How Much to Charge for Dryer Vent Cleaning: Price per Job, Worked

October 27, 2026 · Pricing a service business

How much to charge for dryer vent cleaning comes from your own numbers: an hourly floor that pays your year, your own minutes on site for the vent in front of you, the consumables and vehicle miles the job uses, and a margin on top. In the illustrative example below, the floor is $50.00 a billed hour, a 20-foot wall-exit vent prices at $79.75, a 36-foot roof-exit vent at $129.75, and each extra 10 feet of run adds $7.81.

None of these figures are what dryer vent cleaning costs in your area or what companies charge for it. Every time, length, mileage and cost belongs to one made-up operator and is there to be replaced with your own records. Nothing here is fire-safety or code guidance, and nothing here says how often a vent should be cleaned; for any part you fit, follow the manufacturer’s instructions.

The dryer vent cleaning cost formula

floor rate    = (pay + overhead) / hours billed on site a year
minutes       = setup + vent length / 10 x minutes per 10 feet
                (+ roof access minutes on a roof exit)
job cost      = minutes / 60 x floor + consumables
                + miles x cost per mile
job price     = job cost / (1 - margin)

That is the whole dryer vent cleaning cost calculator. The rest of this post works it through and then checks it against a year.

Step 1: your floor rate per billed hour

The example operator wants $48,000 a year before income tax and carries $9,600 of overhead (insurance, phone, software, advertising; vehicle running cost is charged per job below, and equipment is paid back from profit). The week is 40 hours of everything, driving, quoting and admin included, for 48 weeks: 1,920 hours. Only 60% of them are spent on site at a job, so 1,152 hours a year are billed.

$57,600 over 1,152 billed hours is $50.00 per billed hour. Spread over every hour worked it would be $30.00, but the hours in the van and at the desk are paid by the hours on site, so the floor is set per billed hour.

Step 2: price per job, by length and access

The operator’s own timing is 45 minutes per job for setup, moving the dryer out and cleanup, plus 7.5 minutes for every 10 feet of vent run. A roof exit adds 36 minutes for the ladder, roof setup and cap work. Each job uses $6.00 of consumables (foil tape, clamps, covers) and carries 12 miles at the operator’s own $0.65 a mile, a share of the day’s round trip that includes the drive home.

The roof exit costs more because of minutes, not materials: longer run, plus roof access. Its price is 62.7% above the wall exit. Driving time is not a line here, because the floor in step 1 already pays it through the on-site share; charging it again per job would count it twice.

With 25% of jobs on the roof, a booked job averages 72 minutes on site and $92.25 in price, of which $18.45 is margin on top of the floor.

Step 3: how many jobs fit in a day

The working day is 8 hours. Take out 0.75 hours for admin and quoting, and allow 12 minutes of driving per job. Adding jobs one at a time until the next will not fit, 5 jobs fit: 6 hours on site, 1 hour driving and 0.25 hours spare. That full day is 75% on site, above the 60% step 1 assumed, and it covers 60 miles home to home and $461.25 of sales.

The insight: a year is not all full days

It is tempting to stop there: a full day bills more of its hours than the floor assumed, so the floor looks safe. The year says otherwise. The example fills 70% of its 240 working days and counts the rest as earning nothing, so the year is 168 full days and 840 jobs. That is 1,008 hours on site, against the 1,152 the floor was built on: only 52.5% of the hours worked, not 60%.

The floor time alone brings in $50,400.00, $7,200.00 short of the $57,600 that pay and overhead need. What closes the gap is the 20% margin: $15,498.00 across the year, which covers the $7,200.00 and leaves $8,298.00 above the $48,000 target, for $56,298.00 before income tax. Set aside 25% for tax and $42,223.50 is kept.

So the margin in step 2 is not extra pay. At these bookings it is what pays for the days that do not fill. The operator needs 61.2% of days full just to reach the target, so if bookings drop below that, the year falls short even though every job was priced above the floor. Compare the share of days you actually fill, from your calendar, with the share your floor assumes, before you trust either.

Apartment buildings and yearly plans

A building of 10 units has one 30-minute setup for the building instead of 450 minutes of setups for the same units booked one by one, and one trip. At 39 minutes per unit’s vent (more than the 15 minutes of vent work in the wall-exit job, so the saving is the setups and the trip, not faster cleaning), the building takes 7.00 hours and prices at $522.25, $52.23 a unit, 34.5% under the wall-exit price. It earns $104.45 of margin, against $159.50 if the same units were separate wall-exit jobs.

A yearly plan of 2 wall-exit visits at a 10% discount is $143.55. Its profit for the year is $15.95, the same as one one-off wall-exit job at $15.95, because the discount takes half of each visit’s margin. The visit count is a plan design, not a cleaning interval. A plan pays where its visits are ones you would not otherwise have booked.

How these were calculated

The floor is (pay + overhead) / (weeks x hours a week x on-site share). Minutes on site are setup + length / 10 x minutes per 10 feet, plus roof access on a roof exit. Job cost is minutes / 60 x floor + consumables + miles x cost per mile, and price is cost / (1 - margin). Jobs per day are counted in whole jobs that fit after admin, each with its drive. The year is full days x jobs per day, with sales less consumables, vehicle and overhead giving income before tax. A building is one setup plus minutes per unit, with consumables per unit and one trip. Figures are carried from step to step as the spreadsheet shows them, to the cent. Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program that adds the vent run in 10-foot steps, fills the day one job at a time and builds the year day by day, and the two agree. All inputs are illustrative, not measured times or market prices. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.

The gutter cleaning pricing post prices another ladder job the same way, and the markup vs margin chart converts a margin to the markup it needs.

To run this on your own timings, miles and year, the pack below has eight linked calculators, including equipment payback and add-on parts.