How many plumbing contractors file permits in New York City?

905 distinct firms filed the 13,049 plumbing permits in our file over the twelve months to 2026-09-05, an average of 14.4 permits each. The ten busiest filed 2,240 between them, the busiest fifty filed 5,473, and the busiest hundred filed 7,389, which is 56.6% of the city's plumbing volume. 166 firms filed exactly once. This is a closed universe you can work through by name, not a lead list you sample from.

What does it take to become a Licensed Master Plumber in New York City?

The standard route requires seven years of total experience within the ten years before the application, at least two of them as a registered journeyman plumber working under the supervision of a Licensed Master Plumber. Shorter routes exist for holders of a mechanical engineering degree or a New York State architect or engineer licence. Applicants must be at least eighteen, pass a written exam at $585 with a score of 70%, then pass a practical exam at $530 within twenty-four months. The licence also requires a place of business inside New York City that complies with the Zoning Code, which rules out a home office.

Is the cost on a New York City plumbing permit a real job value?

More than on most trades in the file. 88.3% of the 13,049 plumbing permits carry a positive cost, running a $34,000 median with a quartile range of $15,900 to $70,000, and 142 records sit at or above one million dollars. Treat it as a declared valuation stated to the Department rather than a contract price. It ranks jobs against each other reliably. It does not tell you what the owner is paying.

Which borough has the fewest plumbing firms?

Staten Island. 151 distinct firms filed its 962 plumbing permits over twelve months, the smallest bench in the city, and its $21,000 median is the lowest of the five boroughs. The Bronx runs the opposite way: 257 firms across only 766 permits, the most fragmented plumbing market in New York City. Manhattan carries the most of both, 5,682 permits from 657 firms.

NYC Plumbing Permits: 905 Firms Hold the Whole Market

Q: Who is allowed to pull a plumbing permit in New York City?

Only a Licensed Master Plumber, or a Licensed Master Fire Suppression Contractor for fire suppression work. The New York City Department of Buildings issues plumbing permits to those licence holders and to nobody else. A property owner must hire a New York State licensed Professional Engineer, a Registered Architect or a Department-licensed plumber to file. That single rule is why the name on a New York City plumbing permit is worth more than the name on most permit records: it is a licence holder, and the licence is hard to get.

By the permits.llc team · Last reviewed September 5, 2026 · Optimal window: Weeks 1–4

Every plumbing permit in New York City is filed by one of 905 firms. Only a Licensed Master Plumber can pull one, and the hundred busiest licence holders file 56.6% of the city's volume. That is not a fragmented market you sample from. It is a closed list you can finish.

TL;DR

13,049 New York City plumbing permits in twelve months, filed by 905 distinct firms.
The busiest 100 firms file 7,389 of them, which is 56.6% of the city.
Only a Licensed Master Plumber may obtain a plumbing permit from the Department of Buildings.
Median declared cost $34,000, upper quartile $70,000, and 142 filings clear a million.

Who can pull a plumbing permit in New York City?

A Licensed Master Plumber, and effectively nobody else.

The New York City Department of Buildings issues plumbing and fire suppression permits only to a Licensed Master Plumber or a Licensed Master Fire Suppression Contractor. Before plumbing work begins, the property owner must hire a New York State licensed Professional Engineer, a Registered Architect or a Department-licensed plumber to file for the permit. The licence holder obtains the permit and arranges the required tests and inspections. All plumbing job filings and permit requests go through DOB NOW: Build, and the Department no longer accepts paper filings.

This matters for anyone reading the data because it changes what the contractor field means. On most permit records in most cities, the contractor name is whoever happened to be hired. On a New York City plumbing permit it is a licence holder who had to qualify, sit two exams and maintain a commercial address in the five boroughs. The field is 100% populated across all 13,049 records in our twelve-month window, and so is the owner field.

How concentrated is the New York City plumbing permit market?

Enough that a hundred names cover more than half of it.

Cohort	Permits	Share of 13,049
Top 10 firms	2,240	17.2%
Top 50 firms	5,473	41.9%
Top 100 firms	7,389	56.6%
Firms filing 4+ boroughs (171)	7,418	56.8%
Firms that filed exactly once (166)	166	1.3%

Set that against the rest of the city's trades and the shape is unusual. Plumbing runs 14.4 permits per firm. Building runs 10.0 across 7,203 firms. Mechanical runs 4.4 across 2,848 firms, the most fragmented major trade in New York City. Electrical runs 36.5, but that number is inflated by filings that are closer to notices than to jobs, which our electrical permit coverage works through in detail.

Plumbing sits in the useful middle. It is concentrated enough to name and large enough to matter.

The commercial consequence is direct. If you sell to plumbing contractors, whether that is supply, fleet, software, insurance, financing or subcontract labour, your total addressable market in New York City is 905 companies, and your top-half target list is 100. Most sales teams treat a market like that as too small to bother segmenting. It is the opposite. It is small enough to cover completely.

