Based on aggregated data, a whole house repipe costs $4,000 to $18,000, with a typical job landing near $7,500. Within that total, materials account for roughly $1,200 to $5,400 and labor for $2,800 to $12,600 — labor is about 70 percent of the bill at every point in the range. The typical duration is 2 to 7 days, and the work is permitted and inspected in most jurisdictions.
A repipe replaces the water supply distribution inside a house: the cold and hot lines from the point of entry, the risers, the branch runs and the stub-outs at every fixture. It is not a repair of a failed section and it is not drain work. What makes one house $4,000 and another $18,000 is almost entirely the job as it has to be executed — how many fixtures the pipe has to reach, how far apart they are, how many floors sit between them, and what has to be opened to get there.
What the $4,000 to $18,000 Range Actually Measures
The band is wide because two different variables move inside it, and they move independently.
The first is the house: a one-bathroom bungalow needs a fraction of the pipe, the fittings and the crew-hours of a four-bathroom two-storey home. That variable alone spans most of the range.
The second is the pipe itself. Aggregated pricing puts a PEX repipe at roughly $4,000 to $10,000 and a copper repipe at roughly $8,000 to $18,000 on comparable houses — the single line item that can double a quote on an identical floor plan. Which of the two a house gets, and what that choice costs over its service life, is covered in copper vs PEX repiping cost; this page treats the material as one cost factor among several and holds the rest of the analysis on the house.
Published sources disagree at the top of the range, splitting between $15,000 and $18,000 for the largest residential jobs. This site widens a band where sources disagree rather than averaging them, so the figure carried here is $18,000.
Repipe Cost by House Size, Bathrooms and Stories
Bathroom count is the strongest single predictor in the dataset, because a bathroom is where supply lines cluster: a lavatory, a toilet, a tub or shower, and often a second lavatory, all fed from branches that have to be run, secured and tested individually.
| House | Bathrooms | Supplied fixtures | Typical total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1,200 sq ft, single storey | 1 | 7–9 | $4,000–$6,000 |
| 1,200–1,800 sq ft, single storey | 1.5–2 | 9–11 | $5,500–$9,000 |
| 1,800–2,500 sq ft, one or two storeys | 2–3 | 11–13 | $7,000–$12,000 |
| 2,500–3,500 sq ft, two storeys | 3–4 | 13–16 | $9,500–$15,000 |
| 3,500 sq ft and up, two or more storeys | 4 or more | 16 or more | $12,000–$18,000 |
The $7,500 national typical figure falls in the middle row, which is the most common configuration in the housing stock the dataset draws on.
Square footage matters less than the plan drawn on it. Two houses of identical area price differently when one stacks its bathrooms over the kitchen wet wall and the other spreads a master bath, a hall bath and a laundry to three corners. Stacked wet areas share risers and shorten branch runs; scattered ones multiply both. That is why fixture count and layout carry the estimate rather than area, and why a compact 2,400 square foot house with three bathrooms in a column can price below a sprawling 2,000 square foot ranch with the same fixture count.
Storeys add cost in a specific way. A second floor needs vertical risers, and every riser has to pass through a floor assembly and be supported and insulated where it does. It also puts finished ceilings underneath the upstairs bathrooms, which is the most expensive surface in the house to open and close.
Cost per Fixture and per Square Foot
Both derived figures are useful for sanity-checking a quote, and neither is how a repipe is actually priced.
| Basis | Derivation | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Per supplied fixture, low end | $4,000 across 8 fixtures | ~$500 |
| Per supplied fixture, typical | $7,500 across 12 fixtures | ~$625 |
| Per supplied fixture, high end | $18,000 across 17 fixtures | ~$1,060 |
| Per square foot of house, typical | $7,500 across 2,000 sq ft | ~$3.75 |
| Per square foot of house, full band | $4,000–$18,000 across the areas it covers | ~$3.50–$5.50 |
The per-fixture number rises as houses get larger, which is the opposite of how most trade pricing scales. On a coating or a flooring job, unit cost falls with area because mobilization spreads out. A repipe behaves differently: the extra fixtures in a big house are the ones furthest from the point of entry, on the longest runs, behind the most finished surfaces. The marginal fixture is more expensive than the average one, not less.
