What should a service plumber job description include? (free template)

Duties and responsibilities.

Write the description before you advertise the job.

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, essential functions are the fundamental duties of the position, not the marginal ones, and a written description prepared before advertising or interviewing is evidence of what is essential — a function can be essential because the job exists to perform it, because few employees are available to share it, or because it is highly specialised.

For a service hire, that same list doubles as your screening rubric.

Write the day as it runs on your trucks: arriving at an occupied home or building, diagnosing the failure, quoting the repair on the spot, completing the work, testing it, collecting, documenting the job.

Duties to draw from: diagnosing and repairing supply, drain, waste and vent systems; clearing stoppages; repairing and replacing fixtures and water heaters; explaining repair options and pricing to customers; pulling permits where the job requires them and handling the inspection; recording every ticket in your field software; keeping truck stock straight.

What you will still train is everything shop-specific — your pricing, your truck stock, your software and your documentation standard.

Split the work the way your trucks run.

Residential or commercial.

Service and repair, or service plus installation and remodel work, or both.

Emergency response and on-call participation, if the role carries them.

A commercial service plumber job description that names the building types and piping systems is a different posting from a residential one, so put the split in the title line as well as the duties list — a construction-side plumber reading it should know immediately that this truck does not rough in new buildings.

Then state the physical demands plainly: you may list requirements such as lifting a set weight or climbing ladders, and ask whether the applicant can meet them.

Licence and certification requirements — worded as your state issues them.

A job title and a licence class are different lines: licence names and tiers differ from state to state, seven states leave plumber licensing to cities, counties or an industry board, and Ohio licenses plumbing contractors (businesses) only — so never write a generic "must hold a state plumbing licence" line.

The licence line names the exact class your state — or city or county, where licensing is local — grants for the work, worded the way the issuing board words it, with the board named.

If you have not looked it up yet, keep the line bracketed until you have; the template below carries the placeholder.

If a strong hire can qualify after you hire them, say so: "or ability to obtain within [N] days" is an honest line.

And name any certification the job actually requires exactly as the issuing body does.

Verify before you post.

Licence names, tiers and thresholds change, and licensing is often local — the map of which states run which licence ladder, and what the no-state-licence states do instead, is in our guide to how to hire a service plumber.

Confirm the exact licence class for your jobs with your state plumbing board — or with the city and county where licensing is local — before the posting runs.

Pay and pay-plan disclosure.

Post a real range — the low, the high, and how the plan works.

As of September 2026, rules confirmed in our research to require the range in the posting itself include California (employers with 15 or more employees, Labor Code 432.3), Colorado (compensation, a benefits description, and how and when to apply, under the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, per the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment), Washington State (15 or more, wage scale or salary range plus a general description of benefits), the District of Columbia (minimum and maximum projected salary or hourly pay), Maryland (wage range and a general description of benefits), Maine (10 or more employees, from July 29, 2026, per the Maine Department of Labor), Massachusetts (employers with 25 or more in the state, since October 29, 2025), Minnesota (30 or more), Illinois (15 or more — a hyperlink to a public page with the pay scale and benefits satisfies the rule), New Jersey (10 or more employees over 20 calendar weeks), New York (4 or more), Vermont (5 or more) and Virginia (from July 1, 2026).

Delaware's law is signed but takes effect two years after enactment — September 26, 2027 — and will not apply to employers with 25 or fewer employees.

Connecticut and Rhode Island do not require the range in the posting: Connecticut requires the wage range on request or by the time of an offer, and Rhode Island requires it on request and before pay is discussed.

Our research did not confirm posting requirements in Hawaii or Nevada, and city ordinances were outside this check, so verify each state — and each city — where the job is located.

The state-by-state rules are in our guide to pay transparency laws by state.

If the job is paid on commission, say so in the posting: New York's labor department requires postings to clearly state when a position is commission-based, and 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.

Name the pay plan itself — hourly, flat rate, commission, salary, or a mix — and how overtime and after-hours call-outs are paid, in the posting rather than at the offer.

On the number itself: our research has no service-only wage to benchmark — BLS OEWS publishes only the combined Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters occupation (SOC 47-2152), which covers the trade at every level and the pipe trades alongside it.

Benchmark the range against the whole-trade tables on our service plumber salary page, then set it against the competing offers in your own metro rather than against a "service plumber average" of unknown origin.

Schedule, on-call, truck and tools.

These lines describe the day more concretely than the duties list does, so put each in the posting rather than leaving it for the interview.

Schedule: give the working days and hours and the honest seasonal shape of the work — if summer means six-day weeks of emergency calls, write that here.

On-call: say whether there is a rotation, how often it lands on one plumber, and how after-hours call-outs are paid — with that pay treatment in the pay section, not nowhere.

Truck and tools: say whether the truck is company-provided and whether it goes home with the plumber, what the company supplies — fuel card, tablet, the large and specialty tools — and what the plumber is expected to carry, such as hand tools.

If you fund licence renewals, continuing education or certification fees, name it.

Read your posting the way a busy candidate would: fast, looking for a reason to stop.

The fastest reasons to stop are all fixable in the copy.

No pay range.

A posting that hides the number reads as a number worth hiding.

In the states that require the range in the posting, leaving it out is also a legal exposure, not just a conversion problem.

A licence line your state does not issue.

A generic "state plumbing licence required" tells a working plumber you have not checked your own market — seven states leave plumber licensing to cities, counties or an industry board, and Ohio licenses plumbing contractors (businesses) only.

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

A title that hides the split.

A bare "Plumber wanted" does not tell a service tech whether the truck is service or construction.

Put residential or commercial, and service versus install, in the title line.

On-call discovered after the offer.

If the rotation is real, the posting says so — a hire who accepts the rotation in the ad has accepted it knowingly.

Age-coded wording.

Terms like "young", "age 25 to 35", "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 imagine doing it.

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 vary by state and city and were not verified state by state in our research — confirm the rules where you hire before you screen.

Eligibility verification, before the first day.

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

Florida requires private employers with 25 or more employees to use it for new hires, and North Carolina requires the same of employers with 25 or more employees in the state.

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 too.

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 calendar days of contract award.

With the copy fixed, put the posting where service plumbers actually look: browse service plumber jobs to see what candidates see on the board.

When you are ready to run the full process, our guide to how to hire a service plumber covers sourcing, screening, pay and the first 90 days, and how to write a job ad for HVAC technicians covers the ad-writing mechanics.

The day-to-day definition of the role is our service plumber career guide.

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.