How much should you charge for pressure washing?
Price from your own numbers rather than a published range. Work out your loaded cost per production hour, which is crew wages plus payroll burden plus the truck, fuel, chemicals, insurance, and overhead for that hour. Estimate how long the surface will take at the flow rate your machine actually delivers, multiply, then add your target margin. Quote the customer a flat price per job or per square foot, and keep the hourly math private. Rate cards you find online are useful only as a sanity check on the answer your own costs produce.
Nearly every underpriced pressure washing job starts the same way. Someone asks for a price on the phone, the owner remembers roughly what the last driveway went for, and a number comes out. It is usually close enough to feel right and low enough to lose money once drive time, a second chemical pass, and the trip back for a missed section are counted.
The fix is not a bigger number. It is a method that produces a number, so any estimator on your team lands within a few dollars of the same price on the same house.
Step one: find your loaded cost per production hour
A production hour is an hour of surface actually being cleaned. It is not a paid hour, because a paid hour includes loading, driving, setup, breakdown, and the conversation at the door. Most one-truck operations spend between five and six hours a day producing out of an eight hour paid day, and pricing against paid hours instead of production hours is the single most common reason a busy season ends flat.
- Crew wages for the hour, plus payroll taxes, workers comp, and any benefits
- Truck and trailer cost per hour, including payment, maintenance, and tires
- Fuel for the drive and for the machine
- Chemicals at the mix rate you really use, not the label rate
- Insurance, phone, software, licensing, and the rest of overhead divided across your realistic annual production hours
Add those together and divide by production hours rather than paid hours. That figure is the floor. Anything below it is volunteer work with equipment wear attached.
Step two: estimate the time honestly, by surface
Square footage alone does not predict time, which is why per square foot rate cards break down on real properties. What predicts time is surface type, soil level, access, and how much of the job is surface cleaner work versus wand work. Flat concrete under a surface cleaner moves several times faster than the same square footage of fence pickets or a stair set.
- Open flat concrete: fastest per square foot, and the surface where volume pricing works
- Driveways with oil staining or rust: add a treatment pass and the dwell time it needs
- House washing: mostly a chemical and rinse job, priced by elevation and access more than area
- Fences and decks: slow, detail heavy, and the surfaces most often underpriced by half
- Roofs: soft wash only, longer setup, higher risk, and priced accordingly
- Commercial flatwork at night: add mobilization, lighting, and water source uncertainty
Estimate time in the same units you record it in. If your job records already carry actual hours per surface type, you are not guessing at all after the first season, you are reading your own history.
Step three: pick the pricing shape the customer understands
Your cost math is hourly. Your quote should almost never be. Residential customers hear an hourly rate as an open-ended bill and a flat price as a decision they can make today, so convert before you present.
- Flat price per job for residential: one number, one scope, one line to approve
- Per square foot for repeatable commercial flatwork where the area is measurable and the soil is consistent
- Per unit for countable work such as fence panels, stairs, or parking spaces
- A minimum charge on every ticket, because a fifteen minute job still costs you a mobilization
- Hourly only for open scope cleanup where nobody can define the finish line
Step four: quote the exclusions, not just the price
Most pressure washing disputes are about scope, not rate. A quote that names what is included, what is extra, what the surface will realistically look like afterward, and what happens if a stain does not lift is worth more than a quote that is fifty dollars cheaper. Rust, artillery fungus, deep etching, and oil that has soaked into porous concrete should all be written down as treatment add-ons before the crew rolls.
"We stopped losing money on fences the week we started timing them separately from flatwork. Same crew, same day, completely different job."
Step five: check the price against what happened
A price is a prediction. The only way to make the next one better is to compare it to the actual hours, materials, and drive time the job consumed. Job costing turns a season of quotes into a rate table built from your own work, and it usually reveals that one or two surface types are carrying the losses for everything else.
- Estimated hours against clocked hours, per job and per surface type
- Chemical cost per job against the mix you assumed
- Drive time as a share of the paid day, by route
- Gross margin by service line, not just for the business as a whole
- Rework and callbacks, which are pricing failures disguised as quality failures
Do that for one season and the phone quote stops being a memory exercise. You will have a price per surface, an honest minimum, and the confidence to hold both when someone asks you to sharpen your pencil.
Common questions
- How much should I charge for pressure washing per square foot?
- Per square foot pricing only works on repeatable, measurable flatwork. Derive the rate rather than borrowing one: take your loaded cost per production hour, divide by the square feet per hour your surface cleaner actually produces on that soil level, then add your target margin. Fences, decks, stairs, and roofs should be priced by time or by unit, because area does not predict the labor.
- Should I charge by the hour or by the job?
- Calculate by the hour and quote by the job. Residential customers approve a flat number faster and hourly quotes invite a discussion about how fast your crew works. Hourly billing makes sense only for open scope cleanup where nobody can define the finish line.
- What should my minimum pressure washing charge be?
- At least the cost of a mobilization plus your target margin: the drive out, setup, breakdown, and drive back, valued at your loaded hourly cost. Without a minimum, small tickets quietly subsidize themselves out of your bigger jobs.
- How do I price commercial pressure washing differently?
- Commercial work adds mobilization, scheduling constraints, night or early morning windows, water source uncertainty, insurance requirements, and payment terms. Price the constraints as line items rather than folding them into the rate, and confirm water access before you quote, because hauling water changes the job entirely.
- How do I know if my prices are actually profitable?
- Compare estimated hours to clocked hours on every job and look at margin by service line rather than by month. If one surface type consistently runs over the estimate, that is where the money is going, and it is fixable with a rate change rather than more volume.