Plumbing Calculator
Our free plumbing calculator gives you a rough price for any Canadian province, pulls a pipe and fitting takeoff off the same fixture list, and checks your drain sizes against the National Plumbing Code. Three tools, one set of inputs, CAD throughout. Pick your job, count your bathrooms, and you'll have a number before you finish reading this paragraph.
Get Estimate Now! →A full bathroom counts as a toilet, a sink and a tub or shower. The first one gets a tub and the rest get showers, which you can change below.
Adjust individual fixtures ▾
Plan details, if you have the drawings ▾
Set from the job you picked. Change them only if you know the real figures, since they move the estimate.
Pipe sizes always show the inch nominal, because the plumbing code states nominal sizes in imperial even though everything else in it is metric.
Set from the job you picked. The connection line covers tying into the municipal main and is zero on a single-room renovation.
Edit unit prices ▾
What the numbers rest on
- Sizing follows the National Plumbing Code of Canada 2020, Division B Part 2. Loads from Table 2.4.9.3, branches from 2.4.10.6-B, stacks from 2.4.10.6-A including the per-storey cap, building drains from 2.4.10.6-C by slope.
- Labour runs the same engine as the Blaze labour calculator: national plumber base rate, provincial index, employer burden and a provincial WCB preset, with Quebec switching to QPP and QPIP automatically.
- Pricing is Canadian retail starter data. Unit prices, overhead, profit, permits and the connection are all editable, so put your own supplier and bid numbers in.
The heuristics, stated plainly
- Trunk and branch splits supply pipe 70/30 small bore to large. A manifold splits 85/15.
- Fixture grouping scales every run length: compact 0.8, typical 1.0, spread out 1.3.
- Stack allowance is 3 m per storey above the first, per stack. Supports at 1.8 m on supply, 1.2 m on DWV.
- Project type multiplies the job: new build 1.00, basement 1.20, gut renovation 1.25, finished-space retrofit 1.55.
- Freight uplift is 1.35 in the territories, 1.10 in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1.05 elsewhere in Atlantic Canada.
Before you rely on it
A planning estimate, not a quote and not a code compliance certificate. Provinces amend the national code and the 2025 edition is phasing in, so confirm every size against the edition enforced where you are building. Fixtures, excavation and slab work, gas fitting and septic systems sit outside these numbers.
This plumbing calculator is one of the trades in our construction cost calculator hub, which also covers concrete, roofing, flooring, electrical and labour. All Canadian, all free.
How to use it
Pick the job first. A whole house, one bathroom, a basement bathroom, a kitchen, a laundry room. The tool fills in the fixtures for you, so a homeowner never has to know what a laundry box is. Then pick your province, because that moves the labour rate and the tax line.
Three tabs run off that one fixture list:
- Rough-in cost gives you a planning range with the labour hours, the material split, permits, and the service connection broken out
- Pipe and fitting takeoff turns your fixtures into metres of pipe by size, plus elbows, tees, stop valves, hangers, and how many coils and sticks to buy
- Fixture units and sizing totals your hydraulic load and returns the minimum branch, stack, and building drain size
Got the drawings in front of you? Open the plan details panel and enter your real storey count, stack count, water service run, and building drain length. The estimate tightens up considerably.
What plumbing actually costs in Canada
Here's the deal. New construction plumbing runs roughly $4 to $10 per square foot in Ontario, and the tool lands near $1,000 per fixture at rough-in in most provinces once you count permits and the connection to the municipal main. Per square foot figures move around a lot by market, so treat the per fixture number as the more reliable one.
Run a three bathroom, two storey house through the tool with Ontario selected and it comes back at $10,690 to $14,463 with HST included. Twelve priced fixtures. Ninety-four labour hours. That's a typical spec build, nothing fancy.
