What Factors Affect Plumbing Cost?
We get asked all the time why plumbing pricing is so different from contractor to contractor. This is an attempt to explain how pricing is calculated or should be calculated. Not all plumbing pricing will have all of the steps included in them although they should and you should have a pretty good idea why and how an estimate is achieved. Let’s start off with the simple concept of labor and move on from there. Labor….whether you are union or non-union, has a base wage you pay, plus any fringe benefits (Fringe Benefits – are any non-wage benefits an employee receives which includes but is not limited to health insurance, retirement, unemployment insurance, life insurance, etc.) the employer pays. For the benefit of this article lets put the base wage @ $35.00 p/hr, the average amount of fringe benefits in the US is about 38% of payroll expenses which bring you to $48.30 per hour. OK so you’ve got a raw cost labor rate of $48.30 per hour. Most companies now attempt to figure out what t
