We Checked 20 UK Plumber Websites for a Price. Not One Published a Figure.

Last Updated on August 28, 2026

In August 2026 we checked 200 UK small business websites to see how many published a price. Twenty of them were plumbers, two in each of ten cities. Not one plumber published a single figure for anything.

Not an hourly rate. Not a callout fee. Not a from price for a boiler service. Nothing.

Five of those twenty sites told visitors they offered fixed prices, transparent pricing or no hidden charges, and then printed no number to go with the claim.

The full league table

Ten trades, ten cities, 200 independent businesses, checked on 10 August 2026. Publishing a price means any concrete figure in pounds for the business’s own work appearing anywhere on the site.

Across all 200, 91 published something, which is 45.5 per cent. Group them and the divide is stark. The four appointment trades published 87.5 per cent of the time, the five home service trades 16 per cent. Accountants sit between the two at 25 per cent.

Plumbing sits at the bottom with gardening. And the sample flatters you, because every business was pulled from page one of organic search. These are the better marketed plumbers in each city. The real figure across all UK plumbers is almost certainly worse.

The mistake: treating this as a pricing decision

Ask a plumber why there are no prices on the site and you get one of four answers. Every job is different. Competitors will undercut me. I will attract price shoppers. I want to talk to them first.

All four are answers to the question “what should I charge”. That is not the question. The customer standing in a kitchen with water coming through the ceiling is not trying to negotiate. They are trying to work out whether to ring you or the next one on the list, and the only thing they know about you is that you will not say.

Publishing a price is not a pricing decision. It is a filtering decision, and you are currently choosing not to filter.

What the silence actually costs

Three things, in order of how much money they move.

You buy your own enquiries twice. Every caller who rings to ask what you charge, hears the number and goes away was a call you paid for with your time. A plumber taking six of those a week at ten minutes each is losing an hour a week to a question a line of text would have answered. Over a year that is a working week, spent qualifying people out.

You lose the customers who never ring. This is the expensive one and it is invisible, which is why it never gets fixed. Nobody emails to tell you they picked someone else because that person published a callout fee and you did not.

You are unquotable. When a customer asks a search engine or an AI assistant what a plumber costs in their town, the answer is assembled from businesses that published numbers. If your site contains no figure, there is nothing in it for anyone to quote. The national chains and the directories you pay to be listed on will be quoted instead, and they are quoted at their price, not yours. We went through the mechanics of this in will AI recommend your plumbing business.

That third point is the one that changed. Ten years ago hiding your prices cost you a few phone calls. In 2026 it removes you from the layer where a growing share of customers get their answer.

The four objections, answered honestly

“Every job is different”

True, and irrelevant. Nobody is asking you to publish a fixed price for an unseen job. They are asking what it costs to get you to the door. A callout fee, an hourly rate and the hours it is charged in are three facts that do not change job to job, and you already know all three.

“Competitors will undercut me”

Your competitors can already find out what you charge by ringing you and describing a leaking tap. What they cannot copy is a published worked example from a job you actually did, because they did not do it.

And be careful what you are really saying here. If the only thing keeping the work coming is that nobody can compare you, the business is not competing on service, it is competing on confusion. That is a foundation problem, not a marketing one.

“I will attract price shoppers”

Hidden prices attract price shoppers. That is the whole mechanism. When there is no number on the site, the only people who ring are people who do not know what you charge, and a chunk of them were never going to pay it. Publishing a figure sends those people away before they reach your phone, which is exactly what you wanted.

“I want to talk to them first”

Fine. Publish the callout fee and put “everything beyond the first hour is quoted before we start” next to it. You have still answered the question. You have not committed to anything.

What to publish, in ascending order of effort

You do not need a price list. You need three lines. This is a Start stage fix in the Start, Build, Scale sense: no budget, no tools, one honest hour with your own invoices.

Level one: the callout

One sentence on the homepage, in this shape, with your own rates in place of the gaps: “£X callout, includes the first hour. £X an hour after that. Evenings and weekends £X.”

Three facts you already know. It takes ten minutes and it puts you ahead of every plumber in this study.

Level two: from prices on your five most common jobs

Look at your last fifty invoices. Five jobs will account for most of them. Then write them out in this shape, using your own figures and not ours: “Boiler service from £X. Tap replaced from £X. Radiator swapped from £X. Toilet refitted from £X. Power flush from £X.”

Use “from”, mean it, and honour it. If your real range is wide, publish the range. A range is still a number.

Level three: the worked example

This is the one nobody can copy. It reads like this, with your job and your number in it: “A recent full bathroom refit in a three bed semi came to £X including tiling and a new shower unit, over nine working days.”

One real job with a real number does more for trust than any pricing table, and it gives search engines and AI tools something specific and true to quote about you. Add one a month and after a year you have a body of evidence no competitor has.

Consumers looking for the other side of these numbers can find our figures for what a plumber costs, emergency callouts and power flushes. If a customer can find a number on our site and not on yours, that is a decision you made.

Say it plainly or do not say it

The detail that ought to sting is the five plumbers who claimed fixed prices, transparent pricing or no hidden charges with no figure anywhere on the site. Across the full 200 businesses, fifteen did this and six had a dedicated pricing page with no prices on it.

A transparency claim with no number is worse than saying nothing. It tells a customer you know the objection and have decided to answer it with words instead of facts. If you are going to claim it, print it.

The sharp takeaway

Zero of twenty plumbers publish a price, which means the first plumber in your town who does is the only one answering the customer’s first question. That is not a marketing budget. It is one line on a homepage and an hour with your invoices. Go and look at your own site now and count the numbers on it. If the answer is nought, you already know what this week’s job is.

Method

200 businesses were checked on 10 August 2026: ten trades, two independent businesses per trade in each of ten cities, being Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Bristol, Sheffield, Norwich, Cardiff, Glasgow, Nottingham and Southampton. Businesses were drawn from page one organic search results for standard queries such as “plumber Manchester”. National chains, franchises, directories, marketplaces and lead generation platforms were excluded. Every business checked is an independent local firm with its own website. For each we reviewed the homepage plus any pricing page linked in the site’s navigation. Free quote, competitive prices or fixed fees without a number counted as not publishing.

Three caveats we would rather state than bury. Sampling from page one skews the panel towards better marketed businesses, so the true share publishing prices is likely lower than these figures. For four of the ten towns the photography search included the word “prices”, which may flatter that trade’s 95 per cent, so treat that one as the top end of the range. And a handful of sites blocked automated checking and were replaced with the next qualifying business in the same town.

We have named no businesses. The finding is the pattern, not the people, and every plumber in that sample was doing what the industry considers normal.

Whito

Whito is an independent UK research bureau. We ask the AI engines what they recommend, then check the businesses they name against Companies House and the sector registers. Figures we publish carry the date they were checked. Companies cannot pay to appear or to rank.

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