Most plumbers charge something for turning up, and the amount depends almost entirely on how soon you want them. All the figures below are cost-guide rates excluding VAT.
What a call-out costs
A booked, non-urgent visit sits at around £60 on Checkatrade's scheduled-visit figure. A same-day or emergency visit runs £110 to £180. Checkatrade puts UK emergency call-outs at £100 to £120 in one guide and an additional emergency call-out on a drain job at £180 in another. Out of hours, the hourly rate on top of it can double as well.
Urgency, not distance, is what moves this number. The same plumber attending the same address costs roughly three times as much on a Sunday evening as on a Thursday morning that you booked last week.
Why "the average call-out fee is £110" is not a fact
That figure gets quoted everywhere, including by the publisher it comes from, and it does not survive contact with the same publisher's other pages.
Checkatrade's plumbing guide gives £110 as the average call-out. Checkatrade's drain-unblocking guide gives £60 for a scheduled visit and £180 for an emergency one. Those three numbers cannot be averaged into a single meaningful figure, because they are pricing different levels of urgency rather than different plumbers.
So the honest version is a split rather than an average: around £60 booked, £110 to £180 same-day or emergency, more again outside working hours. A page giving you one flat number has picked whichever of the three it read first.
Is the first hour included?
Nobody authoritative says. This is the single most consequential gap in the published figures, and it is worth being straight about.
The sources that address it split both ways. MyBuilder says most professionals have a minimum charge, usually the cost of an hour's work. Checkatrade's own call-out guide hedges, saying there may be a minimum one-hour charge for any emergency call-out. Aggregator sites assert both that call-outs typically include the first hour and that some roll it in while others add it on top, with no methodology behind either claim.
There is no norm to report, which means the difference between a £60 call-out that covers an hour and a £60 call-out plus £65 for the hour is entirely down to who you ring. That is a real £65 sitting on one phone call.
What the minimum realistically comes to
Combining the two, the best-supported figure for turning up and doing something small is £60 to £120 for the first hour including the call-out. Treat that as a bracket rather than a price. It is assembled from Checkatrade's £60 scheduled call-out at the bottom and its £110 average at the top, and it carries the uncertainty of both.
When the fee gets waived or absorbed
Some plumbers fold the call-out into the job price once you go ahead, which is why a quoted job price and a call-out plus hourly rate are not comparable until you know which you are being offered. A £150 fixed price to replace a tap and "£60 call-out plus £70 an hour" can land in the same place or £60 apart, depending on the answer.
The four questions worth asking on the phone
Ask what the call-out charge is, whether it includes any labour, what the hourly rate is after that, and whether the figures include VAT. Ask them before you describe the problem rather than after. A plumber pricing the job rather than the visit will tell you so, and that is a better answer than any of the four.
If it is not an emergency, say so and book it. Urgency is the most expensive thing on this page and it is often the one thing a homeowner controls.
The call-out is the one line a homeowner can settle in a phone call.