How much should a plumber spend on marketing?
Set it against your boiler and bathroom work, not your call-outs. Emergency jobs are too small to carry marketing costs on their own. At £147 a month you need roughly one extra boiler installation a year to be well ahead, which is a very different sum from needing thirty extra call-outs.
Your job mix decides the answer
Plumbing has the widest gap between its cheapest and most valuable work of almost any trade, and averaging across it produces a meaningless number.
| Job type | Rough value | How much marketing cost it carries |
|---|---|---|
| Emergency call-out | Low hundreds | Very little. Volume trade. |
| Boiler repair | Low to mid hundreds | Some |
| Bathroom installation | Low thousands | Comfortably |
| Boiler installation | Mid thousands | Easily. One job covers a year. |
The calculation to run
- Split last year's jobs into emergency, repair and installation.
- Work out the margin on each group, not the turnover.
- Decide which group you actually want more of. For most plumbers it's installations.
- Judge any marketing spend on whether it produces more of that group specifically.
- If it's producing call-outs instead, it isn't working, however busy it looks.
What most plumbers get wrong
Measuring success by how busy the phone is. A plumber can be fully booked on call-outs and worse off than one doing half the jobs at four times the value. Busy isn't the goal; the right work is.
The second is cutting spend in summer. Boiler installation is researched months ahead of the cold, and the pages that win winter installations need to be ranking well before anyone feels a draught.
Related questions
Should I spend more before winter?
Spend earlier rather than more. Visibility built in late summer is what catches the first cold snap. Money spent in December is competing during the busiest weeks of the year.
What if I only do emergency work?
Then your margins are thin and paid channels will struggle. The stronger move is usually adding a higher-value service line rather than buying more call-outs.
Is £147 a month enough to see anything?
It depends entirely on your area and starting position, and anyone who answers that without looking at either is guessing. What it does mean is a low break-even: roughly one good installation a year.
Want the numbers run properly?
Tell us your split between call-outs and installations. We'll do the break-even maths on your figures and say plainly whether it's worth doing.