No Texas agency publishes what plumbers charge, and neither does anyone else with the authority to. Every “average Texas plumber rate” you can find online was assembled by a lead-generation company out of its own quotes, and none of them will tell you the sample size.
So this page does something different. It sets out the numbers that are published, by the bodies that publish them, with the date we read each one — and then shows you how to read your own estimate against them. Where a sourced figure does not exist, we say so instead of inventing a range.
What plumbers earn is public. What plumbing companies bill is not.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median pay for plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters at $30.67 an hour, or $63,800 a year, in its May 2025 data. The lowest-paid ten percent earned less than $44,150 a year; the highest-paid ten percent earned more than $108,420.
For Texas specifically, the Bureau’s Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for May 2025 put the mean wage for the same occupation at $29.22 an hour, or $60,780 a year, with a median of $59,840 — below the national figures above.
All of those are wages — what an employer pays the person, before the employer has paid for anything else. Your invoice is not that number. The distance between the two is the company’s cost of existing, and Texas publishes a useful amount of that.
Three of the costs a Texas plumbing company carries are set by public bodies and printed in public documents.
Insurance: at least $300,000. A Responsible Master Plumber — the licensed person a Texas plumbing company must operate under — has to maintain a minimum of $300,000 of commercial general liability coverage and keep a certificate of insurance on file with the state board. The board’s own certificate form puts it as coverage “not less than $300,000 for all claims arising in any one-year period.” A company that cannot show you that is not one you want under your slab.
Permit fees, set by your city. Houston’s 2026 Building Code Enforcement fee schedule prices plumbing fixtures at $34.24 for one to three and $11.41 for each additional fixture, under a $97.56 minimum permit fee that applies when the fixture lines come to less. A gas permit and inspection — a separate permit, not a plumbing fixture line — is $45.53 for up to four openings and $7.80 for each additional opening. A non-refundable $33.56 administrative fee applies to every Houston permit on top of these. Austin publishes its own residential fee schedule, effective 1 October 2026. Every Texas city sets its own, and they are not close to each other — which is why a quote in Plano and a quote in Lubbock for the same job are not comparing the same total.
City registration, which is free by law. Dallas, Fort Worth, Frisco and Plano all require a plumbing contractor to register with the city on top of the state license. Texas Occupations Code §1301.551(g) bars a municipality from charging a plumber a registration or administrative fee for it, and Plano’s own form says “No registration fee will be assessed” while El Paso’s says “No Annual Fee.” So it is a filing every legitimate shop completes and the ones working around the rule do not — but it is not a line in your bill.
None of this tells you the hourly rate. All of it tells you what a legitimate quote has to cover, and why the cheapest number on the phone is often the one from the company carrying none of it.
Labor to repair your home’s plumbing is not taxable in Texas. If you are being charged sales tax on labor for a residential repair, that is wrong.
The Comptroller states it directly in Publication 94-116: “Labor to repair, remodel, or restore residential real property is not taxable.”
How the materials are taxed depends on which kind of contract you signed, and there are only two:
So on a residential repair there are exactly two correct invoices: no tax line, or a tax line calculated on the materials. A tax charge applied to the labor total, or to the job total, is a billing error worth questioning before you pay it.
One thing to note: this is the residential rule. Repair to nonresidential real property is taxable on the total amount charged — which is why a commercially-oriented shop’s invoice template sometimes turns up on a house.
Texas plumbing law governs who may do the work and what insurance they carry. It does not set prices or prescribe a pricing model, so both of the common ones are lawful.
A flat-rate shop quotes a price per job from a book, regardless of how long it takes. A time-and-materials shop bills hours plus parts. Neither is inherently more honest, and the difference only bites you when you assume you are getting one and are handed the other.
Three questions settle it on the phone, and all three are free to ask:
The third one is the one people forget, and on a water heater, a repipe or a sewer line it is not a rounding error.
The state board tells you what belongs on the paperwork, and it is a short list you can check in ten seconds.
TSBPE’s consumer guidance says the written estimate and invoice should contain the Responsible Master Plumber’s license number, and the name, address and telephone number of the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners. It also tells consumers to obtain several estimates before committing, and to get all warranties and cost estimates in writing.
An estimate with no license number on it is not a small omission. It is the one field that lets you check everything else.
Two quotes for the same job in Texas are routinely built on different assumptions, and the cheaper one is often the one that left something out.