What Each Fixture Branch Adds
Repipes are quoted as a whole-house number rather than fixture by fixture, but the total is built from branches, and the branches are not equal. Allocating the aggregated $4,000 to $18,000 band across the fixture counts it covers gives a workable picture of what each one contributes.
| Fixture branch | Lines run | Derived contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Hose bib or single cold stub | Cold only, short run | $250–$450 |
| Refrigerator ice and water line | Cold only, long run | $250–$500 |
| Toilet | Cold only, low stub-out | $300–$550 |
| Washing machine box | Hot and cold, recessed box | $450–$800 |
| Lavatory sink | Hot and cold, low stub-outs | $450–$850 |
| Kitchen sink with dishwasher | Hot and cold, plus appliance feed | $600–$1,100 |
| Tub or shower valve | Hot and cold, in-wall valve body | $700–$1,400 |
| Water heater supply and hot main takeoff | Hot and cold, largest diameter | $700–$1,400 |
These are allocations of a whole-house total, not separately quoted line items — no plumber prices a repipe this way, and adding a bathroom to a house does not add a bathroom’s worth of branches at these figures in isolation.
Two branches dominate the top of the table, and both for the same reason: they sit inside a finished wall. A tub or shower valve is the only supply connection in most houses that cannot be reached from a cabinet, a floor or a crawlspace, so it is the one branch that reliably forces an opening in a tiled surface. The water heater takeoff is expensive for a different reason — larger pipe, more fittings, and the point where hot distribution for the whole house originates.
Run length is the variable that the table cannot show. Two lavatory branches in the same house can differ by a factor of three when one sits four feet from a riser and the other sits at the far end of a ranch. This is also why a detached laundry, a wet bar, an outdoor kitchen or a second-floor utility sink carries more cost than its fixture count suggests: each one is a long run to a single connection.
Access: Slab, Crawlspace, Basement and a Finished Ceiling
Access is the cost factor that is invisible on a floor plan and dominant on an invoice. It acts on the labor line, which is where roughly 70 percent of the money already sits.
| Access condition | Effect on the labor line | Typical total, national |
|---|---|---|
| Full basement or open crawlspace | Baseline | $7,500 |
| Single storey, attic routing over open ceilings | +10% to 20% | $8,025–$8,550 |
| Slab-on-grade, rerouted overhead through the attic | +25% to 50% | $8,815–$10,125 |
| Two storeys, finished ceilings below the upstairs baths | +30% to 60% | $9,075–$10,650 |
A basement or a tall crawlspace is the cheapest house to repipe because the horizontal distribution is reachable without opening anything: the crew works below the floor, drops or rises at each fixture, and the only openings are at the stub-outs.
Slab-on-grade changes the geometry completely. The original supply lines are cast into or beneath the concrete, and current practice abandons them in place rather than chasing them through the slab. The new distribution is rerouted overhead — up an interior wall, across the attic, and back down to each fixture — which lengthens every run, adds two vertical penetrations per fixture group, and puts the entire system into an unconditioned space where it has to be insulated. It also means the wall openings appear high on the wall in every room with a fixture, not low. Phoenix, Dallas and Tampa in the table below are slab markets; a repipe quoted in any of them is usually quoting the overhead reroute rather than the crawlspace baseline.
A two-storey house with finished ceilings below the upstairs bathrooms is the most expensive access condition in the dataset, because the openings land on the ceiling of the room below. Ceiling patches are harder to blend than wall patches, they are usually textured, and they sit in living space rather than in a closet or a garage — which pushes the finish-repair line up at the same time as the plumbing labor line.
Where the Money Goes: The 30/70 Split
| Component | Low | Typical | High | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Materials — pipe, fittings, manifolds, valves, hangers, insulation | $1,200 | $2,250 | $5,400 | ~30% |
| Labor — layout, openings, running, tie-ins, testing, inspection | $2,800 | $5,250 | $12,600 | ~70% |
| Total project | $4,000 | $7,500 | $18,000 | 100% |
The split reconciles exactly at all three points, which makes it usable as a check on a quote: a bid where pipe and fittings are more than about a third of the total is either quoting an unusual material specification or thin on labor.
Against the trade’s national average hourly figure of $112, the typical $5,250 labor line implies roughly 47 crew-hours — about two plumbers for three working days, which is what the 2 to 7 day duration describes at its typical point. The low end of the labor band is about 25 crew-hours and the high end about 112, which is where the seven-day figure comes from. Hourly and flat-rate pricing for the trade, and what sits inside a billed plumbing hour, is broken down in what a plumber charges per hour.
Very little of that labor is spent joining pipe. The hours go into locating the existing runs, cutting and protecting the openings, pulling long runs through joist bays and attic space, securing and insulating them, tying every fixture back in, pressure testing the whole system, and waiting through two inspections.
