prices in the book were set
Every row follows one rule: price = cost × (1 + overhead) ÷ (1 − target margin). With 25% overhead and a 60% target margin that works out to about 3.1 times the cost, so the $49.75 fill valve or flapper job prices at $155.47. The flat rate price calculator does that arithmetic for any task you want to check, and the plumbing flat rate pricing guide works the formula through real repairs if you want to see where the cost on each line comes from.
The formula suits small repairs. Water heaters, tankless installs and repipes are mostly equipment cost, and a margin target on the whole ticket gives a number the market won’t pay. Keep those rows priced job by job, against what a comparable install actually sells for in your area.
The cost column decides whether the book works
Most pricing books fail in the same quiet way: the flat rates get filled in, the costs don’t, and from then on nobody can say which jobs make money. In one real 86-service Housecall Pro book we audited, 83 services had no cost recorded at all, the worst measurable item was priced at a -20% gross margin, and the estimated undercharge came to $71,888 a year from just the 3 items that had cost data, at 12 sales each per year (the item-by-item working).
You can check your own book for free. Upload the template or your existing export to the Margin Leak Finder, enter your labor rate, overhead and target margin, and it flags every row priced under target. It runs in your browser, so your pricing never leaves your machine.
Free book, or software that maintains one?
A book you re-price yourself each quarter covers most of what a one-to-four-truck plumbing shop quotes. Software earns its cost when you want a much larger task library kept current for you. The plumbing price book software comparison lines the options up. The full download and the field-by-field walkthrough of the same file are on the plumbing price book template page.
Frequently asked questions
What is a plumbing flat rate pricing book?
It is the list of every job a plumbing shop sells, each with one fixed price the customer hears before work starts, plus the cost behind that price. The tech opens it at the sink or the water heater, finds the task and quotes the number instead of working out hours and parts on the spot.
Is there a free flat rate plumbing price book?
Yes, the one on this page is free: 56 plumbing tasks with a description, a flat rate, a cost and a unit on every row, as a CSV that opens in Excel or Google Sheets and imports into Housecall Pro. The prices rest on stated assumptions ($45/hr loaded labor, 25% overhead, 60% target margin), so put your own labor rate in before it goes live.
What should a flat rate pricing list for plumbing service include?
Six fields per task: a category, the task name your techs say out loud, a customer-facing description, the flat rate, the cost (parts plus loaded labor) and a unit. The cost field is the one most shops leave empty, and it is the only way to tell whether a job made money.
How many tasks does a plumbing flat rate book need?
Fewer than most shops expect. The free book has 56 tasks and covers the bulk of residential service calls. A working book is the jobs your shop actually quotes, usually a few dozen to maybe a hundred, not a catalog of every fitting.
Can I use the same pricing formula for every plumbing task?
No, not for water heaters and repipes. Small repairs price cleanly from labor plus parts divided out to a target margin. Water heaters and big installs are mostly equipment cost, so a margin target on the whole ticket gives a number the market won't pay. Price those rows job by job and keep the formula for the small repairs.
How often should I update my plumbing price book?
Check parts costs against supplier invoices every quarter and rebuild the labor rate once a year, or sooner if wages, insurance or fuel move. Copper, water heaters and PRVs are the rows that drift first.
Can I import this plumbing price book into Housecall Pro?
Yes. The columns match Housecall Pro’s price book import wizard, so the file loads without remapping, and the step-by-step import guide walks through the wizard. It’s a plain CSV, so any software that imports a price list from a spreadsheet, or just Excel or Google Sheets, can open it too.
Or skip the re-pricing weekend
If working the book over line by line isn’t happening, The Margin-Right Rebuild is a $249 one-time service: we take your price book export, rebuild every price at your target margins, and hand back a file verified to import clean.