Repipe House Cost

Dallas Best Plumber is a free referral service, not a plumbing company. We do not set prices, we do not perform work, and nothing below is our quote. These are figures published by independent sources, named and dated so you can check them. Note that the two publishers differ substantially at the top end, and that one of them is now several years old - both facts are flagged in the table.

Repiping is the plumbing job where published averages are least useful, because the number depends almost entirely on your specific house: how many fixtures, how many stories, whether the runs are accessible, and how much finished surface has to come off and go back on. Treat the table as a frame for reading a quote, not as a prediction.

Look at the published material figures again: PEX at well under two dollars a foot. Even a large house needs only a few hundred feet of supply line. The pipe is not the cost.

Labor is. A repipe means running new supply lines to every fixture in the house, which means getting into walls, ceilings and the attic, cutting access points, fishing pipe through framing, making every connection, pressure testing, and then reconnecting every fixture. The published hourly rates multiplied by the real hours on a whole house is most of the quote.

Access is the multiplier on that labor. A single-story Dallas-area slab home with an accessible attic is the best case: the plumber can run most of the new piping overhead and drop down to each fixture, keeping wall damage to small patches. A two-story house, a house with vaulted ceilings, or one where the plumbing has to come up through the slab makes the same job take far longer.

Then there is the part most homeowners do not see coming: putting the house back together. Bob Vila publishes drywall repair at $50 to $75 per square foot and ceiling repair at $45 to $90. If a plumbing quote does not say who patches, textures and repaints, you do not yet have a comparable number - and in a Texas home with sprayed or knockdown wall texture, matching the finish is skilled work.

• Number of fixtures: every sink, tub, shower, toilet, hose bibb and appliance is a run and a connection.
• Stories and layout: single-story with attic access is cheapest; two-story and vaulted ceilings cost materially more.
• Whether lines run under the slab: rerouting overhead to avoid the slab is common in Texas and changes the scope.
• Material choice: PEX is cheaper and more flexible, copper costs more and is still preferred by some homeowners.
• Finish repair: drywall, texture matching and paint, plus tile where a wall had to be opened behind it.
• Permits and inspection, which in Texas are handled by your city.
• Whether you stay in the house during the work, which affects how the plumber phases the job.
• Whether the drain and waste lines are also being replaced, which is a separate and usually larger job than a supply repipe.

For a modern repipe the realistic choice is PEX or copper, and for most Dallas-area homes PEX wins on practical grounds rather than just price.

PEX is cross-linked polyethylene: flexible tubing that can be fished through framing with far fewer connections than rigid pipe, because it bends around obstacles instead of needing an elbow. Fewer joints means fewer potential leak points. It tolerates freezing better than rigid pipe, it does not corrode, and mineral-rich water does not scale it the way it scales copper. In a region where slab movement stresses rigid pipe and a hard freeze is a real annual risk, those properties matter.

Copper is rigid, long-proven and more expensive both in material and in labor, because every direction change is a soldered fitting. Its weakness in this market is that it is exactly what failed in the homes now being repiped: aging copper develops pinholes, and mineral-rich water accelerates the process from the inside.

CPVC sits in between on price, is rigid like copper, and is more brittle than either, which makes it less forgiving of movement. It is a legitimate material but it is not usually the recommendation for a whole-house repipe here.

Whichever you choose, what matters as much as the material is whether the installer routes the new lines out of the slab. A repipe that re-buries supply lines under concrete in expansive clay soil reproduces the original problem.

Nobody repipes a house for fun. The decision usually arrives after a run of individual leaks, and the honest test is whether the failures are isolated events or a pattern.

One pinhole in a copper line is an event. Three in two years, in different places, is the pipe telling you its remaining life is short. At that point each repair is buying months while the underlying condition continues, and the money spent on repairs is money not spent on the fix.

There are also material-specific cases where a repipe is the recommendation regardless of how many leaks you have had. Polybutylene is the clearest: it was installed in homes from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s, it fails in ways that are hard to predict, and our polybutylene pipe replacement guide covers why it is usually replaced rather than repaired. Galvanized steel supply lines are another: they corrode and scale internally until flow is strangled.

Set against that, a repipe is disruptive and expensive, and if you are selling in the next year the calculation is different. A plumber who tells you honestly that your copper has years left is worth more than one who quotes a repipe for a single leak.

• Repipe: multiple supply leaks in different locations within a couple of years.
• Repipe: polybutylene supply lines, which is the normal recommendation on material grounds alone.
• Repipe: galvanized steel supply lines with visibly restricted flow and rusty water.
• Repipe: a slab leak on a line that the camera or the plumber's assessment shows is deteriorating along its length, where rerouting overhead solves the whole system at once.
• Repair: a single leak in otherwise sound copper or PEX, especially where the cause was external - a nail, a freeze event, a fitting.
• Repair first: any leak where static pressure has not yet been checked. High pressure causes leaks, and fixing a regulator is far cheaper than repiping.
• Get a second opinion: any repipe recommended off the back of one leak, with no history of failures and no material-specific reason.

Repipe quotes are the least comparable numbers in residential plumbing, because the scope varies so much between them. These questions make them comparable.

1. Ask what is included and what is excluded, in writing, specifically naming drywall patching, texture matching and paint. This is where two quotes most often diverge by thousands.
2. Ask whether it is supply lines only, or drain and waste as well. These are different jobs and conflating them in conversation is common.
3. Ask what material and what routing: PEX or copper, and overhead through the attic or under the slab. Then ask why.
4. Ask how many access holes they expect to cut and where, so you know what your house will look like mid-job.
5. Ask how many days, and whether the water will be off overnight at any point.
6. Ask who pulls the permit and whether the inspection is included. Permitting is handled by your city.
7. Ask what warranty covers the pipe and the labor, and for how long, in writing on the contract rather than agreed verbally.
8. Ask whether the existing shut-off valves, pressure regulator and water heater connections are being replaced at the same time, since the labor is already on site.

Dallas Best Plumber is a free referral service, not a plumbing company. Tell us roughly when the house was built, how many bathrooms it has, how many stories, and what the leak history looks like, and we match you with a licensed, insured plumber serving your ZIP who can assess the system and quote the work. The match is free and there is no obligation.

On a job this size, two quotes are the minimum and three is better. Use the published figures above and the questions in the previous section to make sure you are comparing the same scope, because that is where repipe quotes go wrong far more often than on price.

In Texas, plumbing work must be performed by a licensed plumber, and you can verify any license yourself through the Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners public license search. Our Texas plumbing license lookup guide shows how.