Put both on the same footing before you compare the totals:
Not because Texas plumbers are unusual, but because the housing stock is.
Slab leaks. Slab-on-grade construction is common across Texas, so a leak under the slab is an ordinary problem here and an unusual one in parts of the country built over basements and crawlspaces — where the same repair is a different job reached a different way.
Whole-house repipes. Same reason, plus the access question: routing new pipe through a slab house is not the same work as routing it through a basement ceiling.
Water heaters. The variable here is not the appliance, it is the permit. Every Texas city we have verified requires a permit to replace one, and the fee, the process and even the timing differ. San Antonio treats a like-for-like swap as a Limited Service Repair: the bulletin covers “replacement of an existing water heater connected to an existing venting system, gas and/or electric circuit in the same location,” and the contractor “shall obtain the required permit after and within three working days from the completion of the work.” That is the reverse of the usual permit-first sequence — and it stops applying the moment you change type, because a tank replaced with a tankless, or an electric replaced with a gas, is expressly outside it.
We are writing dedicated Texas pages for slab leaks and repipes rather than folding a national average into this one. The permit side of a repipe or a sewer line is covered in big-ticket plumbing permits in Texas.
We could produce one. We would have to build it out of contractor marketing pages and lead-generation estimators, none of which show their working, and then present it as though a state agency had blessed it. That is the thing this site exists not to do.
What we will publish, as we build it, is Texas-specific cost pages for the jobs where the national averages are actively misleading here, starting with slab leaks and whole-house repipes on slab-on-grade housing stock.
Get the Responsible Master Plumber’s license number off the estimate and look it up. The state’s search is free, it takes about a minute, and it tells you whether the license is current and shows the status and expiry of the certificate of insurance behind that $300,000 requirement. An empty field there means the board has no record on file, which is not the same as no coverage — ask the company for a copy.
An estimate you cannot check is just a number someone said out loud.
Next: how to verify a Texas plumber’s license, screen by screen. Also: how to tell if a plumber is overcharging or scamming you. All of our Texas plumbing cost guides.
Every figure on this page comes from one of the documents below, each published by the body that sets, measures or administers the thing it describes. We record the document’s own date and the date we read it, because published pages change without notice.
| Source | Document date | We read it |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Occupational Outlook Handbook, Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters | May 2025 wage data; page last modified 2026-08-27 | 2026-09-14 |
| Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts — Publication 94-116, Real Property Repair and Remodeling | revised 03/2007 | 2026-09-14 |
| TSBPE — Responsible Master Plumber license type | undated | 2026-09-14 |
| TSBPE — Certificate of Insurance form | undated | 2026-09-14 |
| TSBPE — Consumer Information | undated | 2026-09-14 |
| City of Houston — 2026 Building Code Enforcement Permit Fee Schedule | 2026 schedule | 2026-10-11 (RE-READ AND CONFIRMED. The 2026 Building Code Enforcement Permit Fee Schedule, 8 pages, PDF created 16 December 2025, read in full as raw PDF text after returning HTTP 429 on 2026-10-09; the 429 was transient. The figures this page uses are confirmed on its face: the PLUMBING PERMIT FEES block prints ‘Minimum Permit Fee $97.56’ and ‘Fixtures (Plumbing) $34.24 - One to three / $11.41 - Each additional’, and the administrative and general block prints ‘Administrative Fee (Non-Refundable) $33.56’. Note for anyone reconciling it against the city’s web pages: the schedule’s GENERAL minimum permit fee is $91.06, which is a different figure from the $97.56 plumbing minimum, and several trade blocks carry the $91.06 line. Houston’s schedule is titled by calendar year with no fiscal dates and Houston’s fiscal year runs July to June, so it does not turn over with the October cities.) |
| City of Austin — Development Services fees index (FY 2025-26 schedules, effective 2025-10-01) | effective 2025-10-01 | 2026-10-08 (the FY 2026-27 residential schedule this index points at was read in full as raw PDF text on this date; the index page itself was not re-read, and the figures quoted here come from the schedule, not the index) |
| City of San Antonio — Limited Service Repair bulletin IB121c | undated | 2026-09-14 |
| City of Lubbock — FAQs / Reports (Building Safety) | undated | 2026-09-14 |
Tell us the job once — we send it to up to 3 license-verified plumbers. Free, no spam, delete your request anytime.
Secure form. Sent over an encrypted connection to up to 3 license-verified plumbers. Never sold to data brokers, and you can have your request deleted anytime.