How Much to Charge for Pressure Washing, Per Square Foot, Worked Out
Charge per square foot, but not one rate for everything. Work out the hourly rate your year needs, add what the machine costs to run per hour, divide by how many square feet an hour you clean on that surface, and add your chemical cost per square foot. Then make sure the job is big enough to pay for the drive. In the illustrative example below, that gives $0.106 a square foot for a driveway, $0.153 for house siding and $0.228 for a roof - the roof needs about 2.2 times the driveway rate, for the same hourly pay.
Those figures are not market prices, and nothing here tells you what your area pays. They are what one set of made-up costs and speeds requires. Your price comes from your own numbers, run through the same steps.
The formula
For a job of a given size on a given surface:
Job price = (hourly floor + running cost per hour) x (wash hours + travel and setup hours) + chemical cost per sq ft x square feet
where wash hours = square feet / square feet per hour. Divide the job price by the square footage to get your price per square foot.
Three inputs do most of the work:
- Your hourly floor - the rate below which your year does not add up.
- Your production rate on this surface - square feet an hour. This is the one that changes the answer most between jobs.
- Unbilled time per job - driving and setting up, which clean nothing.
Step 1: the hourly floor
Illustrative inputs: you want to keep $52,000 a year after tax, the business has $11,300 of annual overhead, and tax on profit is a placeholder 25%. You work 30 weeks of the year (the rest is off season), 50 hours a week, and 70% of those hours are actually spent washing - the rest is quoting, driving, coiling hose and loading the van.
- Revenue needed: $52,000 / (1 - 25%) + $11,300 = $80,633
- Billable hours: 30 x 50 x 70% = 1,050
- Hourly floor: $80,633 / 1,050 = $76.79
On top of that, the machine costs money every hour it runs. Here that is $4.50 of fuel and $3.25 of pump, hose and surface-cleaner wear, so $7.75 an hour, plus $0.012 a square foot of detergent and water. Each job also carries 50 minutes of driving and setup.
Step 2: what one price pays on different surfaces
Here is a 1,500 square foot job priced at a flat $0.18 a square foot, on each surface. The revenue is the same every time. The time is not.
| Surface | Sq ft per hour | Hours on the job | Net for the job | Net per hour |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Driveway / flatwork | 1,800 | 1.67 | $239.08 | $143.45 |
| Patio and walkway | 1,400 | 1.90 | $237.24 | $124.55 |
| House siding (soft wash) | 900 | 2.50 | $232.62 | $93.05 |
| Deck (wood, low pressure) | 600 | 3.33 | $226.17 | $67.85 |
| Roof (soft wash) | 500 | 3.83 | $222.29 | $57.99 |
The same $0.18 pays $143.45 an hour on a driveway and $57.99 on a roof - 2.5 times as much - because a surface cleaner on flat concrete covers 1,800 square feet an hour in this example, and a soft wash on a roof covers 500. Against a $76.79 floor, the driveway is comfortable, house siding at $93.05 clears it, and 2 of the five surfaces fall below it.
A flat per-square-foot rate card quietly overcharges for fast work and undercharges for slow work. If most of your calendar is roofs and decks, a rate that feels fine on driveways is losing you money by the hour.
Step 3: the price each surface needs
Run the formula backwards: what does each 1,500 square foot job have to cost so that it pays exactly $76.79 an hour after running costs?
| Surface | Price for the job | Per square foot |
|---|---|---|
| Driveway / flatwork | $158.91 | $0.106 |
| Patio and walkway | $179.04 | $0.119 |
| House siding (soft wash) | $229.36 | $0.153 |
| Deck (wood, low pressure) | $299.81 | $0.200 |
| Roof (soft wash) | $342.08 | $0.228 |
That is the answer to “pressure washing price per square foot” for this example: not one number, but one per surface.
How much to charge for pressure washing a driveway
Size matters as much as surface, because the drive and setup cost the same whether the driveway is small or large. Before any water comes out, every job in this example has already cost $70.45 - 50 minutes at $84.54 an hour (the floor plus running cost).
| Job | Square feet | Price for the job | Per square foot |
|---|---|---|---|
| Driveway | 400 | $94.04 | $0.235 |
| Driveway | 600 | $105.83 | $0.176 |
| Driveway | 1,000 | $129.42 | $0.129 |
| Driveway | 1,500 | $158.91 | $0.106 |
| Driveway | 3,000 | $247.36 | $0.082 |
| House siding | 1,500 | $229.36 | $0.153 |
| House siding | 2,500 | $335.30 | $0.134 |
| House siding | 3,500 | $441.23 | $0.126 |
A 400 square foot driveway needs $0.235 a square foot to pay the floor. A 3,000 square foot one needs only $0.082. Per square foot, small jobs have to cost more - or carry a minimum charge.
At a flat $0.18, the driveway only reaches the floor once it is about 582 square feet. Below that, the honest fix is a minimum charge of at least the cost of showing up, $70.45 here, plus the wash time.
The roof is worse: at $0.18 it never reaches the floor, at any size. Just the washing, before any travel, costs $0.181 a square foot in this example, which is already more than the price. A bigger roof only loses more.
How much to charge for pressure washing a house
The house siding rows above answer this one: $229.36 for 1,500 square feet of siding, $335.30 for 2,500 and $441.23 for 3,500, at the 900 square feet an hour assumed here. Measure the wall area, not the floor area of the house - siding is what you are actually cleaning - and time yourself on a few houses before you trust the production rate.
The rain days are already in your price
The floor above assumed all 30 working weeks were workable. Weather does not cooperate, and the overhead, the van payment and your rent do not pause for it.
Take the yearly revenue needed, $80,633, and spread it over a season of 150 scheduled days (30 weeks, 5 days a week) at a blended 4,000 square feet a day:
| Share of days lost to weather | Days you actually work | Price per square foot needed |
|---|---|---|
| 0% | 150 | $0.1344 |
| 10% | 135 | $0.1493 |
| 20% | 120 | $0.1680 |
| 30% | 105 | $0.1920 |
| 40% | 90 | $0.2240 |
Lose 30% of your days to weather and the price you need per square foot goes from $0.1344 to $0.1920 - 43% higher. In hourly terms, the $76.79 floor becomes $109.71. That is not a price rise. It is the price you always needed, finally counted. If you priced from a dry-weather calendar, every wet week is an unpaid one.
Use your own history: count how many scheduled days you lost last season and put that share into the calculation.
How these were calculated
The hourly floor is revenue needed (take-home divided by one minus the tax rate, plus overhead) divided by billable hours (working weeks x hours a week x billable share). A job’s net is its revenue minus chemicals per square foot and running cost per hour over wash time plus 50 minutes of drive and setup; net per hour divides that by the same total hours. The weather table divides yearly revenue needed by the square feet you can clean on the days that remain. Every figure was computed twice, by the code behind the product and by an independent implementation, and the two agree. All inputs - income, overhead, production rates, costs, the 25% tax figure - are illustrative, not typical or market figures. None of this is financial, legal or tax advice.
If you want to run this on your own costs, speeds and rain history, the kit below lays out the same arithmetic with blank worksheets, production rates per surface and scripts for quoting, rain cancellations and damage conversations.