Why is the licence the reason, and not the market?

Because the barrier is regulatory, and it is steep.

The standard route to a New York City Master Plumber licence requires seven years of total experience within the ten years before the application, at least two of them as a registered journeyman plumber working under the supervision of a Licensed Master Plumber. Shorter routes exist: five years for a mechanical engineering graduate, three for a New York State licensed architect or professional engineer, each with a minimum period of that experience inside New York City. Applicants must be at least eighteen and able to read and write English.

Then two exams. A written exam at $585 requiring a 70% score, followed by a practical exam at $530 that has to be passed within twenty-four months of the written notification. And the licence requires a place of business in New York City that complies with the Zoning Code, which specifically excludes a home office, alongside general liability, workers' compensation and disability insurance.

Seven years and a commercial lease is not a market you enter opportunistically. It is why the 905 figure moves slowly, why the top hundred stay the top hundred, and why a plumbing account relationship in this city is worth building properly rather than churning.

Which boroughs have the thinnest plumber bench?

Staten Island, by a wide margin, and the Bronx has the opposite problem.

Borough	Plumbing permits	Firms	Median cost	Plumbing share of all filings
Manhattan	5,682	657	$35,875	9.6%
Brooklyn	3,242	527	$36,000	7.7%
Queens	2,397	427	$30,000	7.0%
Staten Island	962	151	$21,000	8.8%
Bronx	766	257	$26,250	4.8%

Staten Island runs 962 permits through 151 firms, an average of 6.4 each, and carries the lowest median in the city. It is the most single-family borough and the plumbing work reflects that. For a supplier or a service business, 151 names is a territory one person can hold.

The Bronx is the anomaly worth staring at. It files the fewest plumbing permits of the five boroughs, 766, and spreads them across 257 firms, which is more firms than Queens uses for three times the volume. Plumbing is also the smallest share of total filings there, 4.8% against Manhattan's 9.6%. Either the work is going somewhere the permit record does not capture, or the borough genuinely has a thin, fragmented plumbing economy sitting under a large amount of other construction activity.

Note that the Department stores the county name rather than the borough. New York County is Manhattan, Kings is Brooklyn and Richmond is Staten Island, which trips up anyone matching this file against a borough-keyed list for the first time.

Does a plumbing permit lead the job or trail it?

It trails, by a median of nine days.

Across 8,674 addresses in the twelve-month window that carry both a plumbing permit and a building, mechanical or electrical permit, the plumbing filing lands after the other trade on 5,671 of them, the same day on 1,545, and before on 1,458. The median offset is nine days.

Nine days is short, and shorter than the sixteen-day lag we measured on electrical filings. Plumbing is not a late-stage trade in New York City. It goes in close to the front, which suits a trade whose rough-in has to happen before anything closes up.

For a seller, that cuts two ways. If your buyer is the plumbing contractor, the plumbing permit is your record and it is timely. If your buyer is the building and you need to reach it before the plumber is chosen, nine days is not much of a window, and the building or mechanical filing at that address is the trigger you actually want. Working across trades at the address level rather than inside one trade is the point our account-based prospecting piece makes about the file as a whole.

What this data cannot tell you

The plumbing file is unusually complete, which makes its gaps easier to miss.

The owner field is populated on 100% of these records, and it is not a deed holder. It records the party that commissioned the work, which in New York City is frequently a managing agent, an LLC or a co-op board. A permit here is a signal about the property owner, not the contractor, and the owner it names may be a corporate entity three steps from anyone who makes a decision.

The declared cost is a valuation stated to the Department. 11,524 of the 13,049 records carry a positive figure, and the $34,000 median and $70,000 upper quartile rank jobs against each other reliably. Neither is a contract price.

We hold no square footage, no year built, no stories and no block or lot for New York City, so a plumbing permit cannot be sized against the building it sits in. There is also no way to separate a licence holder's own crews from work filed on behalf of a subcontractor, which means firm counts are counts of filers, not of plumbing companies operating in the city. The real number of businesses doing plumbing work here is larger than 905. The number that can pull the permit is not.

How permits.llc fits in

Our New York file holds 396,411 permits from the New York City Department of Buildings across all five boroughs, current to within a couple of days, with contractor and owner names on every plumbing record. Manhattan reaches back to 2003, Staten Island only to 2017, so long-run comparisons need the per-borough start dates.

To build the 905-firm list yourself, download the New York permit file and group the twelve-month plumbing filings by contractor name. To work it geographically instead, the New York borough pages split the file by borough so you can see whether your territory looks like Staten Island's 151 firms or Manhattan's 657 before you size a team against it.

Two adjacent reads help here. Kitchen and bath showrooms sell into the fixture end of this work and are usually specified after the permit is filed. The wider five-borough permit picture covers how the file is structured before you filter it down to one trade. If you want the plumbing filings as they land rather than as an annual pull, daily permit alerts carry the same records on a next-day cadence.