Enter drain type, access difficulty, equipment used, and travel — get a flat rate price built on your actual costs, not what feels competitive. Your most common call, priced correctly every time.
Free PDF: a one-page flat rate card for the 12 most common drain and plumbing service calls — formatted to hand to customers or post in your truck. Customize the numbers, print and go.
One-time template + weekly plumbing business tips. Unsubscribe anytime.
Drain cleaning is one of the most variable service calls in plumbing. A kitchen sink can clear in 20 minutes or turn into a 3-hour root-cutting marathon. Quoting hourly puts the customer in an adversarial relationship with your clock — they're watching every minute. Flat rate ends that conversation and puts the risk where it belongs: on you, the expert who knows how to price the job correctly.
The mistake most plumbers make is pricing flat rate to their best-case time. A sink drain takes 20 minutes when everything goes right. Price it for 20 minutes and you lose money every time a root or grease buildup adds an hour. Price it for the average time including the hard jobs and you make money consistently.
A better approach: price each category of drain for the P75 job — the job that takes longer than 75% of similar calls. You'll be slightly high on easy jobs and right on difficult ones. Over a month of calls, you'll average out profitable.
Every drain call is an opportunity to present a camera inspection. A $150–250 camera inspection that finds root intrusion or a belly in the line turns a $250 snake job into a $3,000–8,000 line repair. Most customers say yes when you explain "I cleared it today, but here's what I found — this will come back unless we address the cause." Present it as the diagnosis, not the upsell.
A hydro-jetter costs $3,000–8,000 and wears consumables (hoses, nozzles) fast. A camera system is $2,000–5,000. These costs need to be in your flat rate — not as a separate line item, but baked in. If you own the equipment, the flat rate for camera-assisted or hydro jobs should be meaningfully higher than for a hand snake.
Flat rate price book, service call rate schedule, estimate templates, and the business systems to run a plumbing operation that competes on expertise and speed — not just price.
Flat rate pricing for drain cleaning removes the awkwardness of explaining why one clog costs more than another. This calculator helps you set flat rates for your most common drain types — kitchen, bathroom, main line, floor drain — based on your average labor time and cost. Use it to build a price book that your techs can quote on the spot without calling the office.