Plumbing Drain Cleaning Job Pricing Calculator
Prices residential and light-commercial drain cleaning jobs — cable snake, hydro-jetting, camera inspection, or combinations — from labor hours, technician loaded rate, equipment amortization per use, overhead, and target gross margin. Equipment cost per use is the key estimating variable: a cable snake amortizes at $3-$5 per job, a hydro-jetter at $15-$25, a sewer camera at $10-$20. Returns the recommended job price, equipment contribution, break-even price, and realized gross margin. Benchmarked against PHCC (Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors) drain-cleaning pricing guides.
Calculator
Adjust the inputs below; the result updates instantly.
Job type
The drain cleaning service being priced. Each service type carries a different equipment cost per use and a different market price band. Snake-plus-camera and hydro-plus-camera are the combination packages most commonly sold.
Labor
Equipment
Overhead
Pricing
Recommended job price
- Direct labor cost
- $58.00
- Equipment amortization (direct cost)
- $5.00
- Break-even price (zero margin floor)
- $93.00
- Industry price band guidance
- Within industry band ($150-$350) for snake service — price is defensible.
- Summary
- Service type: snake. Labor: 1.00 hr × $58.00/hr = $58.00. Equipment cost per use (snake): $5.00. Overhead per job: $30.00. Total cost basis: $93.00. Recommended job price at 55.0% gross margin (divisor formulation): $206.67. Break-even price: $93.00. Realized gross margin: 55.0%. Within industry band ($150-$350) for snake service — price is defensible. PHCC drain cleaning price band for residential service: snake $150-$350, hydro-jet $350-$750, camera $150-$300. Equipment amortization should reflect actual truck-unit cost per job (snake $3-5, hydro-jetter $15-25, camera $10-20). Tool, not advice — for binding price-book adoption commission a PHCC cost-of-doing-business analysis.
How this calculator works
This calculator prices residential and light-commercial drain cleaning jobs — cable snake, hydro-jetting, camera inspection, or combination packages. The build-up is: labor cost (hours multiplied by fully-loaded technician rate) plus equipment cost per use (truck-unit amortization, passed through as a direct cost) plus overhead per job, divided by (1 minus the target gross margin). Equipment cost per use is the critical estimating variable that distinguishes drain cleaning pricing from standard service pricing.
Equipment amortization — the most common drain-cleaning pricing error
Cable snake, hydro-jetter, and sewer camera equipment are significant capital assets. A production-grade drum machine costs $1,500-$4,000; a trailer-mounted hydro-jetter runs $15,000-$60,000; a push-rod sewer camera with software and monitor runs $3,000-$15,000. These assets depreciate, consume cable, hose, and recording media, and require periodic overhaul. The per-job amortization of these costs is a direct, variable cost that must be captured as a line item — not buried in overhead and not marked up on top of the repair. Industry benchmarks: cable snake $3-$5 per job, hydro-jetter $15-$25 per job, camera $10-$20 per job.
Operations that do not model equipment amortization per job are effectively funding their equipment replacement from net profit — a common error that suppresses reported margins and makes it difficult to justify equipment reinvestment.
Drain cleaning as the highest-margin service category
PHCC cost-of-doing-business surveys consistently report drain cleaning as the highest-margin service category for residential plumbing operations — target margins of 50-65% are achievable and defensible. The equipment creates a service moat: homeowners and most property managers cannot self-perform production-grade drain cleaning. Flat-rate pricing on drain cleaning works particularly well because job variability is high (a 30-minute snake job and a 90-minute snake job both justify the same flat rate) — the faster jobs at the flat-rate price produce excellent margins that offset the difficult jobs.
Sources
- PHCC (Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors). Drain cleaning pricing guides, equipment cost benchmarks, and cost-of-doing-business surveys. Source for the $150-$350 snake, $350-$750 hydro-jet, and $150-$300 camera price bands.
- NECA (National Electrical Contractors Association). Cross-trade gross margin benchmarks.
Last reviewed: 2026-05-19 against the sources above.
Equipment cost per use is the direct, variable cost of using the specific piece of drain cleaning equipment on the job — cable wear, hose wear, periodic drum-machine overhaul, recording media for the camera, and battery replacement on portable units. This cost scales directly with the number of jobs the equipment runs. Overhead per job is the per-call share of fixed monthly overhead that does NOT scale with individual job count — dispatch center, FSM software, general liability, marketing. Equipment cost per use is captured as a direct line item (not marked up) because it is a pure capital-recovery cost; overhead is recovered through the pricing margin. Failing to account for equipment amortization is the most common drain-cleaning pricing error — operators who run $50,000 hydro-jetters and do not model per-job amortization are effectively funding the equipment from net profit.
Resources
Links marked sponsoredmay earn The Fennec Lab a commission. They do not affect the calculator's output. See disclosures.
- PHCC — Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors National Association — PHCC publishes drain cleaning pricing guides, equipment cost benchmarks, and cost-of-doing-business surveys for residential and commercial plumbing contractors. Source for the drain cleaning price bands and equipment amortization benchmarks cited in this calculator.
- NECA — National Electrical Contractors Association (Industry Benchmarks) — Cross-trade cost-of-doing-business benchmarks from NECA for gross margin targets on specialty-equipment service work — relevant comparison data for drain cleaning margin band analysis.