“It’s unfortunate that sometimes storing passwords as plain text is a contractual requirement from the client because they don’t want to be forced to create a new one when they forget their original password. Sad world we live in.”
You still should not be storing in plaintext. You should be storing it using reversible encryption. That way if someone gets a backup copy of your database, as happened with Reddit, they still will not have will not have the encryption key you used.