Smaller jobs price higher per fixture, and that surprises people every time:
| Job | Assumes | Typical range, Ontario | Per fixture |
|---|---|---|---|
| Whole house, 3 bathrooms | New build, open walls | $10,690 to $14,463 | $1,048 |
| One bathroom | Retrofit into finished space | $4,219 to $5,708 | $1,654 |
| Basement bathroom | Basement development | $4,228 to $5,721 | $1,658 |
| Kitchen | Gut renovation | $2,399 to $3,246 | $1,411 |
| Laundry room | Gut renovation | $2,743 to $3,712 | $1,614 |
Those middle-column assumptions matter. A bathroom roughed in during a new build costs a lot less than the same three fixtures cut into finished walls, and the tool lets you switch project type to see the difference.
Why the jump? Mobilisation, layout, testing and the inspection call don't shrink just because the job did. Ten hours of setup spread across twelve fixtures is cheap. Spread across three, it hurts. You know how it goes. That's the thing about small plumbing jobs that homeowners never see coming.
What moves the number
Fixture count, first and always
Plumbers price by fixture because that's what the work actually tracks. A water closet, a lavatory, a tub, a kitchen sink, a laundry box, each one is a supply run, a drain, a vent, and a trim-out visit. Add a powder room and you've added two fixtures, not half a bathroom.
Where the fixtures sit
Stack two bathrooms over each other on a shared wet wall and the pipe runs get short and the labour drops. Spread them across opposite ends of the house and you're running pipe through joists all afternoon. The tool handles this with a grouping setting, compact, typical, or spread out.
Pipe material
PEX, copper, CPVC. On that same Ontario house, copper type L comes in about $1,400 above PEX, roughly 11% on the total job. CPVC lands within a couple hundred dollars of PEX. Most residential work in Canada is PEX now, and most DWV is ABS rather than PVC, which is a genuine Canada versus US difference that trips up anyone using an American calculator. Cast iron is the outlier, worth it for noise on a stack running past bedrooms, expensive everywhere else.
Whether the walls are open
New build is the baseline. Basement development runs about 20% higher, a gut renovation 25%, and cutting into finished space 55% because everything takes longer when you're working around drywall you're trying not to wreck. If you're pricing a reno, our renovation estimating team sees this gap on real jobs constantly.
And the lines people forget. Permits and inspection, usually $150 to $500. Tying into the municipal water and sewer main, which is one of the biggest single items on a new build after labour. Breaking and repouring slab for a basement bathroom, which we don't price at all and which is often the largest line on that job. We'd rather tell you it's missing than quietly bury a guess in the total.
Bidding a house this week and need the numbers to actually hold?
Send the drawings and get a real plumbing takeoff back in 10 to 48 hours, priced line by line with a scope letter.
Get Estimate Now! →Plumbing labour rates by province
Labour is about 65% of the plumbing package on a typical Canadian house. So the province you're building in matters more than the pipe you're running.
| Province or territory | Billed plumber rate | 3 bathroom house, tax in |
|---|---|---|
| Nunavut | $65.51 | $11,675 to $15,796 |
| Northwest Territories | $64.42 | $11,574 to $15,659 |
| Yukon | $62.67 | $11,413 to $15,441 |
| Alberta | $60.68 | $10,244 to $13,860 |
| British Columbia | $58.73 | $10,735 to $14,524 |
| Ontario | $57.32 | $10,690 to $14,463 |
| Saskatchewan | $55.40 | $10,313 to $13,953 |
| Manitoba | $53.41 | $10,209 to $13,813 |
| Quebec | $52.71 | $10,410 to $14,084 |
| Newfoundland and Labrador | $52.08 | $10,656 to $14,417 |
| Nova Scotia | $50.31 | $10,233 to $13,844 |
| New Brunswick | $50.01 | $10,292 to $13,925 |
| Prince Edward Island | $48.88 | $10,178 to $13,770 |
Remember the per fixture numbers up top? Look at the totals here though. The spread between PEI and Ontario is under $700 on a whole house, even though the hourly rate differs by more than eight dollars. Alberta's lower rate gets partly cancelled by a higher wage index, then Alberta's 5% GST pulls the total back down while Ontario's 13% HST pushes it up. The territories are the real outlier, and that's freight and crew mobilisation more than wages.
