Labour rates for plumbing & heating engineers

[REDSAW]

i hear 200 came of that new hospital?.

go and burn down dudley college.lol

 

[Blake]

thats direct labour, with van, tools and polo shirt. i agree its pants but people are working for this type of money. My area has a plumber living in every street. normally a fast tracker in his mothers corsa lol

I'd move or go work in ASDA for the same money :0

 

[petercj]

Hi Petercj

I'll happily acknowledge that its far from being perfect, but I don't think its without value. Many more respondents would improve the sample, and next year I will probably use this forum to try to boost the number of responses.

We have asked the same base set of questions over several years, which allows trends to appear - some of which I discuss in the article linked to in the OP. It was hard work writing it this year, because the overwhelming story the data was telling was "everything is much the same as last year" - this is hard to make interesting! Whilst I agree that this could be statistical accident, I don't consider that very likely.

Regarding the use of statistical terms, when I first did the survey I used maximum, minimum and mean. This was deeply unsatisfactory, and gave way too much credence to outlier data - particularly to one or two very large values which I thought may not be true. The shift to using median, quartile and decile was an attempt to manage this better.

I only have three motivations for doing it, all of which I am happy to admit are self-serving:

1) It gets our name in the HPM magazine twice a year 🙂
2) It is in my business interests that plumbers and heating engineers don't undercharge for their services because of lack of market research. If all our survey does is set them thinking and doing more thorough research in their own area, then thats fine. With the greatest respect to our customers, many of them are skilled and experienced tradesmen, but their business skills don't necessarily match their technical skills. A customer who goes bust or leaves the industry because they made poorly informed business decisions is a waste of a perfectly good customer! Thats not to say that all tradesmen match this profile - a significant number are very canny indeed - but a fair proportion aren't.
3) Because I enjoy it. I like analysing the numbers, imperfect though they may be, and trying to puzzle out the trends that underpin them. Fortunately, I have reached that stage in my life where I can afford to indulge my interests from time to time. 🙂

If you have a better idea for methodology (without incurring large costs) I would be happy to consider it.

Ray

There is no point in using such methodology with such little data.

The Gas Safe website states that there are 123,000 GSR engineers registered in the UK. Off the top of my head I would suggest that you could at least double that number as a guesstimate of the number of non-gas plumbers in the UK.

Applying the methodology to such a small sample doesn't mean that the results have any statistical significance.

Also, the variation in charging by a single GSR/Plumber will probably have a greater variance than the figures shown, e.g. GSRs in our area still get around fifteen hundred pounds for a boiler change (low end boiler), so on a straightforward swap-over they will be on around one hundred pounds per hour. However, if they fit a tap their charges are likely to be around 40 pounds an hour.

I don't know one GSR/Plumber who would give a straight answer to the question: "how much do you charge an hour?": they will all say they quote for a specific piece of work. If they do state an hourly rate, it's likely to be lower than their actual average rate.

A more accurate non-scientific survey would to be to contact a number of GSR's/Plumbers in a given area and ask how much they charge for: *a straightforward boiler swap; *changing a kitchen mixer tap; *standard vented cylinder, etc, etc. Which would provide some indication of charging for various types of work, if not of a standard hourly rate for each GSR/Plumber.

I would expect to find that there was more consistency for boiler swaps than the fitting of kitchen mixer taps, or something like changing a radiator, but would remain open to being proved wrong by making such inquiries. I would also expect to find that as times get harder, so the variance in charging increases.

 

[AWheating]

i hear 200 came of that new hospital?.

go and burn down dudley college.lol

they are just in the process of building/ new parts of the college in the town center, so it will take some doing. I could just concentrate on mons hill and take the plumbing department out LOL.

 

[markadams]

Does your survey only cover England? I would be interested to see if the prices change for other parts of the UK, Wales and Scotland for example.

 

[Ray Stafford]

Does your survey only cover England? I would be interested to see if the prices change for other parts of the UK, Wales and Scotland for example.

It covers anywhere that the HPM magazine is circulated, although to be honest it does have a south east bias, because thats where our branches are located, and lots of our customers complete the survey card in the branch (or at least they pick up the card from the tradecounter, even if they fill it in later and return it anonymously.)

There is some data for Scotland and Wales, but its a bit thin to be drawing conclusions from.

We are just starting the process of collecting the data for the 2013 survey, and are making an online version that we will promote via this forum and via twitter etc, and so hopefully get more data.

