What should a plumbing estimator job description include? (free template)

Duties and responsibilities.

Put the description in writing before the posting goes up.

The ADA treats the fundamental duties of a job as its essential functions, and a written description prepared before you advertise or interview is evidence of what is essential — a function can be essential because the position exists to perform it, because few employees are available to share it, or because it is highly specialised.

For an estimator, that written list doubles as your bid-quality rubric: it is what you screen candidates against and what you measure finished estimates against once the job is built.

Start from the market, then narrow it to your work.

Plumbing estimating is not one job: pricing service replacements at a residential shop, bidding plan-and-spec commercial work off drawings, and pricing design-build jobs where your shop proposes the system are different days.

Say which of them the hire will do — residential or commercial, service or new construction, or the mix — and name the system scope you bid (water, drainage and vent, fixtures, gas piping, or the package).

The worker-side version of this question — what the job is like day to day — belongs to our plumbing estimator career guide; this page stays on the employer's side.

Then list the duties that produce a bid at your shop, in the order your workflow runs them: reviewing drawings and specifications, walking the site, producing material takeoffs, pricing materials with suppliers, building the labor hours, assembling the proposal with its inclusions and exclusions, handing the won job to the field with its budget, and tracking what the estimate missed.

Name the labor side precisely.

MCAA's WebLEM (Labor Estimating Manual) is a reference of labor hours for installing piping systems, HVAC equipment, plumbing fixtures and equipment, hangers and more, with a labor unit expressed in man-hours per unit of material, item or task.

WebLEM prices piping two ways — a Component Method that prices labor per pipe, fitting and valve, and a Work Activity Method that prices separate activities, which makes splitting shop and field hours easier — and several estimating-software vendors license MCAA labor units, with free access for MCAA, MSCA and PCA members.

If your shop estimates from labor units, name the system in the posting: it tells an estimator which workflow they are walking into.

Physical demands, stated plainly.

Before a conditional job offer you may state the job's physical requirements — lifting a set weight or climbing ladders, for example — and ask whether the applicant can meet them.

If your estimators walk job sites before and during the bid, say so, and state the physical demands of those walks — the posting is the first place an applicant learns how much of the job happens on sites.

Licence and certification requirements — worded exactly.

Do not write a generic "must hold a state plumbing licence" line: licence names come from each state's own files, and the plumbing structures differ enough to break a vague line on contact.

As of September 2026, Ohio licenses plumbing contractors (businesses) at the state level, with no individual plumber licence.

Delaware, Illinois, New Jersey and North Carolina have a statewide plumbing licence with no journeyman rung.

In Georgia, Maine, Kentucky, Delaware, Montana, Wisconsin, Texas, Louisiana, New Jersey, North Dakota, Connecticut and Rhode Island, the individual master (or equivalent) plumber licence is what lets a business contract, with no separate state plumbing-contractor licence.

And a single mechanical licence covers plumbing in Mississippi, Tennessee and New Mexico, South Carolina puts Plumbing inside its Mechanical Contractors classification, and Alaska's Mechanical Administrator family spans plumbing and heating/process piping.

A requirement that fits nowhere reads to a working estimator as an employer who never checked their own market.

So use the template's placeholder until you have looked up the exact licence name and class your jobs need, with the issuing authority named — and if the right candidate could qualify after you hire them, say so: "or ability to obtain within [N] days" is an honest line.

Before an offer you may ask applicants about required licences and certifications and ask them to describe or demonstrate how they would do a task — a takeoff on a sample drawing is a fair ask — and you may collect licence numbers on the application so you can check each one, a step our guide to verifying a licence before you hire walks through.

Verify before you post.

Plumbing licensing is set state by state, and by the cities and counties that issue licences where licensing is local, and the rules change.

Confirm the current requirements for your jobs with your state licensing board — or the city or county that issues licences where licensing is local — and treat this page as employer information, not legal advice.

The fuller licence, pay and screening picture sits in our guide to how to hire a plumbing estimator.

Pay and pay-plan disclosure.

Post a real range — the low, the high, and how the plan works — because in a number of states the range is a legal requirement in the posting itself, not a nice-to-have.

Laws confirmed in our research (September 2026, from statute text or the state labor agency) to require pay disclosure in job postings include California (employers with 15 or more employees), Colorado, Washington State (15 or more), the District of Columbia, Maryland (for work performed at least partly in the state), Maine (10 or more, since July 29, 2026), Massachusetts (25 or more in the state), Minnesota (30 or more in the state), Illinois (15 or more), New Jersey (10 or more, over 20 calendar weeks), New York (4 or more, for work performed at least partly in the state), Vermont (5 or more) and Virginia (since July 1, 2026).

Delaware's law is signed but does not take effect until September 2027, and it will not apply to employers with 25 or fewer employees.

Connecticut and Rhode Island do not require the range in the posting; each requires giving the applicant the wage range on request — by the time of an offer at the latest in Connecticut, and before pay is discussed in Rhode Island.

Our research did not confirm the posting requirement reported for Hawaii, and city ordinances were outside this check; our research produced no closed national list, so verify each state — and each city — where the job is located or where applicants will work.

The state-by-state detail lives in our guide to pay transparency laws by state.

Several of these laws reach past the number, so build the posting accordingly.

Colorado requires a benefits description and how and when to apply in every posting; Illinois (15 or more employees) accepts a hyperlink to a public page carrying the pay scale and benefits; Minnesota (30 or more in the state) and Washington (15 or more) require a general description of benefits in the posting; Washington, D.C. requires the minimum and maximum projected pay in every listing and disclosure of healthcare benefits before the first interview.