The Drywall and Finish Line That Is Not in the Plumbing Quote
This is the most common gap between a repipe quote and a repipe budget, and it is worth stating plainly: a plumbing quote typically covers cutting the openings and a basic patch, not the finished wall.
What “basic patch” means varies by contractor. In aggregated pricing it usually means the hole is squared and a drywall panel is screwed in — sometimes taped, sometimes not. Texturing, priming and painting are almost always outside the plumbing scope, and matching a textured ceiling or a painted accent wall is finish carpentry and painting work, not plumbing work.
| Finish repair scope | Typical cost |
|---|---|
| Patch and tape only, small number of wall openings | $300–$600 |
| Patch, tape, texture and spot paint, single storey | $600–$1,500 |
| Ceilings included, textured, rooms repainted wall to wall | $1,500–$4,000 |
| Tile removed and reset at a shower valve opening | Priced as tile work, separately |
The number of openings tracks the fixture count, not the size of the house, and the location of each opening is what sets its repair cost. An opening in a garage wall or a closet is a patch. The same opening in a tiled shower surround is a tile job, and the same opening in a living-room ceiling is a texture-match job that usually ends in repainting the whole ceiling because a patch never quite disappears.
Two questions separate quotes that look identical on price: whether the plumber’s number includes any wall repair at all, and whether openings will be cut from the least-finished side where a wall backs onto a garage, a laundry or a closet. The second one is a real cost lever — the same branch reached from a garage wall instead of a tiled bathroom wall can move the finish line by a four-figure amount.
Where a repipe runs alongside other work, the finish line largely disappears into it. In a house already being taken back to studs, the walls are open and the openings cost nothing to make or close. That is why repipes are commonly scheduled into a gut renovation — in a basement being finished, for instance, the ceiling below the first floor comes down as part of the work and exposes the horizontal distribution for free.
Permits, the Rough Inspection and the Final
A repipe replaces the water distribution system, so it is generally permitted and inspected rather than treated as maintenance. Aggregated data puts the permit fee at $50 to $800 depending on jurisdiction, and a reinspection, where one is needed, at $25 to $150.
The inspection sequence sets the schedule more than the plumbing does. A rough inspection happens with the new lines run, pressure tested and still visible — before any opening is closed. A final inspection follows after everything is tied in and the system is back in service. The gap between them is why a repipe cannot be closed up on the same day it is piped, and why a finish contractor cannot be booked to start until the rough has passed.
Practical cost consequences of that sequence: the pressure test has to hold while the inspector is present, so a failed test is a rescheduled inspection rather than a quick fix; and any opening closed before the rough inspection generally has to be reopened. Both are timeline costs rather than line items, but they are the usual reason a two-day plumbing job occupies a week of calendar.
DIY Cost Math on a Repipe
The DIY comparison behaves differently here than on most projects in this dataset, and the reason is the split at the top of this page rather than the difficulty of the work.
Materials are about $1,200 to $5,400 of a $4,000 to $18,000 job, so a homeowner supplying their own pipe and fittings is competing for 30 percent of the total. The other 70 percent is roughly 25 to 112 crew-hours of layout, opening, running, tie-in and testing. On the typical job, that is around 47 hours — for one person working weekends, a project measured in months rather than the 2 to 7 days a crew takes, with the house’s water supply in a transitional state throughout.
Three costs sit on the DIY side of the ledger that do not appear on a materials receipt:
- Tooling. The joining system dictates the tool, and the tools that produce the fastest connections are the expensive ones. A rental covers a weekend; a repipe stretched across months either pays rent repeatedly or buys outright.
- The permit and the two inspections. Permitting rules for homeowner-performed plumbing vary by jurisdiction, and the same rough and final inspections apply. Work closed up before the rough inspection generally has to be reopened, which is a finish-repair cost paid twice.
- The finish repair. It is the same $300 to $4,000 either way. Nothing about doing the plumbing yourself reduces the number of openings.
The narrow version of the arithmetic: a DIY repipe competes for the materials third of the job, spends the labor 70 percent in weekends instead of dollars, and leaves the finish-repair line untouched.