One thing worth being clear about. That billed rate is contracted rough-in labour, not an emergency service call. A plumber quoting you $150 an hour to come unclog a drain on a Sunday is pricing a truck, a dispatcher, diagnostics and a warranty on a one hour visit. Different job, different number. Our labour cost calculator breaks the burden stack down line by line if you want to see how a wage becomes a billed rate, and we've written up construction labour rates by province separately.
Tax is on by default because published Canadian plumbing prices are almost always quoted tax in. Switch it off for a pre-tax subtotal. If you're a builder and the rebate question matters to you, we cover HST on construction projects in more detail.
Pipe and fitting takeoff
The second tab is for whoever's actually buying the material.
It converts your fixture list into metres of pipe by nominal size, 13 mm and 19 mm on the supply side, 38 through 100 mm on DWV, plus the water service. Then it counts elbows, tees, stop valves, sanitary tees, couplings, hangers and floor sleeves, applies your waste factor to the pipe only, and rounds the buy into real Canadian stock units. PEX coils at 30 m. ABS and copper in 3.66 m sticks.
Choose your distribution method and the split changes. A manifold layout runs more small bore pipe on home runs. Trunk and branch runs more 19 mm. No guessing involved, and every heuristic the tool uses is printed under the result so you can check our arithmetic instead of trusting it.
Be honest with yourself about what this is, though. Lengths come from per-fixture allowances scaled by your layout, not from anything measured off a drawing. It's good for a material order ballpark and great for sanity-checking a supplier quote. It isn't a takeoff you'd bid off. For that you want a real one, and that's what our plumbing estimating services exist for. Prices on material shift too, so keep an eye on material costs by trade if you're bidding months out.
Fixture units and pipe sizing
This is the tab no other Canadian plumbing calculator bothers with, and it's the one plumbers actually use.
Every fixture puts a hydraulic load on the drainage system, measured in fixture units. A flush tank water closet is 4 FU. A lavatory on a 1 1/4 in. trap is 1 FU. A bathtub is 1.5, a shower under 9.5 LPM is 1.5, a clothes washer is 2 on a 2 in. trap. Total them up and the code tells you the minimum size for the branch, the stack and the building drain.
The calculator runs the real National Plumbing Code tables, including the parts people get wrong:
- A stack has two limits, total load and maximum load from any one storey. A 3 in. stack caps at 102 FU overall but only 18 FU from a single floor, so 20 FU on one storey forces you up to 4 in. from that connection down
- A branch downstream of the third water closet has to be 4 in. no matter what the fixture units say
- A stack serving more than six water closets is 4 in. minimum
- The building drain is sized by load and slope, so a 3 in. drain carrying 27 FU at 1 in 50 is fine and the same pipe at 1 in 100 isn't
- A bathroom group of a toilet, lavatory and tub counts as 6 FU rather than the 6.5 you'd get adding them individually, because the code applies a diversity factor
Trap size changes the load on a couple of fixtures, so lavatory, kitchen sink and floor drain each get their own trap selector rather than us picking one and hoping.
The sizing has to be right. It really has to be. An undersized branch is a failed inspection at best and a callback with drywall coming off at worst. Provinces amend the national code, so treat what the tool returns as a planning check and confirm against the edition adopted where you're building.
Venting and backwater valves
Drainage is only half of a DWV system. The other half is air, and it's where most failed inspections come from.
Every trap needs a vent. Without one the water seal siphons out, sewer gas comes back through the fixture, and the drain gurgles as it tries to pull air from somewhere. A stack vent carries the stack through the roof, branch vents pick up individual fixtures, and a wet vent lets one pipe do both jobs where the code allows it. Get the developed length wrong on a trap arm and the trap loses its seal no matter how well the drain is sized.