If the pay is salary plus a bonus — per bid won or per quarter — say how it is earned.

New York requires postings to clearly state if a position is commission-based, while Vermont goes the other way: an ad for a job paid on commission, in whole or in part, need only disclose that fact and may skip the range.

Settle the overtime math before the posting, not after.

Name the plan — salary, salary plus bonus, hourly — and if you promise a bonus in advance, federal overtime rules treat it as non-discretionary: an employer that promises in advance to pay a bonus has abandoned discretion over it, so the bonus goes into the regular rate used to compute overtime for employees who are owed overtime.

This page cannot tell you whether a particular estimator is exempt from overtime — check with an employment attorney before you label the plan.

And build the range from the job and your budget, not from the candidate: asking an applicant's salary history is banned in Virginia, Hawaii, Rhode Island, D.C. and California in the rules our research confirmed, plus others we did not check.

Anchor the range to the market, with the series in view.

BLS publishes no wage series for the job title "plumbing estimator" — the occupation series is Cost Estimators (SOC 13-1051) across all industries — so the closest figure in our research is the industry cut: within NAICS 238220, Plumbing, Heating, and Air-Conditioning Contractors, cost estimators earned a median of $81,820 a year in May 2025, with the 10th percentile at $51,310 and the 90th at $129,250 — on employment of 13,650 (BLS OEWS May 2025).

That industry figure covers estimators at plumbing and HVAC contractors together and excludes the self-employed, so treat it as a floor for the conversation, not a survey of your metro — the occupation-level Cost Estimators figures sit on our plumbing estimator salary page.

Schedule, travel, truck and tools.

State each of these instead of letting the new hire discover them.

Schedule: the working days and hours, and the honest shape of the bid calendar — bid days that run to the deadline, month-end close-outs, or a season that stacks addenda and re-bids.

If the role covers weekend bid closings or after-hours award calls, write the expectation here; if it does not, leave the line out.

Travel: whether site walks and pre-bid meetings are local or statewide, and how they are covered — a company vehicle, a shop truck for walk-through days, or a mileage allowance in a personal vehicle.

Tools: the laptop, takeoff and estimating software, digital planroom access and large-format printing the shop provides, and anything you fund — association membership (free WebLEM access comes with MCAA, MSCA and PCA membership), certification fees, licence renewals, continuing education.

A posting that names its tooling describes the estimating workflow the hire is joining.

Each of the problems below lives in the copy, and each is yours to fix before you publish.

No pay range.

Where one of the posting laws above covers your shop, a posting without a range is a legal exposure — not a stylistic choice.

A licence line that fits nowhere.

A generic "state plumbing licence required" tells a working estimator you have not checked your own market: Ohio licenses contractors at the state level with no individual licence, four states have no journeyman rung, in a dozen states the master (or equivalent) licence is what lets a business contract, and in five states a mechanical licence or classification covers plumbing.

Name the licence, the class and the issuing authority, or state plainly that you will help the right candidate obtain it.

A title that hides the job.

"Estimator" alone does not say whether the hire prices residential service swaps or bids plan-and-spec commercial work off drawings — they are different jobs, so put the market and the project type in the title or the first line.

If you post a "senior" or numbered estimating level, say what it means at your shop: what it is senior to, and what the hire owns.

Age-coded wording.

Terms like "young", "recent college graduate", "boy" or "girl" violate age-discrimination rules unless a statutory exception applies, and help-wanted ads may not show a preference for, or discourage, applicants based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age 40 or older, disability or genetic information.

Describe the work, not the person you picture doing it.

Questions the posting cannot ask.

Stating the physical demands and asking whether the applicant can meet them is allowed.

Asking about past job injuries or workers' compensation history before an offer is not — keep those questions out of the posting, the application form and the phone screen.

Referral-only hiring.

Recruiting mainly by word of mouth through a mostly one-group workforce can itself be discriminatory if almost all hires come from that group.

Post the job publicly.

Small-shop assumptions.

Federal EEO laws cover private employers with 15 or more employees and the age law those with 20 or more, but state laws often cover smaller shops, so check yours.

Federal contractors must include the equal-consideration tagline in job ads; many other employers add an equal-opportunity line voluntarily.

Screening rules you have not checked.

Background-check, ban-the-box and paid-sick-leave rules were not verified state by state in our research — confirm the rules that apply where you hire before you screen.

Eligibility verification, before the first day.

While applications come in, check whether your state mandates E-Verify.

Florida (private employers with 25 or more employees, since July 1, 2023) and North Carolina (25 or more in the state) require it for new hires; South Carolina requires every private employer to verify every new employee within three business days; and Arizona, Alabama and Mississippi require every employer to use it.

The thresholds reported for Georgia, Tennessee and Utah were not verified in our research, so check your state's current rule directly.

Federal contractors covered by the FAR E-Verify clause must enroll within 30 days of contract award.

With the copy fixed, run the wording past our guide to how to write a job ad for HVAC technicians — the guide covers plumbing ads too.

When the replies come in, how to hire a plumbing estimator picks up the rest: sourcing, screening, pay and the first review cycle.

This page is employer career information, not legal advice. Confirm licence requirements with the issuing board — the state, or the city and county where licensing is local — pay-posting rules with each state labor department, and employment-law questions with an employment attorney.