The 2 to 7 Day Timeline and What Happens to the Water
The aggregated typical duration is 2 to 7 days of plumbing work. A rough shape of how that time is spent:
| Phase | Typical share of the window | Water status |
|---|---|---|
| Layout, protection, opening walls and ceilings | Day 1 | On |
| Running new distribution — mains, risers, branches | Days 1–3 | On |
| Fixture tie-ins and changeover to the new system | 1 day | Off during working hours |
| Pressure test and rough inspection | Within 1 day | Off or partially off |
| Closing openings, basic patch, final inspection | Final day | On |
The water question is the one that decides whether a household stays in the house. In the common case, the supply is shut off during working hours on the days that involve tie-ins and restored at the end of each day — households generally remain in place. Full-window outages are not the norm; the longest single shutoff is the changeover, when the old system is abandoned and the new one is proved.
Two things extend the window without adding plumbing work: the inspection gaps described above, and the finish trades, which start after the plumbing is signed off rather than alongside it. A job quoted at three plumbing days can occupy two calendar weeks once a rough inspection, a final and a painter are sequenced through it.
Whole House at Once, or Phased by Zone
A phased repipe — one bathroom or one wing at a time — is a real option and it is almost always more expensive in total.
The reason is that mobilization, permitting and inspection are largely fixed. A crew that returns three times sets up three times, cuts three sets of protection, and the jurisdiction inspects what is in front of it each time. The changeover between old and new pipe also has to be engineered at every zone boundary, which means transition fittings between the old material and the new one at each seam — joints that a single-pass repipe never creates.
| Approach | Cost behaviour | Typical outcome against a $7,500 whole-house job |
|---|---|---|
| Whole house in one pass | One mobilization, one permit, one finish-repair pass | Baseline |
| Two zones, months apart | Two mobilizations, transition fittings at the boundary | Commonly 15% to 30% higher in total |
| Bathroom-at-a-time as each is remodelled | Cost absorbed into open walls; no separate finish repair | Can be lower, only if the remodels were happening anyway |
The third row is the case where phasing genuinely wins, and it wins for a reason that has nothing to do with plumbing: the walls are already open and already being refinished, so the two most expensive parts of a repipe are already paid for by another trade.
What Puts a House Into Repipe Scope
The conditions that move a house from repair pricing to repipe pricing are worth stating as cost triggers rather than as symptoms, because each one changes what a quote covers.
- Repeat failures on different runs. One failure is a repair. Failures arriving at separate points in the house is the pattern that turns a $650 invoice into a system question, and it is the input to the crossover table below.
- Pressure loss at every fixture rather than one. A single slow fixture is an aerator or a valve. Low pressure across the whole house points at the distribution itself, which is what a repipe replaces.
- A pinhole or slab leak that has already been repaired more than once. Each of these carries an access cost as well as a plumbing cost, and on a slab the access cost is the larger of the two.
- A planned renovation that opens the walls anyway. This one is a scheduling trigger rather than a failure, and it is the cheapest moment a repipe ever has, because the finish-repair line is already being paid by another trade.
- A fixture count the existing system was never sized for. Adding a bathroom, a second water heater or an irrigation tie-in to distribution sized for a smaller house shows up as pressure drop when two fixtures run at once.
None of these is a diagnosis, and none of them prices the job on its own. They determine which of the five rows in the size table applies and whether the access premium attaches — which is where the whole spread from $4,000 to $18,000 comes from.
When Patching Stops Paying
The comparison that matters for most households is not repipe versus nothing. It is repipe versus another repair call, and the arithmetic is straightforward against the dataset’s own figures. A single pipe repair carries a typical figure of $650, with a band of $200 to $2,000 depending on access and method.
| Repair calls at $650 | Cumulative repair spend | Share of a $7,500 repipe |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | $1,950 | 26% |
| 6 | $3,900 | 52% |
| 9 | $5,850 | 78% |
| 12 | $7,800 | 104% — crossover |
At the top of the repair band, the crossover arrives at about four calls; at the bottom of the repipe band, at about six calls of $650. The plain version: somewhere between four and a dozen repair invoices buys the whole system.
Two costs sit outside that table and both favour the repipe. Each repair opens its own wall and leaves its own patch, so the finish-repair line is paid repeatedly rather than once. And each repair is scheduled against a failure that has already happened, which is where emergency and after-hours pricing enters — a premium a planned repipe never pays. Detailed repair pricing, including the access and emergency premiums, is in burst pipe repair cost.
