How to Get More Work as a Plumber

If your diary goes from three weeks deep to worryingly empty and back again, the problem usually isn’t the standard of your work — it’s that everything is arriving through one channel. Here’s the honest shape of it: free channels take months to build and then cost you nothing. Paid ones work tomorrow and never stop charging. Almost everyone who stays consistently busy runs both. Below is where plumbing work actually comes from, ranked by what each one really costs you — and what to do differently depending on whether you need jobs this month or you’re building for next year.

Where the Work Comes From

Every source of work trades off the same three things: how fast it produces, what it costs, and how good the customers are. Roughly:

Read down that table and the strategy writes itself: the cheap sources are slow and the fast sources cost money. If you only have fast-and-paid, you never stop paying. If you only have slow-and-free, you’ve got no answer when next month looks thin. The people who aren’t constantly worrying about the diary have two or three running at once.

The Free Lever Most People Under-Use

When someone’s boiler dies, they don’t open a directory — they search on their phone. The map listings come up before the ordinary website results, and people pick from those largely on star rating and review count. If you’re not in there, you don’t exist for that search, however good you are.

A Google Business Profile costs nothing and is the biggest free thing most plumbers can do. Worth getting right rather than just claiming:

• Verify it properly, and set it up as a service-area business if you work from home — you list the areas you cover rather than publishing your home address.
• List the services people actually type: boiler repair, blocked drain, bathroom fitting, emergency plumber — not just “plumbing”.
• Put real photos on it. Your van, your work, finished bathrooms. Not stock images — people can tell.
• Keep it current. Hours, phone number, whether you cover out-of-hours. A profile that’s clearly stale reads as a business that might not exist any more.
• Reviews are the ranking factor and the deciding factor, which is the next section.

Reviews: How and When to Ask

Most plumbers do good work and collect almost no reviews for it, because asking feels awkward and the moment passes. Two things fix that.

Ask at the right moment. Not by text a week later — right there, when you’ve just fixed the thing and they’re visibly relieved. That’s the peak of goodwill and it lasts about a minute.

Steady reviews beat a burst of them. Five over five months looks like a working business; twelve in one week looks like something else, to Google and to customers.

Building a Referral Network

The most under-rated source of work, and it costs nothing but a bit of deliberate effort.

• Other trades. Bathroom fitters, kitchen fitters, electricians, tilers and builders all hit plumbing they don’t want to touch. Be the person they call, pass work back the other way, and it compounds. A tiler who trusts you is worth more than a paid lead every time.
• Merchants and trade counters. The staff behind the counter get asked “can you recommend a plumber?” constantly. Being a familiar face there is worth more than most advertising.
• Gas engineers and plumbers who are full. Someone booked six weeks out is turning work away daily. That work has to go somewhere.

The rule is simple: referrals flow to people who refer. Send work out and it comes back.

Repeat Volume: Landlords and Agents

Letting agents, property managers and portfolio landlords are the closest thing to a standing order in this trade. One agent looking after a few hundred properties generates a constant stream of small jobs — taps, leaks, boiler call-outs, safety certificates.

Be honest about the trade-off, though: you’ll usually be on keener rates and expected to be responsive, and some agents pay slowly. What you get in exchange is volume that doesn’t depend on marketing at all. For plenty of plumbers, agency work covers the baseline and everything else is upside.

Lead Sites, Honestly

Lead platforms do one thing very well: they produce work immediately. When you’ve got a gap next week, nothing else on this page fills it that fast. The trade-off is that you’re paying, and on most of them you’re quoting against several other people for the same job.

They differ more than people assume — some charge per lead, some charge a subscription, some do both, and how many others get the same lead varies a lot. We’ve gone through the main ones properly:

• MyBuilder vs Checkatrade vs Rated People vs Bark — the side-by-side comparison
• Is MyBuilder worth it? · Is Checkatrade worth it?
• Is Rated People worth it? · Is Bark worth it?
• Looking to move: the best alternatives, or specifically MyBuilder alternatives and Checkatrade alternatives

None of them is automatically good or bad. What decides it is the next section.

The Only Number That Matters

That one calculation tells you which platform to keep, which to drop, and whether the free channels are worth the time you’re putting in. It also explains why how many people you’re quoting against matters as much as the price: the same lead sold to six of you is worth a fraction of one sold to two.

If You Need Work This Month

Everything above is the long game. If next month is looking thin, the order is different:

1. Ring your last twenty customers. Genuinely — a “just checking that’s all still fine” call turns up more work than people expect, and it’s free.
2. Tell the other trades you know you’ve got space. One text to five people costs nothing.
3. Get the Google profile sorted this week — it won’t pay off tomorrow, but every week you leave it is a week it isn’t building.
4. Use a lead source to fill the immediate gap, while the free channels catch up. That’s what they’re genuinely good at.

Then keep the free ones running once things pick up again — the mistake nearly everyone makes is stopping the moment they’re busy, which is exactly what creates the next quiet spell.

Where We Fit

We’re one option among the ones above, and worth being straightforward about. Bathrooms & Plumbing connects homeowners with vetted local tradespeople: jobs are qualified before they reach you, shared with one other person at most rather than a crowd, and you only pay for real leads — free to join, no subscription, no contract.

That suits you if you’re tired of quoting against five others and paying for a subscription whether work comes or not. It won’t replace your referrals or your Google profile, and it shouldn’t — nothing on this page is a substitute for the free channels. It’s there to fill the gaps while those build.

The Short Version

Work comes from repeat customers, Google, other trades, agents and lead sites — and the free ones are slow while the paid ones are instant, which is exactly why you want both. Get the Google Business Profile right, ask for reviews at the moment you finish the job, and send work to other trades so it comes back. If you buy leads, track cost per won job rather than cost per lead, and pay attention to how many people you’re quoting against. And don’t switch the free channels off the moment you get busy.