Starting a plumbing business usually begins with a van, a bag of tools and one phone number passed round a workplace. The paperwork arrives later. That is normal, and it is survivable, as long as later means a few weeks rather than the following spring when a brown envelope turns up.
There is a sensible order to it. First, the things that stop you working at all. Then the things that stop you getting paid. Everything after that can wait for a wet Tuesday.
Before The First Call-Out
Three things will stop a plumbing business dead if they are missing: gas registration, insurance and a number people can actually reach you on. The rest is tidying.
If you work on gas appliances, pipework or flues, you have to be on the Gas Safe Register. There is no grey area and no grace period while you get round to it. Your registration number goes on your paperwork, and customers do check it online before they let anyone near a boiler. The separate tickets matter too: unvented hot water storage if you are touching cylinders, water regulations if you want to join an approved contractor scheme and bid for work where that is asked for.
Then HMRC. You register as self employed, and the deadline is the 5 October following the end of the tax year in which you started trading. That sounds generous, and it is, right up until you have eight months of merchant receipts in a carrier bag and no real idea what you earned.
Last, the phone. Plenty of plumbers run on one mobile for years and that is fine, but set the voicemail up properly with your name on it. A missed call at half three on a Friday with a dead voicemail is a boiler job gone to whoever answers next.
Sole Trader Or Limited Company For A Plumbing Business?
Most people starting a plumbing business begin as a sole trader, because it takes twenty minutes and you keep the admin small. You register, you keep records, you file a self assessment return once a year. Your money and the business money are legally the same money, which is simple and also the point people warn you about.
A limited company is worth looking at when the shape of the work changes. If your plumbing business is mostly subcontracting to main contractors, fitting out new builds or doing commercial work, you will notice that some clients ask about it, and their payment terms and insurance requirements tend to come as a package. There is more admin and an accountant costs more, so it is a decision about where the work is going, not a badge.
You can start as a sole trader and incorporate later. Plenty do, usually in the second or third year when turnover has settled and the sums start to favour it. Pick whichever lets you get on with the first six months, and revisit it with an accountant once you can see a full year of numbers rather than a guess.
Insurance A Plumbing Business Should Not Skip
Public liability is the one a plumbing business gets asked for. A domestic customer almost never asks, but letting agents, main contractors and commercial sites will, and they usually want to see £2 million or £5 million of cover before you set foot on site. Buy it before the first job rather than the first job that asks for it.
Employers’ liability is not optional once you have anyone working for you, and that includes an apprentice or a mate you pay cash on busy weeks. If you employ, you need it, and the fines for not having it are not a bluff.
Two things get missed. The first is tools in the van: a lot of policies exclude anything left overnight unless the van is alarmed or the tools are removed, so read the wording rather than the sales page. The second is damage caused by your own work after you have left, a weeping compression joint above a plastered ceiling being the classic. Check that heat work and completed work are both covered, because a soldered joint behind a kitchen unit is the most expensive five seconds in the trade.
Pricing The First Jobs
A plumbing business lives or dies on the structure of its pricing, not the headline number. Decide three things and write them down: what a call-out covers, what the hourly rate is after that, and what you charge out of hours.
A common shape is a call-out fee that includes the first hour, then an hourly rate after it, with a higher rate evenings, weekends and bank holidays. Materials get bought at trade price from the merchant and billed at something nearer retail, and that gap is part of your income rather than a cheeky extra. Say so plainly if a customer asks.
For bigger work, price the job rather than the hour. A full bathroom rip-out and refit might be five days, and quoting £250 a day with materials listed separately is easier to defend than one lump figure with no working shown. Picture an ordinary week in the first year of a plumbing business: three days on that bathroom, two days of call-outs at two jobs a day, plus an hour lost every morning to the merchant. If your rate does not cover the unbilled hour, you are working six days to get paid for four.
Quote in writing, even if it is a text message. The argument you are preventing is not about honesty, it is about memory.
Getting Paid And Keeping Records From Day One
Open a separate bank account before the first invoice. It does not have to be a business account at the big bank your dad used; it has to be an account where only work money lives, so that at the end of the year you can see what came in without picking it out of the weekly shop.
Carry a card reader. A plumbing business that takes payment on the doorstep before packing the van up gets paid for roughly ninety per cent of domestic work on the day, and then only has to chase the trade customers. Put seven day terms on invoices to letting agents and builders, and expect to ring them anyway.
If you subcontract to a contractor on construction work, the Construction Industry Scheme applies. They deduct tax from your labour before paying you, at the standard rate if you are registered and a higher one if you are not, so register and keep every deduction statement. Those statements are what get the money back at the end of the year.
Keep merchant receipts, fuel, van costs, tool purchases, insurance, phone and anything else the business paid for. Twenty minutes on a Friday with a scanning app beats a weekend in January. A plumbing business that logs as it goes also knows, by about month four, which jobs are actually profitable, which is a more useful piece of information than most people expect.
Where The Work Comes From In Year One
Not from advertising, mostly. The early work in a plumbing business tends to come from four places: other plumbers passing on jobs they cannot fit in, builders and kitchen fitters who need someone reliable at short notice, letting agents who need gas safety certificates every year, and people who were given your number by somebody you have already done a decent job for.
The landlord work is worth chasing hard because it repeats. An annual gas safety check on forty properties is a known block of income every twelve months, and letting agents are quick to adopt a plumber who answers the phone and sends paperwork the same day.
Here is the bit that catches people. Your number gets passed on, and before they ring, they search the name. If nothing comes up, or the only thing that comes up is a Facebook page last posted on in March, a fair few of them carry on down the list. Photos of your own work, a few reviews and a number big enough to tap are what turn a passed-on recommendation into a booked job, which is the whole argument behind our website design for tradesmen. If you want that sorted while you are still kitting the van out, get in touch and tell us what you do and where you work.
The Van And The Stock
The van will eat more money than you planned. A new plumbing business can easily bury £2,000 to £4,000 in stock that never comes back out: fittings in three sizes, isolating valves, flux, a pile of 15mm compression elbows bought because you ran out once on a Sunday.
Some of that is unavoidable, because a second trip to the merchant costs an hour and a bit of credibility. Just be honest with yourself about which bits are genuine stock and which are hoarding. A merchant account with thirty day terms helps cash flow enormously in the first year, as long as you treat it as borrowed money rather than a discount, and pay it on the nail so the credit limit grows with you.
Signwriting pays for itself. Not a full wrap, just the trade, the number and the Gas Safe logo on both sides and the back doors. The van sits outside a customer’s house for four hours while the neighbours walk past it.
What Starting A Plumbing Business Comes Down To
Twelve weeks is enough to get properly set up. Registration and tickets first, insurance before the first job, a separate account and a pricing structure you can say out loud without hesitating, then the slow work of getting your name into the hands of builders, agents and neighbours.
The trade itself you already know. What makes a plumbing business work is the dull half hour a week that keeps the paperwork straight, and answering the phone when it rings.