Why It's Getting Harder to Hire a Plumber, and What That Means for Your Shop
The trade is losing experienced plumbers to retirement faster than new ones are coming in. Here's what the numbers actually say, and how shops are adjusting.
If you’ve had a tech spot open for months with nobody worth calling back, you’re not imagining the market getting tighter. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment of plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters to grow 4 percent from 2024 to 2034, roughly in line with the average for all occupations. The number that matters more for hiring: about 44,000 openings a year, on average, over that decade. Most of that isn’t new demand. It’s replacement, plumbers retiring, moving to a different trade, or leaving the workforce, and someone needing to fill the spot.
That’s the quiet part of the labor story. The work isn’t disappearing. The people who know how to do it are aging out faster than new apprentices are coming up to replace them.
Why this hits small shops harder
A five-truck shop losing one experienced plumber to retirement isn’t a rounding error. It’s 20 percent of the crew, along with years of knowledge about the customers, the local codes, and the properties in your area that never made it into any file. A big regional outfit can absorb that. A small shop has to cover the gap immediately, usually by asking the remaining crew to do more with the same hours in the day.
- Apprenticeship pipelines are slower than attrition. Training a new plumber to run solo takes years, while a retirement can happen with a few months’ notice.
- Experienced hires are getting pickier, and rightly so. A tight labor market means a good plumber has options, and shops competing for the same small pool end up competing on more than pay.
- The trade is quietly aging. A workforce with a lot of plumbers in their 50s and 60s is a workforce with a lot of retirements coming at once, not spread evenly over time.
What shops are actually doing about it
None of this has an easy fix, but the shops handling it best share a pattern: they protect the hours of the plumbers they already have. That means less time spent on things that don’t require a license, like fielding calls, chasing down callbacks, and doing the scheduling that used to fall to whoever picked up the phone between jobs.
A full-time front desk hire is one way to free that time up, though it adds its own hiring problem to a shop that’s already short-staffed. Some shops route that work through a service instead, so the two or three plumbers they do have spend their hours on jobs that need a license, not on paperwork and phone tag. It’s a smaller fix than the labor shortage itself, but it’s one a shop can actually make this month instead of waiting years for the pipeline to catch up.
The takeaway
The plumber shortage isn’t a future problem. It’s already showing up in how long a job posting sits open and how much a competing shop is willing to pay to poach your best tech. You can’t hire your way out of a nationwide gap by yourself, but you can make sure the plumbers you do have are spending their hours plumbing, not doing the parts of the job that don’t need a license at all.
Curious what that looks like day to day? See a 10-minute demo.