The sizing tab handles branches, stacks and building drains. It does not size vents, and we'd rather say that plainly than let you assume it does. Vent sizing depends on developed length as well as load, and that comes off a drawing, not a fixture count. Treat the drain sizes as your starting point and have your plumber or designer run the vents.
The backwater valve
If you're finishing a basement anywhere with combined or surcharge-prone sewers, this is the cheapest insurance on the job. A backwater valve stops municipal sewage reversing into the lowest fixtures when the main backs up, and several Canadian municipalities subsidise installing one. Toggle it on in the cost tab and it prices as its own line, around $550 installed, with the figure editable like everything else.
Worth knowing: the code tightened here. Gate valves and screw caps were removed as backflow protection options in the 2020 edition specifically to cut basement flooding risk, so anything relying on manual intervention no longer qualifies.
Which code edition applies to you
The calculator follows the National Plumbing Code of Canada 2020, which is the edition behind the plumbing regulations most provinces enforce today. The 2025 edition was published in December and comes into force in Alberta on 1 January 2027. Other provinces adopt on their own schedules, and current provincial regulations stay in force until they do. Alberta and British Columbia publish their own plumbing codes based on the national model, Ontario runs its plumbing requirements through the Ontario Building Code, and Quebec amends the national code through the Régie du bâtiment. Check what your jurisdiction actually enforces before you rely on any size.
What the calculator leaves out
Fixtures themselves, faucets, toilets, tubs and the finish trim you pick out. Excavation and slab work. Gas fitting. Septic fields and wells. Sprinkler and fire protection, which is its own trade. Water treatment, anything structural you have to modify to get pipe through... you name it.
Permits and the municipal connection are in there now, as their own lines, but permit fees vary a lot by municipality, so check yours against our breakdown of permit costs by province before you lock a budget.
Material pricing in the tool is retail basis. A plumbing sub buying through a wholesaler beats it, sometimes by a lot. Every unit price is editable for exactly that reason, and the overhead and profit fields are yours to set too. We default to 20% overhead and 15% profit, which is roughly where a residential sub bidding a house sits, and if you want to understand why that number isn't optional we've written about overhead and markup.
When a calculator isn't enough
A calculator gives you a range. A bid needs a number.
We've completed 8,900+ estimates for 4,100+ contractors across every Canadian province and territory, and we track 96% accuracy on them (pricing lands within 3 to 5% of actual cost). Plumbing takeoffs come back in 10 to 48 hours, priced line by line, with a scope letter and clarifications so nobody argues later about what was included. Our senior estimators are CET certified with 12 to 20 years in the field, and we run FastPIPE alongside PlanSwift and Bluebeam Revu on mechanical work.
Pricing is project by project. Starts at $100. No contracts, no retainers, no monthly minimum you have to feed whether you're bidding or not. Plain and simple.
Need plumbing on its own, or the full mechanical package? We cover both, and MEP estimating bundles plumbing with mechanical and electrical when a project needs all three coordinated. The rest of our construction estimating services cover all 33 CSI divisions, so if the plumbing bid turns into a whole project bid, we've got you.
Send your plans. We'll take it from there.
Where these numbers come from
Code sizing and fixture units follow the National Plumbing Code of Canada 2020 published by the National Research Council, with the 2025 edition now published and phasing in. Which edition applies where you build depends on how each province adopts the model codes. Wage data behind the provincial labour rates comes from Government of Canada Job Bank figures for plumbers, NOC 72300, loaded with employer burden and a stated overhead and profit markup. Material pricing is Canadian retail basis and editable inside the tool.
Built and reviewed by the Blaze Estimating mechanical estimating team · CET certified · 12 to 20 years in the field
Frequently asked questions
How much does plumbing cost for a new house in Canada?
How much is plumbing rough-in per fixture?
What does it cost to plumb one bathroom?
Is PEX cheaper than copper?
How many fixture units is a toilet?
What size drain pipe do I need?
Does this plumbing calculator include HST?
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