Out-of-hours plumber rates: should you offer the cover, and what should you charge?

If you offer out-of-hours cover, fix the premium before the phone rings and tell the customer what it is before you set off. Pimlico Plumbers, a London firm that publishes its tariff, charges £130 an hour ex VAT for plumbing from 7am to 6pm, £170 from 6pm to midnight and £210 from midnight to 7am, on rates effective from 15 January 2026. In the Netherlands, Trustoo's cost guide lists €80 to €160 for a night hour, against €40 to €80 for daytime work on weekdays.

Whether the cover is worth offering turns less on the rate than on a plainer question: who picks up the phone in the middle of the night?

What do out-of-hours plumbers charge in the UK?

The clearest published example I found prices the clock rather than the crisis. Pimlico's rates page says "No call out fee" and "No emergency premium", bills with a one-hour minimum and then in 15-minute increments, and lets the time band carry the premium instead:

Pimlico Plumbers, plumbing (ex VAT)	Per hour	Against the day rate
7am to 6pm	£130	the base
6pm to midnight	£170	£40 more, about 31%
Midnight to 7am	£210	£80 more, about 62%

Pimlico's table puts the day and evening bands under one column, headed "Monday-Sunday", so a Saturday evening there costs what a Tuesday evening does; the midnight band has a column of its own, headed "Overnight". That is one London firm running its own 24-hour call centre, so read it as one price list to hold yours against.

For a broader yardstick, WaterSafe's 2026 cost guide puts a typical UK plumbing hour at £40 to £70, and the standard call-out fee an emergency plumber is likely to charge at £60 to £120, "with additional labour charges sometimes applying if further work is required". It adds that emergency call-out costs are higher than standard rates, "especially for out-of-hours appointments, weekends and bank holidays". The guide gives no method or source for its bands, so treat them as estimates.

And what do Dutch plumbers charge for evenings and weekends?

€80 to €160 for a night hour is the band in Trustoo's guide, updated on 1 September 2026, which breaks the hour down by time of day:

Trustoo's guide	Per hour
Standard (daytime, weekdays)	€40 to €80
Evening	€60 to €120
Night	€80 to €160
Weekend	€60 to €160
Urgent (spoed)	€80 to €160

Its night band is the standard band doubled at both ends. The same guide puts call-out costs (voorrijkosten) at €20 to €40 on average, and says plumbers often charge a minimum to come out at all, a start tariff of usually €60 to €120.

Read the table for what it is. The page's average-price widget says it is "Gebaseerd op aanvragen via Trustoo", based on requests made through the platform, but the table with the evening and night bands, which is where the out-of-hours figures sit, states no method of its own. Homedeal's guide, dated 30 December 2025, gives €45 to €85 an hour excluding VAT for an ordinary hour and an urgent rate averaging €100 to €125 an hour, also without a method. Two lead-generation guides agreeing roughly is a sanity check for your own number, and that is all it is.

Should you offer out-of-hours cover at all?

Offer it when the premium pays for the broken night, and when the phone will actually be answered. I found no survey of how many plumbers offer night cover or what it costs them, so what follows is my own reasoning rather than a finding.

• Price the morning after. A leak after midnight costs you more than the hour on the invoice; it can cost you the first job of the next day. If your night rate would not make that trade feel fair, it is too low, or the cover is not for you.
• Draw your own lines, and narrow them if you need to. Pimlico's evening band starts at 6pm and its night band at midnight; wherever yours fall, a caller should hear them before you leave the house. Existing customers only, real emergencies only, or a radius around home: each is a rule you can say in one sentence on the phone.

The second condition decides the rest. Invoca, a call-tracking firm that sells a tool for chasing missed calls, said in May 2024 that its own platform data shows "less than 3% of callers who get pushed to voicemail leave a message". It is a vendor's figure with no published sample, and the reasons callers hang up are in why customers won't leave a voicemail. If your night rate sits behind a greeting and a beep, then on Invoca's figure fewer than three callers in a hundred will even leave a message.

Behind a voicemail greeting, your night rate waits on the callers who leave a message: on Invoca's figure, fewer than three in a hundred.

How do you set and agree an out-of-hours price?

Pick one structure, then say it on the phone before you set off. The two shapes in the sources above:

Structure	Published example	Settle this before you go
Hourly rate by time band	Pimlico: £130, £170 or £210 an hour ex VAT, no call-out fee, one-hour minimum	Which band the job starts in
Call-out fee plus labour	WaterSafe's estimate: £60 to £120 to come out, with labour sometimes on top	Whether the fee includes any working time, since some plumbers include an initial period and others charge it separately

Pimlico says its call centre tells customers its rates at the time the job is booked, and the law gives you a reason to copy it. In the UK, section 51 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 covers a service the consumer has not yet paid for where the contract neither fixes a price nor says how it is to be fixed, and nothing section 50 treats as part of the contract fixes one either: the consumer then owes "a reasonable price for the service, and no more", and what counts as reasonable "is a question of fact". An hourly rate agreed on the phone says how the price is fixed, which takes the job out of that section.

Dutch law fills the same gap in a similar way when the job is aanneming van werk, the contract to make and deliver a physical work for a price (article 7:750 BW). Under article 7:752 BW, if no price was set when the contract was made, or only a guide price (richtprijs), the client owes a reasonable price, taking into account the prices you usually charged at that time and the expectations you raised about the likely price. A guide price may be exceeded by no more than 10% unless you warned the client as early as possible that it was likely to run further over, and the same article applies that cap where the price depends on the duration estimated when the contract was made, which is what an hourly rate amounts to when you estimate the hours as you agree the job. Work other than making a physical work is generally an opdracht instead (article 7:400 BW), and article 7:405 BW fills the gap there too: with no fee agreed, the client owes the fee calculated in the usual way or, failing that, a reasonable one. On the call, then, give the rate and the band it falls in, and if you put a number of hours on the job, warn the customer as soon as it looks like running over.

How do you answer the 2am call without sitting by the phone?

Something has to pick up while the caller is still on the line, which is the gap SwiftGuard is built for. Every plan answers 24/7, either every call or only the ones you miss, greets callers in your business name and books the job into your Google Calendar. If you only want it on the calls you miss, the divert codes have a post of their own.

It will not set your price for you. The agent is instructed never to quote or estimate a price; it takes the problem down in the caller's words, and the costs are confirmed on your call-back. That call-back is where your out-of-hours rate gets said and agreed, and ringing back inside the hour is still yours to do. What the agent does add is triage: a leak, no heating or no hot water gets noted as urgent in the booking, without any promise about how soon you will come, and a reported gas smell or carbon monoxide alarm stops the booking altogether, with the caller told to leave the building and ring their national gas emergency line or the emergency services.

Plans start at €69 a month ex VAT, billed monthly; compare what each plan includes before you decide whether your nights are worth covering.