Automatic time tracking for plumbers.

How a plumber's day actually looks

Most time-tracking apps assume a steady, predictable day. A plumber's day is the opposite. You're clearing drains and running rough, switching between addresses like residential service calls for leaks and clogs, water heater replacements, new-build rough plumbing, and doing tasks like diagnosing and clearing drain blockages, replacing tank and tankless water heaters, running PEX, copper, and DWV for new construction. Timers get forgotten. Manually entering jobsites in advance does not match how calls actually come in.

Friction plumbers tell us about

• Emergency calls mean you might hit four addresses before lunch and remember none of the exact arrival times
• Water heater jobs stretch when the shutoff is corroded, and it's hard to prove the extra 90 minutes
• Parts runs to the supply house eat billable-looking time that is hard to account for honestly
• Same-day callbacks on a previous repair need to be billed separately but share the address

How TradesTimer handles it

• Every address and arrival time is captured without you writing anything down between calls
• Stretched jobs show as longer stops on the timeline — ground truth, not estimates
• Drives to the supply house land as their own trip blocks so you can see and label them
• Returning to the same address on the same day creates a distinct second stop you can invoice cleanly

Typical hourly rates

Plumbers in North America typically bill between $90–200/hr . Typical North American residential service range; emergency and after-hours rates sit well above this. At those rates, even 30 minutes of lost billable time a week is real money — and the free version of TradesTimer is built around recovering exactly that time, with no subscription required.

Rate range as of 2026-04-15.