Pressure washing pricing guide: rates, per foot prices and your minimum

This pressure washing pricing guide is for the owner setting prices, not the homeowner shopping for one. Across the trade, jobs are typically priced between $150 and $500, with many residential cleanings landing around $250 to $400. That is the whole trade though, not any one job. The going rate for a house wash is different from a deck, and the rate per square foot for a roof is several times the rate for a driveway.

Below are the going rates by job, the per square foot rates by surface, and an eight step way to build your own number. Then two things no other pricing guide shows: what per foot pricing actually pays per hour, and a concrete texture split that only working operators use.

What drives the number on a quote

Six things. Surface material, because concrete, wood, vinyl and roofing all clean differently and take different chemicals. Size, because more feet means more time and more product. How bad the staining is. Access, since a two-story wall or a roof is slower and riskier than a driveway. How soon they want it. And your local labor cost. Every rate below moves around these six.

The four ways to price a job

By the square foot

You multiply the area by a rate. Working operators prefer it, because it rewards a crew that moves fast. One prices a house soft wash at $0.15 a square foot and can do a 2,500 square foot house in about an hour, and his advice on hourly rates is blunt: never give a client one.

By the hour

You charge for time on site. The US average is $52 an hour, with most states between $35 and $65. It is simple to explain and safe on a job you cannot size up. Its flaw is that it punishes speed.

Flat rate per surface

One price for a job type, built from your average time and rate for that surface. A standard driveway gets one number. Customers like knowing the total, and you keep the upside when the job runs fast.

Commercial or contract bid

Recurring accounts get a bid rather than a quote. Commercial work runs $0.10 to $0.50 a square foot or $75 to $150 an hour, above residential, because the buyer is paying for insurance, a signed contract and a crew that turns up on schedule.

Going rates by job

• House wash: $250 to $500 single story and $400 to $800 two story. Note this runs above the trade-wide $150 to $500 band, so do not quote a house off the general range.
• Roof washing: $450 to $700, the highest of the common jobs because of access and risk.
• Siding: $300 to $600. Driveways: $180 to $240. Decks: $100 to $200.
• Fences: $125 to $235 in one marketplace's data, and $150 to $400 in a contractor guide.
• Patios and walkways: $50 to $75, which is why they are usually an add-on rather than a job on their own.

Cost per square foot, by surface

Nationally, pressure washing runs $0.10 to $0.50 a square foot with an average of $0.20 to $0.40. That average hides most of the useful information, because the spread by surface is wide.

• Driveways, walkways and patios: $0.10 to $0.35 a square foot.
• Siding: $0.15 to $0.40.
• Roofs: $0.30 to $1.00.
• Decks and fences: $0.35 to $1.50 and up, the highest rates in the trade, because wood needs care and the square footage is small.
• Larger commercial concrete: $0.10 to $0.40, lower per foot because the areas are big and open.

Concrete texture, the split nobody publishes

None of the professional guides break concrete out by texture. Working operators do, and it is real money. One prices typical flat or brushed concrete at 15 to 20 cents a foot and rough, cracked or exposed aggregate concrete at 25 to 30 cents. That is 50 to 67 percent more for the harder surface. Rough concrete holds dirt in the texture and takes more passes, so the higher rate is paying for real extra time. Quote it the same as smooth and you give that time away.

What per foot pricing actually pays

The published hourly ranges read like a ceiling. They are not. Two jobs from the same operator, priced per foot and timed, show the gap.

• House soft wash, 2,500 square feet at $0.15: 2,500 times 0.15 is $375, done in about an hour.
• A driveway he says takes two hours at the most and pays $600 to $900: $300 to $450 an hour.
• Against a marketplace average of $52 an hour. The case for per foot pricing is arithmetic, not opinion.
• One caution on the first figure. He uses the house's floor area, not the actual siding area, so treat $375 an hour as an optimistic read of a good day rather than a rate you can bank.

A forum operator makes the same point from the other end. He prices concrete at $0.10 to $0.25 a foot and aims for $100 to $150 an hour of actual work, which is nearly double the marketplace average at the bottom and closer to three times it at the top.

Eight steps to build your own price

• Work out your cost per hour on site. Include the machine: a $6,000 machine over 1,200 billable hours is $5 an hour.
• Add your consumables. One high-volume operator runs about $250 a week for 110 gallons of 12 percent sodium hypochlorite plus gas, which is about $50 a day across a five-day week.
• Add insurance, and your own wage, at the hourly figure you actually want.
• Pick the surface and look up your rate per foot from the list above.
• Measure or ask for the square footage, and adjust for texture and access.
• Estimate the time honestly, from your own last few jobs and not from a video.
• Multiply out, then add margin using the formula in the next section.
• Check the result against your minimum. If it comes in under, quote the minimum or decline the job.

Your minimum charge

Published guides assert a minimum without showing where it comes from. One puts the range at $100 to $250. Working operators are more specific. One will not come out below $135, because below that a drive and a setup do not pay for themselves.

There is a cautionary tale on the same forum, and it is worth reading precisely. A newer operator was considering charging $55 an hour for cold water work. A peer warned him that once gas to get there, soap, insurance and workers' comp came out, he would probably be making under $20 an hour, and that at $20 an hour he might as well work for someone else. Note that both figures are hourly. The lesson is not that a $55 job is too cheap. It is that an hourly rate that looks fine before costs can collapse to nothing after them, which is exactly why the step above puts your own wage in the calculation.

Add margin on purpose

Once you know your cost, add margin deliberately. Contractors commonly target 20 to 40 percent, using price equals cost divided by one minus the margin. A $400 job cost at a 30 percent margin is $400 divided by 0.70, or $571. Simply adding 30 percent gives $520, and the $51 difference is your margin quietly leaking. Put your finished rate straight into the free pressure washing estimate template so every quote uses the same math, and lock the scope with the free pressure washing contract template.

The step that decides whether your price earns anything

A price only makes money on jobs you win. You work out the number, send the quote, and the customer rings back with a question before they book. If that call goes to voicemail because you are up a ladder, they ring the next name on the list.

EveryDial answers your phone and books the job when you cannot pick up, so the pricing work above turns into paid work rather than quotes nobody followed up. It backs up your office, it does not replace anyone in it. Our missed-call cost calculator puts a number on what unanswered calls cost you in a month, and the pressure washing business plan guide shows where pricing sits in a first-year projection.