Employees at plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning contractors averaged 38.8 hours a week in July 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The August 2026 figure, still preliminary, was 38.5. BLS's Occupational Outlook Handbook adds that most plumbers work full time, including nights and weekends, and that they are often on call to handle emergencies.
What BLS reports for plumbing contractors
BLS tracks weekly hours by industry, and the industry where most plumbers work is plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning contractors. The Handbook counts plumbers together with pipefitters and steamfitters, and it says 65 percent of their jobs in 2025 were there. For all employees at those contractors, the monthly averages from September 2025 through August 2026 ran from 37.7 hours (November 2025) to 39.1 hours (June 2026). For production and nonsupervisory employees, the average was 40.7 hours in July 2026, and 40.7 again in August (preliminary).
Two cautions before you quote those numbers. The industry covers heating and air-conditioning work along with plumbing, so it isn't a count of plumbers alone. And it describes employees. The Handbook says self-employed workers held 8 percent of those jobs in 2025, and that self-employed plumbers may be able to set their own schedules. If you own the business and run your own truck, your week can look different from the payroll average.
What BLS says about on-call work
The averages above are weekly hours for people on a payroll. The Handbook describes on-call work in words and gives no hour count for it: plumbers are often on call for emergencies, it says, so evening and weekend work is common.
For an owner, that's the part of the week a payroll average doesn't describe. A leak doesn't wait for business hours, and a customer with water on the floor keeps dialing until somebody picks up. Some of the calls that come in at 9 p.m. are a burst pipe. Others are a robocall, a sales pitch, or a question about last week's quote. You can't tell which until you've answered, and making that call every evening, with the phone face-up on the dinner table, is the real cost of being the one who picks up.
Count your own on-call week
You don't need a survey to find your number. For two weeks, write down every call that reaches you after your normal quitting time: when it came, who it was, and whether it turned into a job. At the end you'll know how many evening interruptions were work and how many weren't, which is a better basis for drawing a line than any industry average.
If you use VettedCalls, the dashboard home already shows calls handled, spam blocked, calls bridged to you and priority calls for the past 7 days, and texting STATUS to your VettedCalls number returns today's totals. You'd still note which calls turned into jobs yourself.
How screening helps when you answer your own phone
Here's what VettedCalls Pro does for you if you answer your own phone, and what it doesn't.
Setup forwards every call from your cell to us. If the number isn't in your saved contacts and hasn't come through screening in the past 60 days, we answer with a greeting in your business name that asks who's calling and how we can help, and the caller gets 4 seconds to start talking. An AI model reads the answer for a name, a short topic, whether it's a priority call and whether it sounds like spam. Next comes a key press, 1 or 2. A robocall that stays silent and never presses a key hears a short goodbye and the call ends, and its number gets a flag on the spam registry every VettedCalls account shares.
Anyone who presses a key gets through. Your phone rings in the Cloud Softphone app showing the caller's number, and after you answer, their name and reason are read to you, a beep sounds, and the call connects.
A plumbing account also listens for priority words. On top of six every account has (urgent, emergency, help, asap, right now and today), it watches for leak, flooding, gas smell, burst pipe, sewage backup, overflowing toilet, no hot water, no water and water shut off, and you can add up to 20 of your own. When a caller says one, the call is flagged as a priority call: it skips the text question, rings you right away at any hour, and is announced as a priority call with the caller's name and topic when you answer. A priority word marks an urgent job. It isn't a 911 call.
What this doesn't do is take your evenings off. On Pro, a real caller who passes screening rings your phone at 9 p.m. like any other, for up to 25 seconds, and then goes to voicemail. What changes is what's on the other end of each ring: spam stopped at the door, a name and a reason when you pick up, and, when you miss one, a voicemail with a text alert, an email with the full transcript and an entry in your dashboard. On a plumbing account the text includes the caller's words when the transcript is ready within 15 seconds, so you can tell a burst pipe from a quote question without calling back blind.
Save the numbers that should always get through, such as your supplier, your dispatcher or your family. Saved contacts don't go through screening and ring you at any hour, though their calls still pass through us.
Trying Pro
Pro comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee, and the pricing page has its monthly price and included minutes. Our call screening page walks through each step a call takes, and the answering service for plumbers page shows how a plumbing line is set up, priority words included.