NSW Plumbers

• Business listings: public Google Maps listings for plumbing services in NSW, collected by Konnex through a business-listing data service in a regular (weekly from 25 Oct 2026) sweep. We exclude listings outside NSW, plumbing supply stores and associations, businesses whose category isn’t plumbing, renovators that don’t offer plumbing, and duplicate listings with the same phone number and address. We then group listings into distinct businesses, so a business with several listings counts once.
• Australian Business Register (ABR): we link a listing to an ABN only when that ABN is active on the register and matches the listing by name, or when the business declares the ABN on its own website. ABN status for Verified and ABN-confirmed businesses was last checked against the ABR on 21 Oct 2026.
• NSW plumbing licences: the NSW Fair Trading contractor licence extract (data.nsw.gov.au, CC BY), dated 4 Dec 2023, plus live licence checks against the NSW Government register. A licence counts only when it belongs to the same legal entity as the business.
• Business websites: the business’s own website (home page plus up to four other pages), checked for a displayed ABN or licence number, and for the suburbs it says it serves.

Figures carry an as-at date, and evidence classes are shown on the tier figures. The headline total is Inferred from listings grouped into businesses. The classes:

Verified

A claim we have checked against an official register (the ABR, the NSW licence register).

Observed

Recorded as a source shows it (a public listing, a business’s own website, a register record or a provider report), without further checking.

Inferred

An estimate from evidence, labelled as an estimate; a range is shown where one can be calculated.

Each business also sits in one supply tier:

Verified

One active ABN and a current licence held by that same business.

ABN-confirmed

One active ABN, but no current licence confirmed for that business yet.

Listed only

A public listing; neither of the above is confirmed yet.

Observed business (the cohort)

A distinct business that passed our checks for trade (plumbing, judged from its Maps category and our exclusion rules), location (NSW) and duplicates. Includes all three supply tiers. A blind review estimates about 93% are plumbing businesses (see below).

In a stratified blind review of 120 cohort businesses against our trade rules (checked 18 Oct on the 17 Oct cohort), 111 were judged to be plumbing businesses. Weighted to the tier mix, the estimate is 92.6%, and the lower end of its 95% interval is 86.0% (Inferred estimate). The review sampled each supply tier separately and checked each business against our trade rules without knowing its tier, labelled by an AI review agent and scored by our QA process; it does not test whether a business is trading now.

Konnex measures how often people search Google for plumbing services, using Google Ads search-volume estimates retrieved through a search-data service. Each figure is the provider-reported number of monthly searches for one phrase (for example “blocked drain”) by people in a Google-defined area. Search demand is measured for the areas Google defines for ad targeting: NSW as a whole, Google ‘City’ areas (which range from small towns to all of Greater Sydney), and a few Google ‘City Region’ areas (such as the Northern Beaches). These are Google’s own areas, not council or suburb boundaries; each list shows each area’s Google type. Google rounds these estimates and groups close variants together, so they are approximate, and we never add phrases together into a single total. A reported 0 is not proof of zero demand; “no measurable volume” means Google returned no figure. Some suburbs cannot be measured because Google does not report at postcode level. Search volume is not a count of jobs, enquiries or customers.

The phrases come from a versioned, reviewed list (plumber-nsw-v2.2: 213 candidate phrases, 186 admitted); commercial and non-plumbing phrases are excluded. Strata (apartment and unit building) plumbing is covered by a small number of phrases. Data covers Sep 2025 to Aug 2026, retrieved 2 Oct 2026. Evidence class: Observed (provider-reported estimate).

• No headcount of individual plumbers. We count businesses and licences, not people.
• Listings are never counted as businesses, and the four universe figures are never added together.
• “First observed” or “no longer observed” doesn’t mean a business opened or closed; it means it appeared in, or dropped out of, the listings we collect.
• No claims about capacity, wait times or shortages, by suburb or anywhere else.
• No business or person names.

Each figure shows its own as-at date. The licence extract carries its own, older date. When we change how a figure is defined, the change log records it as a definition change, not a market movement.