Pressure washing has a pricing problem: the equipment is cheap enough that anyone can start, and many of those new operators charge whatever gets them work. If you set your prices by looking at the lowest flyer in town, you will be busy and broke. The better approach is to work out what an hour of your crew actually costs, set rates per surface that clear that cost with a margin, add a minimum, and check your real numbers against your guesses every season. This post walks through that math with illustrative numbers, plus how to handle add-ons, travel and bundles with your lawn work.
Start With What an Hour Costs You
Before you set a square-foot rate, know your cost per hour of a working rig. Add up labor (wages plus payroll taxes and workers' comp), fuel, chemical, machine and surface cleaner wear and repairs, insurance, the truck and trailer, and a share of your office and marketing. Divide by the hours the rig actually works on customer jobs, not the hours it exists.
As an illustrative example, say a two-person wash crew costs $45 an hour in labor and overhead adds another $25 an hour, so $70 an hour all in. If you want a healthy margin, you might target $130 to $150 an hour of revenue while the crew is working. Those numbers are not your numbers; work out your own.
Then account for time that does not get billed: driving between jobs, setup and teardown, waiting on a customer, refilling water. If a crew only spends six of its eight hours actually washing, your per-hour target on site has to be higher to cover the other two.
Square-Foot Rates by Surface
Once you know your hourly target and your production rate, you can turn it into a square-foot rate. If a crew cleans about 800 square feet of typical driveway an hour, and you want $140 an hour, the math gives roughly 17 to 18 cents a square foot before travel and setup.
Different surfaces need different rates, because they clean at different speeds. Plain concrete with a surface cleaner is the fastest. Pavers go slower and may need joint sand replaced. Wood decks are slow, careful wand work. Siding is often priced per house or by size bracket rather than per foot. Roofs are priced by size with adjustments for pitch.
Build each rate into your service catalog, so every estimate starts from the same number no matter who writes it. Our post on measuring for a wash quote covers how to get the square footage right, which matters as much as the rate.
Review the rates yearly. If your chemical or labor cost went up, your rates have to follow.
Set a Minimum Charge
Small jobs still carry the drive, the setup and the cleanup. A 150 square foot patio at 18 cents is $27, which does not cover the trip. Set a minimum ticket that covers at least the first hour or so of a crew's time, including the drive.
Many companies set one minimum for customers inside their main service area and a higher one outside it. Others set a minimum and then encourage small jobs to add something: "Our minimum is $150; for that we can do your patio and front walk."
A minimum also protects you from "can you just do this one spot" calls that eat a whole morning. Tell people the minimum up front, put it on the estimate, and stick to it unless you are already on their street for another job that day.
Price Add-Ons and Extras Separately
The base job is only part of the ticket. Add-ons often make the difference between a decent job and a good one, and they are easy to sell when they are listed with a price.
Common add-ons include oil and rust stain treatment (priced separately and with no guarantee), gutter face brightening, fences, trash cans, mailbox and lamppost, window rinsing, and sealing after a paver or concrete clean. Each has its own time and material cost; price it on its own line.
Do not give add-ons away to win the job. If you throw in the trash cans for free once, the customer expects it next year. Instead, offer a modest bundle price: house wash plus driveway for a little less than the two separately. The customer sees a deal, and you get two services on one trip, which is where the real savings are.
Upsell alerts after a job can bring add-ons back later: a fall message to driveway customers about sealing, or a spring note to house wash customers about the fence.
Bundles With Lawn Service
If you already mow or treat a customer's lawn, you have a pricing advantage. You are already in the neighborhood every week, which cuts your travel cost on wash jobs there. You can pass some of that savings on and still make more per hour than on a cold job across town.
A simple approach is a lawn customer rate: a set discount on washing for anyone on a recurring lawn program. Another is to include a spring driveway cleaning in a season lawn package, prepaid. Either way, keep the wash work priced as its own line so you can see what it earns.
Be careful not to discount so much that washing becomes a loss leader. The point of the bundle is lower cost for you, not lower margin. Compare actual job costs on bundled wash jobs with standalone ones before you set the discount.
Check Your Real Numbers Every Season
Pricing is a guess until you compare it with what jobs actually cost. Job costing does that: labor from crew clock-in times multiplied by each worker's pay rate, materials used, planned hours against actual, and profit and margin on each job.
Run it after your first month of the season. You will likely find that some job types are much better than you thought and some are worse. Two-story house washes that were quoted at three hours and take four and a half. Driveways in one neighborhood that run fast because the concrete is newer. Commercial accounts that eat travel time.
Adjust the catalog rates where the numbers say to. The reporting and analytics features show the job costing report, but the habit matters more than the tool: price from cost, check what actually happened, and change the rate when reality disagrees with your estimate.
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