Plumbing

What the work is

Plumbing is the water, gas and drainage network inside the building: the pipework that brings drinking water to every tap, the pipework that carries gas to the water heater and the kitchen, and the pipework that takes away waste water and rainwater. It is installing it from scratch, repairing it when it fails and maintaining it over a working life counted in decades, in work that almost always runs inside walls and ceilings somebody else closed up.

The market in Portugal

In Portugal there are 4,576 plumbing installation firms and 12,694 people working in them, with a turnover of €804 million in 2024 (INE, Sistema de Contas Integradas das Empresas). It is the most fragmented of the building's technical activities: 95% of firms have fewer than ten people on the payroll and together those firms account for almost half of the whole sector's turnover. And there is one figure that sums up the rest: there is not a single plumbing company in Portugal with two hundred and fifty people or more. The fifteen largest, each with fifty people or more, do not reach a fifth of the market. This is a trade of local firms, and it remains one.

4,576 firms in the installation of plumbing systems, CAE Rev.3 43221, a subclass INE publishes separately from air conditioning and ventilation. Source: INE, Sistema de Contas Integradas das Empresas, 2024.

12,694 people employed in that same activity. Source: INE, Sistema de Contas Integradas das Empresas, 2024.

95.3% of firms have fewer than ten people on the payroll and account for 46.6% of the sector's turnover; no firm in the activity has two hundred and fifty people or more. Calculated from INE, Sistema de Contas Integradas das Empresas, 2024.

Public statistics. Each figure carries its source and year.

Why it recurs

Plumbing repeats for different reasons from the other trades. On gas, the obligation is a legal one: gas installations are inspected before they enter service and are inspected again over their life, under the regime of the Direção-Geral de Energia e Geologia, and the work may only be done by a registered installation company. On water networks, there are buildings subject to the legionella prevention regime, which requires periodic sampling and an audit. And beyond that the work repeats for physical reasons, not legal ones: condominiums and commercial clients keep maintenance contracts because a burst pipe in a ceiling costs far more than the contract does, and because a plumbing network installed thirty years ago does not reach the end of its life all at once, it gets there piece by piece. This is the trade where the client calls first the person who has already been there.

What the law requires

On gas, the law is explicit and it is the hardest of the three activities. No company may carry out, alter or maintain a gas installation without being registered with the Direção-Geral de Energia e Geologia as an installation company, and the registration distinguishes those who work on networks and service lines from those who work on appliances, with some companies authorised for both. The work has to be signed off by a qualified gas technician, and the installation is inspected before it enters service and inspected again during operation. The DGEG publishes the national list: in the last published edition, with data as at July 2024, 1,102 gas installation companies were registered across the country, of which 351 authorised for networks only, 193 for appliances only and 558 for both. It is worth not confusing this registration with the works licence: the alvará allows the works to be carried out, the DGEG registration is what authorises touching the gas.

On the water and drainage side, the framework is a different one. Carrying out works still requires a contractor's licence from IMPIC, the alvará, in the subcategory for pipework and ducting in buildings, and connection to the public networks follows the rules of each municipality's water utility, which are not the same across the country. The quality of water for human consumption has a regime of its own, overseen by ERSAR, and buildings covered by the legionella prevention regime carry periodic sampling and audit obligations. And if the network is for fire fighting, with hose reels or sprinklers, the fire safety regime for buildings comes in, with registration of the company with the Autoridade Nacional de Emergência e Proteção Civil and a named responsible technician. It is a trade with less maintenance legislation than HVAC or electrical work, but with one area, gas, where the requirement is absolute.

Where it is going

Half of Portugal's residential buildings were built before 1981 (INE, Censos 2021). The water and drainage networks in those buildings are reaching the end of their working life at the same time, pipe by pipe: leaks that show up in a neighbour's ceiling, risers that no longer hold pressure, materials nobody would use today. It is work that cannot be put off and cannot be done from outside, because it runs inside the building. Every serious refurbishment of an old building in Portugal goes, sooner or later, through the plumber.

50.2% of Portugal's residential buildings were built before 1981, 1,794,306 out of a total of 3,573,416. Source: INE, Censos 2021.

What is changing is the gas side. Heat pumps and electric water heating are replacing water heaters and boilers, and the State is funding that switch explicitly: the E-Lar programme, created to swap gas equipment for electric, exhausted its first phase in six days, with around forty thousand applications, and opened a second with sixty million euros. In 2024, 105,000 heat pumps were installed in Portugal (EHPA, Market Report 2025). For a plumbing company this is not the end of anything: it is the substitution of one kind of work for another, with hot water installation still theirs and the gas network becoming maintenance and decommissioning work. Alongside this, the refurbishment programmes are funding work in old buildings that is, in good part, plumbing work. What is short everywhere is people: the training path for a plumber runs to eight hundred and fifty hours of core technical training, and there is no shortcut.

Why it interests us

It interests us because every building has plumbing and every building always will. It interests us because it is the most fragmented of the building trades in Portugal: 95% of firms have fewer than ten people and there is not a single one with two hundred and fifty people or more (INE, 2024). There is no large group here buying everything up; there are hundreds of local firms with clients who have been calling them for twenty years. It interests us because on gas there is a real regulatory barrier, which separates those who are registered from those who are not. And it interests us because revenue comes from contracts with condominiums and commercial clients and from work that reappears by itself in a stock of buildings forty and fifty years old. These are companies to buy and keep, not to tidy up and pass on.

What we look for in a company, in numbers: what we look for.