Whole House Repipe Cost by City
Pipe, fittings and valves are commodity products that ship at broadly national prices. Labor is what moves, and on a repipe labor is roughly 70 percent of the total — which makes this one of the most location-sensitive jobs in the dataset. Applying the formula City Adjusted Cost = National Average × City Labor Adjustment Factor to the $2,250 materials and $5,250 labor typical figures:
| City | Labor Adjustment Factor | Adjusted Typical Total | Labor Portion Only | vs. National |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New York, NY | 1.23 | $8,710 | $6,460 | +23% |
| Chicago, IL | 1.33 | $9,235 | $6,985 | +33% |
| Phoenix, AZ | 0.99 | $7,450 | $5,200 | −1% |
| Dallas, TX | 0.89 | $6,925 | $4,675 | −11% |
| Tampa, FL | 0.87 | $6,820 | $4,570 | −13% |
Labor adjustment factors are derived from BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (May 2025): the median ratio of local to national hourly wages across the trades that do this work. How this is calculated.
Chicago carries the highest labor adjustment factor in the dataset at 1.33 — 33 percent above the national labor figure — and Tampa one of the lowest at 0.87. Phoenix, at 0.99, sits within a percent of the national benchmark. The ordering is set by trade wages and contractor supply rather than by how expensive a metro is to live in, which is why Chicago prices above New York at 1.23.
Three of the metros above carry a second, non-wage effect. Phoenix, Dallas and Tampa are predominantly slab-on-grade markets, which means the access premium from the table earlier in this page applies on top of the labor factor for most houses in them. A low labor factor and an overhead reroute pull in opposite directions, and a slab house in a cheap-labor metro can land close to a crawlspace house in an expensive one. The calculator above applies any city’s factor to a specific configuration.
What a Repipe Quote Covers, and What It Does Not
| Usually inside the quote | Usually outside it |
|---|---|
| New hot and cold distribution to every fixture | Drain, waste and vent piping |
| Shutoff valves and stub-outs at each fixture | Fixture replacement — faucets, toilets, tubs |
| Cutting access openings and basic patching | Taping, texturing, priming and painting |
| Pressure testing and system commissioning | The water service line from the meter to the house |
| Permit filing and both inspections | Water heater replacement |
| Reconnection of the existing water heater | Flooring, tile and cabinetry disturbed by access |
The most consequential row is the last one on the right, and the water service line is the second. A repipe stops at the point of entry; replacing the buried line from the meter to the house is separate work, commonly $600 to $2,500 where it is needed, and it is frequently discovered rather than planned.
The scope boundary on the left column also has a limit worth naming: a repipe is supply piping. Drain and sewer condition is a different system with different failure modes and its own diagnostic — a sewer scope inspection at $100 to $700 prices that question and is often run in the same week, but nothing in a repipe quote touches it.
Related Plumbing Costs
- Burst pipe repair at $200 to $2,000 is the per-incident alternative that the crossover table above is measured against.
- Gas water heater installation at $800 to $3,000 is the adjacent appliance cost, and the appliance is disconnected and reconnected during most repipes — which is why a tank near the end of its life is commonly replaced in the same visit while the water is already off. Ongoing service pricing is in water heater maintenance cost, and the labor half of a swap in water heater replacement labor cost.
- Bathroom plumbing rough-in at $1,500 to $5,000 is what a single bathroom’s supply and drain lines price as on their own, and is the right comparison when only one room is in scope.
- Basement finishing is the project most often scheduled around a repipe, because it opens the same cavities the pipe has to travel through and pays for closing them.
- Subfloor replacement at $900 to $3,000 is the repair that a long-running supply leak produces, and the cost that a repipe is most often weighed against after a second failure.
The plumbing cost overview collects the trade’s projects against the same national dataset.
Where a Repipe Budget Comes Down
- Get the finish repair itemized separately from the plumbing, so two bids can be compared on identical scope rather than on where each contractor drew the line.
- Ask where the openings will be cut. Reaching a branch from a garage, laundry or closet wall instead of a tiled or papered one moves the finish line, not the plumbing line.
- Repipe the whole house in one pass rather than by zone unless the walls are coming open for another reason anyway.
- Combine the work with anything already opening walls or ceilings — a bathroom gut, a basement ceiling, a kitchen remodel.
- Confirm whether the water service line from the meter is in scope, since it is the most common four-figure surprise on a repipe invoice.
- Schedule outside the peak weeks that follow a regional freeze event, when repair demand competes for the same crews.
- Compare bids on the labor line rather than the total, since materials are broadly national and the labor line is where a quote’s assumptions about access are hiding.
Last updated: November 2026. All figures reflect aggregated national cost data and are not a quote for a specific house. Actual pricing depends on fixture count, foundation type, layout and local market. See the methodology page for how figures are calculated and sourced.