Plumbing Performance Dashboard
The first real freeze of the winter, and every phone line is lit. Burst pipes, frozen lines, water heaters giving up. It feels like the best week of the year. Then the numbers come in, and you find out how many of those calls went to voicemail and rang someone else.
There's no shortage of work in plumbing. BLS counts 510,600 plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters in 2025 and expects 7% growth to 2035, with about 42,000 openings a year. The hard part is answering, getting there and finishing the job with the people you already have.
The peaks are sharp. State Farm alone paid more than 20,000 frozen pipe claims from 2024 through June 2025, averaging over $30,000 each, with Illinois top of its list. Roto-Rooter says the day after Thanksgiving brings a 50% spike in service calls, its busiest day of the year. A plumbing company is judged in those weeks, by whoever picks up and how fast they arrive.
The bigger jobs got harder to close, too. The federal credit that paid up to $2,000 toward a heat pump water heater covered only equipment placed in service before December 31, 2025. So more homeowners now ask what a repair would cost before they agree to a replacement.
This example dashboard follows a made-up residential plumbing and drain company in the US Upper Midwest, with ten plumbers on the road. To be clear, it's not a real customer and the monthly figures are modeled. There's very little published research on plumbing benchmarks, so most targets below are marked as starting points, not industry standards.
What is a Plumbing KPI Dashboard?
Overview
A plumbing KPI dashboard shows whether the calls coming in are turning into jobs finished first time, at a profit, for customers who come back.
It starts at the phone. Call booking rate tells you how many people who rang ended up with a plumber booked. Emergency response time tells you how long the ones with water on the floor waited.
Then the job itself. Jobs per plumber per day and revenue per plumber show how hard each truck is working. First-time completion shows how many jobs were done on the first visit, without a second trip for a part.
Then value. Average repair ticket covers everyday repairs. Big-ticket close rate covers the water heaters, repipes and sewer lines, where one accepted estimate can be worth a week of service calls.
Repeat customer rate shows who calls you again, not a competitor. Gross margin sits over the top and tells you if any of it made money.
Who benefits from this dashboard?
- Owner: Compare revenue per plumber and gross margin with the same month last year. Was it a better business, or just a colder winter? That answers whether to hire the next plumber.
- Service Manager: First-time completion and jobs per day show which trucks are short of parts and which plumbers need help diagnosing, before the callbacks pile up.
- Office and Dispatch: Call booking rate and emergency response time are their scoreboard. They show when the phones need more cover, long before a customer complains.
- Drain and Sewer Lead: Big-ticket close rate shows how many camera inspections and water heater quotes turn into accepted work.
Set emergency response time to "lower is better" when you create it. It's the only one of the nine that improves as it falls, and with the direction the wrong way round, an office that gets a plumber there in 90 minutes shows red all winter.
Dashboard Example Overview
The example company runs ten plumbers across service, drain and sewer work, reporting monthly. Nine KPIs:
- Call Booking Rate: Calls from people who could book work that end in a booked job. Calls about jobs already booked are left out. ServiceTitan's June 2022 data put plumbing at 43%, the highest of the trades, without saying which calls it counted, which is why the definition matters more than the benchmark.
- Emergency Response Time: Average hours from an emergency call to a plumber on site. Lower is better, and it's the number a customer remembers.
- Jobs per Plumber per Day: Completed jobs divided by plumber days worked. It drops when plumbers spend the day driving or waiting on parts.
- Revenue per Plumber: All completed revenue divided by plumbers on the road. The core productivity number, and heavily tied to the weather.
- Average Repair Ticket: Revenue per service or repair invoice, with water heaters, repipes and sewer lines left out, so it shows what plumbers find and quote on everyday calls.
- First-Time Completion Rate: Jobs finished on the first visit, with no second trip for a part and no return call. When it drops, look at what's on the truck.
- Big-Ticket Close Rate: Water heater, repipe and sewer line estimates accepted, as a share of estimates presented.
- Repeat Customer Rate: Customers served this month who also booked in the previous 12 months. It moves slowly, and it's the one that says whether people trust you.
- Gross Margin: Revenue less direct labor and materials, as a share of revenue. The check that the other eight made money.
Over two years, the numbers tell a story a lot of plumbing owners will recognize.
Late 2024, the phones run the business. As the weather turns, call booking rate slides from 68% in September to 60% in December, and emergency response time stretches past four hours.
January 2025 is the test, and the company fails it. A cold snap fills the phones, but only 59% of callers get a plumber booked. The average emergency waits 4.7 hours. First-time completion drops to 72% as trucks run out of fittings, and gross margin falls to 42% on overtime and return trips. The busiest month of the year earns $32,400 per plumber.