I think that some of the criticism regarding sample size in the posts above do make a fair point. Unfortunately, we don't have the resources to mailshot the entire Gassafe register, but the more reponses we get, the more useful the data becomes, particularly when looking at regional trends, where inevitably you can only look at a subset of the data.

Ray

 

[kay-jay]

Using the forum for future surveys is a great idea.

Up the numbers of respondents and up the quality of the data🙂

 

[Centralheatking]

THANK YOU Ray - apart from April Fools this is exactly why I like and contribute to UKPF
- we are normally men in vans often on our own - sharing info technical or financial
is the way fwds - centralheatking

I have organised our Holiday for next April 1st - as we need to escape the retribution I think that is inevitable - after Sqube last April 1 - anyway it is an Island with restricted access but unlimited beer/food if we take enough - what do you say ? no wives
but unattached females are in abundance - Jon Cropp is flying in I understand

centralheatking

 

[lame plumber]

THANK YOU Ray - apart from April Fools this is exactly why I like and contribute to UKPF
- we are normally men in vans often on our own - sharing info technical or financial
is the way fwds - centralheatking

I have organised our Holiday for next April 1st - as we need to escape the retribution I think that is inevitable - after Sqube last April 1 - anyway it is an Island with restricted access but unlimited beer/food if we take enough - what do you say ? no wives
but unattached females are in abundance - Jon Cropp is flying in I understand

centralheatking

you all off to anglesey to join william and all those available ewes then🙂

 

[markadams]

Thank you for the reply, I would be interested to know what the rates are in Scotland and Wales (even with the small amount of data) so I can make rough comparisons to the rates in England.

 

[Sag]

If you have any stats (or even raw data with names removed) for South Wales that would be much appreciated.

 

[Centralheatking]

In my opinion this has been one of the best posts - (apart from Sqube) its really good to see local and national rates :81:

It covers anywhere that the HPM magazine is circulated, although to be honest it does have a south east bias, because thats where our branches are located, and lots of our customers complete the survey card in the branch (or at least they pick up the card from the tradecounter, even if they fill it in later and return it anonymously.)

There is some data for Scotland and Wales, but its a bit thin to be drawing conclusions from.

We are just starting the process of collecting the data for the 2013 survey, and are making an online version that we will promote via this forum and via twitter etc, and so hopefully get more data.

I think that some of the criticism regarding sample size in the posts above do make a fair point. Unfortunately, we don't have the resources to mailshot the entire Gassafe register, but the more reponses we get, the more useful the data becomes, particularly when looking at regional trends, where inevitably you can only look at a subset of the data.

Ray

 

[Ray Stafford]

If you have any stats (or even raw data with names removed) for South Wales that would be much appreciated.

There's only a handful of reponses from SA, LD, CF and NP postcodes (I think that those 4 cover most of South Wales?), and they are broadly the same as the outside-of-M25 national figures.

There isn't enough data at that local level for medians, quartiles and deciles to mean much, but the average (arithmetic mean) for South Wales is:

£37.50 for Gas work, slightly below the national median of £40.
£32.50 for general plumbing, which is slightly above the national median.
£47.50 for gas boiler service, which is well below the median, but the data set is really quite small. (Not all respondents do all types of work).

As I mentioned in the OP, once you get outside of the M25, there really isn't a statistically significant difference between regions that I can identify. There may be differences at very local level, but we would need tons more data to identify that. There is certainly no North/South divide that I can see.

Where I live in Southsea, there are some very nice, leafy, upmarket areas, but move 50 yards up the road and you are in student let/bedsit land. I imagine its the same everywhere - or at least in the major urban centres. Apart from Hull, obviously.

 

[Sag]

Thanks, yes SA, NP & CF were the main ones in South Wales. LOL at Hull, I've been clubbing there about 15 years ago!

 

[jase158]

did you get any results for bedforfdshire, buckinghamshire and hertfordshire?
what's the difference between here and London?

Only wondering as plan to move to London at some point, but house prices are so expensive, wondering if I will earn enough?

 

[Ray Stafford]

did you get any results for bedforfdshire, buckinghamshire and hertfordshire?
what's the difference between here and London?

Only wondering as plan to move to London at some point, but house prices are so expensive, wondering if I will earn enough?

Tricky one to answer, because Hertfordshire and Bucks reach quite close to London, and once inside the M25, we start to see London style rates. The median rates inside the M25 are not wildly higher (maybe £5 ph) than the rest of the country, but almost all of the very high figures come from London. The more northerly parts of Herts, the northwestern parts of Bucks and Bedfordshire are more or less the same as everywhere else.