Bailey Plumbing & Heating

Forty-nine permits tell you more about Bailey Plumbing & Heating than its review page ever will. The permit trail runs deep and wide across the Merrimack Valley and beyond — water heaters and mop sinks in Methuen, a third-floor bathroom in Belmont, gas piping for standby generators in Merrimac and Groveland, furnaces and boilers in Lowell and Haverhill. This is a working plumbing-and-gas shop, not a remodeling outfit. The company runs out of a Pelham, New Hampshire headquarters with a local address on Boxford Road in Haverhill, and BuildZoom puts its score at 96 — the 80th percentile among Massachusetts contractors, a number driven almost entirely by that permit volume. What the public record does not give you is customer voice. A single five-star rating sits on the BuildZoom profile, and it is more than a decade old. There is nothing recent from a homeowner about scheduling, cleanup, pricing, or how the crew handles a job that goes sideways. The licensing picture is worth a careful look before you call. BuildZoom lists a Massachusetts Plumbing Business registration (#5239) and a Plumbing Corporation registration (#3291) — both marked as not verified by the directory, and the second carries a 2016 expiration date. Two City of Newton licenses under #20696, one Heater Contractor and one Plumbing Contractor, are listed as inactive and at one point cancelled. None of that is a finding against the company, but it is a mismatched set of records, and only the state e-licensing board can tell you which registration is current today. If you need gas piping for a generator, a boiler or furnace swap, or a full bathroom rough-in, this is the kind of shop that does that work week in and week out. Before booking, pull the current license status yourself from the Commonwealth's e-licensing board, confirm which entity is doing your work given the New Hampshire headquarters, and ask for two or three recent local references — the public record simply does not supply them.