How Much to Charge for Gutter Cleaning, per Foot and per House
To work out how much to charge for gutter cleaning, find the floor rate a billed hour has to bring in over your season, divide it by the feet of gutter you clean in an hour, and scale it up for each story. That is your price per linear foot. Then add the cost of driving out and setting up, which the per-foot price does not cover, and set a minimum. In the illustrative example below the floor is $50.00 a billed hour, a foot of gutter is $0.40 on one story, $0.60 on two and $0.80 on three, and a 160-foot two-story house comes to $150.
None of these are market prices. The income, costs, cleaning speed and story multipliers belong to one made-up owner-operator with a truck and a set of ladders. Time yourself on a house you know and use your own.
The gutter cleaning price formula
floor rate = (income wanted + truck + ladders + insurance + overhead)
/ billable hours in the season
price per foot = floor rate x story multiplier / feet cleaned an hour
cost of showing up = vehicle miles x cost a mile
+ (drive minutes + setup minutes) / 60 x floor rate
house price = feet x price per foot + cost of showing up,
rounded up, never below your minimum
Step 1: the hourly floor rate across a season
Gutter work in this example runs 8 months of the year, but the truck, ladders and insurance are paid for all twelve. So the year’s costs have to be earned in the working months, and only from the hours a customer pays for.
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Income wanted for the year | $40,000 |
| Truck | $6,500 |
| Ladders and equipment | $1,200 |
| Insurance | $2,800 |
| Phone, advertising, software, license | $1,500 |
| Revenue the year needs | $52,000 |
| Working weeks: 8 months x 4 | 32 |
| Hours worked: 32 weeks x 45 | 1,440 |
| Unbilled hours a week: quoting 4, driving 6, admin 2.5 | 12.5 |
| Billable hours: 32 x (45 - 12.5) | 1,040 |
| Floor rate per billed hour | $50.00 |
The fixed costs are $1,000 a calendar month, but they have to be earned at $1,500 a working month. And of the 45 hours a week in season, 12.5 go to quoting, driving and admin that no customer pays for directly.
Spread the $52,000 over every hour worked, all 1,440 of them, and the year looks like it needs $36.11 an hour. Bill at that and the 1,040 billable hours leave $14,444 unpaid. The floor is $50.00 because it divides by the hours you can bill, not the hours you work. The same split is worked through in the freelance hourly rate calculator.
Step 2: gutter cleaning prices per foot by story
The example operator cleans 125 feet of one-story gutter an hour. A second story slows that by a multiplier of 1.50: taller ladders, more moves, slower climbs. Each foot’s price is the floor rate times the multiplier, divided by the feet cleaned an hour.
| Stories | Time multiplier | Feet cleaned an hour | Price per foot | 160 feet of gutter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1.00 | 125.0 | $0.40 | $64.00 |
| 2 | 1.50 | 83.3 | $0.60 | $96.00 |
| 3 | 2.00 | 62.5 | $0.80 | $128.00 |
The example house has 160 feet of gutter on two stories: 1.92 hours at the gutters and $96.00 of labor at the per-foot price. That figure covers time on the gutters and nothing else.
Step 3: trip cost and the minimum charge
Before a foot is cleaned, the operator drives out, unloads ladders and packs up again. Those minutes are billed at the floor rate, and the miles at the vehicle’s own cost a mile.
| Line | Working | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Vehicle | 16 miles x $0.65 | $10.40 |
| Driving there and back | 30 minutes at $50.00 | $25.00 |
| Setup and pack-up | 18 minutes at $50.00 | $15.00 |
| Cost of showing up | $50.40 | |
| Gutter labor, 160 feet on 2 stories | 160 x $0.60 | $96.00 |
| House price, rounded up to $5 | $150 |
That is $0.94 a foot once the trip is in. Quote $0.60 a foot with no trip charge and the house pays $96.00, while showing up alone cost $50.40, 52% on top of the gutter labor.
The minimum charge is the cost of showing up plus the smallest job worth the drive, here 45 minutes of work at the floor rate, rounded up: $90. That minimum pays for 99 feet of one-story gutter. A small single-story ranch below that length still pays the minimum, because the drive and setup cost the same.
Downspouts, gutter guards and debris disposal
Add-ons are sold on a visit that is already paid for, so they carry no trip cost of their own.
- Downspout flushing: 8 minutes each at the floor rate, rounded up to $7 a downspout, $42 for 6.
- Gutter guards: 160 feet at the example’s install speed is 4 hours, $200 of labor, plus $280 of material marked up 25%. Installed, $550, or $3.44 a foot.
- Debris haul-away: 4 bags for this house. Bags, a share of the disposal fee per load and the minutes spent handling them cost $20.53, so haul-away is a $25 line. A customer who keeps the debris for their own yard waste saves that, and so do you.
Price add-ons the same way as the cleaning: your minutes at the floor rate plus what the materials cost you. The pressure washing pricing post works add-on lines in the same spirit.
The insight: a booked plan beats the one-off price
The gutter labor is only part of what a house costs. The rest is the trip, and the trip is what a fall and spring maintenance plan changes. A plan customer is booked ahead, so the visit sits on a route between neighbors and carries a small travel figure, here $10, instead of the $35.40 a one-off drive costs.
The example plan gives 10% off each visit: $135 instead of $150.
| Line | One-off visit | Plan visit |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $150.00 | $135.00 |
| Time on site, 2.22 hours at $50.00 | $111.00 | $111.00 |
| Travel | $35.40 | $10.00 |
| Above your floor, per visit | $3.60 | $14.00 |
| Above your floor, per year | $5.40 | $28.00 |
The cheaper plan visit earns $14.00 above the floor against $3.60 for the full-price one-off, because the routing saves more than the discount gives away. The yearly row assumes a one-off customer books the second cleaning 50% of the time; the plan customer is worth $22.60 more a year. The discount could reach 16.9% before a plan visit earned less than a one-off. That depends entirely on the route travel figure: if your plan customers are spread out, set it equal to the one-off travel and the advantage disappears.
How full can a route day get?
The example route day is 9 hours, less loading and unloading the truck. Each house takes 72 minutes on site with a helper plus 12 minutes to the next one: 6 houses a day. At the $150 ticket plus $20 of add-ons, they bring in $1,020. The helper at $22 an hour, the operator’s own day at the floor rate, the truck miles and the dump fees cost $699, so the day makes $321 above the floor. It covers itself from house 5. A house that runs long pushes the last one off the day, which is the case for timing your own jobs before you fill a route. Window cleaners face the same route arithmetic in window cleaning pricing.
How these were calculated
The floor rate is income wanted plus truck, ladders, insurance and overhead, divided by working weeks x (hours worked a week - unbilled hours a week). Price per foot is the floor rate x the story multiplier / feet cleaned an hour. The cost of showing up is miles x vehicle cost a mile + driving and setup minutes / 60 x the floor rate; the house price is feet x price per foot + that cost, rounded up to the next $5 and never below the minimum. The plan compares price - time on site - travel per visit, and the route day fits whole houses into the working minutes. Every figure was computed twice, once by the code behind the product below and once by an independent program that adds the season up week by week and fills the route day house by house, and the two agree to the cent. All inputs are illustrative, not market rates or measured cleaning speeds. None of this is financial, legal, tax or insurance advice.
To run this on your own truck, season and cleaning speed, the pack below has the same seven calculators linked together, so a change to your floor rate flows through every price.