So in spring 2025 the company changes three things. After-hours calls go to a live answering service and an on-call rota instead of voicemail. Every truck is stocked to a standard list, water heater parts included. And every main-line drain call gets a camera inspection, with the footage shown to the customer.
By August 2025, booking rate passes 75% for the first time. By October, the average emergency wait is down to two hours.
January 2026 brings the same cold, and a different month. Booking rate holds at 77%, the average emergency waits 2.3 hours, first-time completion is 84% and gross margin is 50%. Revenue per plumber reaches $44,400, up 37% on the January before.
Not everything goes up. Big-ticket close rate, which had climbed from 38% to 49%, slips below 45% in February 2026, the first winter without the water heater credit. It recovers to 48% by spring.
The bit owners tend to miss is summer. Revenue per plumber in July 2026 is $36,400, against $31,000 the July before, in the quietest months of the year. Repeat customers have grown from 24% to 35%, because a plumber who turned up fast in January gets the call about the water heater in June.
Creating a Plumbing Dashboard in SimpleKPI
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Step 1 Agree the definitions first
Which calls count toward booking rate? What makes a job an emergency? Is a second visit to fit a part the customer chose a failed first-time completion? Decide once and write it down, because a booking rate of 43% and one of 75% can describe the same office counted two ways.
Need help choosing? Read the in-depth KPI selection guide.
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Step 2 Add your plumbing KPIs to SimpleKPI
Set each KPI up with its unit, frequency and direction. There are currency figures, percentages, counts and hours here, and emergency response time improves as it falls, so set that direction when you create it.
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Step 3 Connect your data
Feed the dashboard from the systems you already run, using imports, integrations or the API. The phone system knows the calls, the field service platform knows the jobs and estimates, and accounting knows the margin. Nobody should be copying those into a spreadsheet every Monday.
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Step 4 Build a view per audience
Give the office a daily view of booking rate and response time for freeze weeks, the service manager a weekly view of first-time completion and jobs per day by plumber, and the owner a monthly roll-up against the same month last year.
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Step 5 Set seasonal targets from your own history
Almost none of these nine has a published industry benchmark, so start from your own trailing twelve months. Set winter and summer targets separately for revenue per plumber and response time, or the crew looks like heroes in January and failures in July for the same effort.
List of Plumbing KPIs
Targets marked starting point have no published US benchmark behind them. Set them from your own history, not from this table.
| KPI Name | Typical Target | Description / Calculation |
|---|---|---|
| Call Booking Rate | ≥ 75% (starting point) | Booked jobs divided by calls from people who could book work. |
| Emergency Response Time | ≤ 2 hours (starting point) | Average time from an emergency call to a plumber on site. Lower is better. |
| Jobs per Plumber per Day | ≥ 3 (starting point) | Completed jobs divided by plumber days worked. |
| Revenue per Plumber | $38,000 a month (starting point) | Completed revenue divided by plumbers on the road. Set seasonal targets. |
| Average Repair Ticket | $425 (starting point) | Service and repair revenue divided by service invoices. Big-ticket jobs excluded. |
| First-Time Completion Rate | ≥ 85% (starting point) | Jobs completed on the first visit divided by jobs completed. |
| Big-Ticket Close Rate | ≥ 45% (starting point) | Water heater, repipe and sewer line estimates accepted divided by estimates presented. |
| Repeat Customer Rate | ≥ 30% (starting point) | Customers served in the period who also booked in the previous 12 months, divided by customers served. |
| Gross Margin | ≥ 50% (starting point) | Revenue less direct labor and materials, divided by revenue. |
Why Plumbing Dashboards Matter
In a freeze, you're never short of calls. What you're short of is a clear picture. The phone system knows who rang, the job software knows who got a plumber, accounting knows what you earned. They're almost never in one place, and by the time someone pulls them together the cold snap is over.
The nine numbers also keep each other honest, which is why they belong on one screen.
Jobs per day going up looks great, until first-time completion goes down with it. That usually means plumbers are rushing to the next call and coming back later for the part. A better big-ticket close rate looks great too, until gross margin drops, because the price came down to win the water heater. On its own, any one number can make you look good. Side by side, you see the real picture.
The work is worth getting right. EPA estimates that household leaks waste nearly 1 trillion gallons of water a year, and that 9% of homes have leaks wasting 50 gallons or more a day. Those are customers who haven't called yet. Compare each month with the same month last year, take the weather out of it, and you'll see whether you're the plumber they call when they do.
Build this dashboard yourself with SimpleKPI's KPI dashboards, and pay one flat price: $79 a month for unlimited users and KPIs.