The hallways of the Plumbers & Gasfitters Local 5 Apprenticeship School in Lanham, Maryland, are adorned with replicas of patents marking milestones in plumbing history. There’s the pipe wrench, patented in 1888, and the pipe cutter, patented in 1945. Also on display is a reproduction of a vintage poster with an illustration that shows a plumber in overalls, wrench in hand, towering high above an admiring crowd. The tagline reads, “The Plumber Protects the Health of the Nation.”
The decor is meant to reinforce the school’s pitch to trainees: that this is a time-tested profession with solid job prospects. Openings for plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters will average about 42,600 each year over the coming decade, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the money isn’t bad, either. The mean annual wage for plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters as of May 2022 was $65,190, the BLS says, which is higher than the national median of $61,900 for all occupations.
Pay varies widely around the country. A plumber in the Piedmont region of North Carolina earns $43,000 a year. One in San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, can pull in almost $100,000.
Despite the decent salary, the pace at which the US is minting new plumbers is lagging behind retirements. The widening plumber deficit matters for households facing hefty charges to fix a leak and businesses trying to get new buildings completed on time and on budget. This shortage cost the economy about $33 billion in 2022, according to an analysis by John Dunham & Associates, a research company in Longboat Key, Florida, which projects the country will be short about 550,000 plumbers by 2027.
The apprenticeship school in Lanham registered 125 students for the academic year that began last September. But training director Christopher Biondi says that, based on past experience, about 40% of trainees will have dropped out by the time the five-year course ends.
Most of the cost of the training is covered by an apprenticeship fund. The bill for students comes to about $1,500 over five years, plus modest outlays for obligatory work boots and a tape measure. During the program, they have assignments that include designing and planning a bathroom—toilet, sink, water heater, and tub—within a 12-hour window. This project involves creating a layout and ordering all the necessary materials from the school’s store. “We really harp on about the professionalism and really take your time, plan it out, and the project becomes easy,” says Mason Holden, a full-time instructor at the school who teaches basic algebra, geometry, drawing, and other skills.
“Some people haven’t done fractions for a long time,” he says. “I’m a hard grader, but I tell them it builds them up, not knocks them down.”
A pre-apprenticeship course in plumbing, offered for the first time this fall at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Maryland, had room for 18 students, but only 3 applied. On the day this reporter visited, an instructor was methodically decoding a maze of piping on a construction blueprint, using pink for drainpipes and orange for fire sprinklers.
“This is the start of your plumbing lives,” says Allen Jones, who spent 50 years in the trade and has returned to teach a new generation. “When you look at that, you may say, ‘Oh my goodness, what am I getting myself into?’ But by the time you are in your third and fourth year of training, it will be like reading a comic book.”
Jean Bosco Nshimiyimana, 34, one of the trainees, says he was drawn to plumbing because it seems more resistant to automation than his current line of work. “There are lots of robots” in welding, he says. “I didn’t see any plumbing being done by robots, so I said, ‘OK, let’s do this one.’”
The perception that plumbing is physically arduous dirty work with long hours is among the reasons younger people aren’t signing up, according to several people interviewed for this story.
Jamal Casimiro, 29, a second-year apprentice in the Lanham program, works on new construction sites such as schools and parking garages. To be on time for a 5 a.m. start, he lays out his clothes and packs his lunch the night before—smoothies in the summer, soup in the winter. He eats breakfast during his 40-minute drive to the site. “My feet hit the floor at 3:15 a.m. off the bed,” he says. “You’re pretty tired when you get off work.”
After graduating from college, Casimiro bounced between jobs, including waiting tables and working for an environmental nongovernmental organization, before deciding on plumbing. He has no relatives in the trade but was intrigued after a repairman visited his family’s home one winter to fix the heater. “I was like, ‘You made this much money in 15 minutes?’ So that kind of turned my ears to it,” he says.
He was also drawn by the opportunity to make a positive impact on the environment through sustainable building practices such as creating more water-efficient systems. “It is a great skill set to have,” Casimiro says. “You are not just going to be some guy making people uncomfortable in their homes because they are moving all of their toiletry products out of the way.”
Mary Thompson, chief operating officer of Neighborly, the world’s largest home services company, is on the frontline of the shortage of plumbers and other building-trades workers. “Everybody is experiencing recruiting issues,” says Thompson, who is herself a licensed plumber. “If you go to the trade schools and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got jobs,’ the trade schools all say, ‘We know you have jobs. Everybody has jobs.’”
Industry executives say there’s no quick fix. Bolstering the plumber pipeline will require deep investment in recruiting and training, starting from middle school upward, says Ed Brady, chief executive officer of the Home Builders Institute, a provider in Washington, DC, of trade skills training for the construction industry. “We are going to have this for a long time. This is not a market cycle issue. This is a generational issue.”
For Biondi, from the Lanham school, outreach efforts need to start even earlier. He recounts that on a recent visit to an elementary school, he asked the class what it is that plumbers do. The answer: clean toilets. “It’s funny because it was kids,” he says, “but that misconception doesn’t change unless it is corrected.”
The large number of job openings—not only for plumbers but also across a swath of occupations—also matters to policymakers at the Federal Reserve. Chair Jay Powell and his colleagues have said that they’re intent on guiding inflation back to the Fed’s long-term target of 2% a year. Yet the persistence of a tight labor market—the latest data show the ratio of vacancies to unemployed workers is 1.4 to 1, which is historically high—may influence how low they’ll allow interest rates to fall. The thinking among some economists is that the cheap-money days that preceded the pandemic will not soon return, because the so-called natural rate of interest—which permits the economy to keep humming along without overheating—will need to be higher to counteract inflationary pressures.
So the slogan on that old poster still has a ring of truth: America needs more plumbers, for the sake of the health of the nation.