A repipe is the job where small estimating errors stop being small. On a water heater swap a forgotten $40 fitting is annoying. On a repipe, a wrong assumption repeated at every fixture is a four figure mistake.
The number that decides a repipe is not the length of pipe. It is the number of openings you have to make and who closes them.
Count the things that actually drive cost
Fixtures, not rooms. Count every fixture that needs hot and cold: sinks, baths, showers, toilets (cold only), washer, outside taps, water heater, any fridge line. A "two bathroom house" tells you very little until you have counted.
Openings. This is the real driver. How many holes do you have to cut in finished surfaces to route new pipe and tie in? An accessible basement or crawl with an open ceiling below is a different job from a slab house with finished walls.
Manifold or trunk and branch. A home run manifold layout uses more pipe and fewer fittings, and is easier to isolate later. Trunk and branch uses less pipe and more connections. The labour difference is usually larger than the material difference.
Vertical runs. Getting between floors is where hours disappear. Count the chases you have and be honest about whether they are usable.
What the house is made of. Plaster and lath is slower to open and much slower to close than drywall. Tile is worse again.
A worked outline
A single storey, three bedroom, two bathroom house with a vented crawl space and drywall interior. Twelve fixtures. PEX, home run manifold.
| Item | Figure |
|---|---|
| PEX, manifold, fittings, valves, hangers, sleeves | $1,150.00 |
| Permit | $220.00 |
| Labour, two plumbers, three days, 48 hours at $53 loaded | $2,544.00 |
| Drywall patching, 14 openings, subcontracted | $1,120.00 |
| Job cost | $5,034.00 |
| Overhead at 30% of job cost | $1,510.20 |
| Break-even | $6,544.20 |
| At a 25% margin, divided by 0.75 | $8,725.60 |
| Price | $8,725.00 |
Use the pipe size calculator to sanity check trunk and branch sizing before you commit to a material list.
The drywall question decides the job
Fourteen openings at $80 each is $1,120, which is 22% of the job cost in this example. How you handle that is the single biggest decision in the quote.
You patch and paint. Highest price, cleanest customer experience, and you now own a finish trade you may not be good at. Match the paint or expect a complaint.
You patch to primed, customer paints. Common middle ground. Be explicit that it is primed, not finished, and that colour matching is theirs.
You leave neat openings, customer arranges repair. Lowest price, and the most common source of a bad review from a customer who did not understand. If you do this, say it three times: on the estimate, in conversation, and on the day.
None of these is wrong. Quoting one and delivering another is.
The exclusion that saves repipes: "Price assumes accessible routing through the crawl space and existing chases. Pipe found encased in concrete, inaccessible, or requiring the opening of tiled surfaces will be quoted separately before work continues."
What goes wrong
Pricing by fixture count alone. A per fixture rate works within one house type and badly across several. The slab house and the crawl space house have the same fixture count and a very different hour count.
Forgetting the water heater tie-in and the outside taps. Both routinely missed in a walkthrough.
Underestimating protection and clean-up. Floor protection, dust containment and daily tidying on a three day job inside an occupied house is real time.
Assuming the customer moves out. They usually do not. Working around a family costs hours that never appear in an estimate built from pipe lengths.
One price, no options. A repipe is exactly the job where a three-option proposal works, because there are genuine choices: material, layout, and how far you take the finishing.
Before you send it
- Have you counted openings, not just fixtures?
- Is the wall repair position stated in one unambiguous sentence?
- Is there an exclusion for anything inaccessible?
- Does the price survive the job taking one extra day? Check it against the job profit calculator.
- Is there an expiry date?
Figures are illustrative. Material prices, labour rates, permit costs, subcontract rates and code requirements vary widely, and a repipe should be priced from a site visit rather than from an article.
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