How Much to Charge for Pressure Washing

Short answer: How much to charge for pressure washing starts with the surface, not the hour. Flatwork like driveways and patios prices per square foot; siding and roofs price per square foot of soft-wash area. Measure the area, divide by your machine’s real production rate — a 4 GPM unit pulling a 16-inch surface cleaner typically runs 700 to 900 square feet an hour on cold water — add chemical cost, add the 30 to 45 minutes of setup and teardown you never bill, then apply your own margin over a minimum charge.

Nobody can hand you a per-square-foot number that works, because your number is built out of your GPM, your injector draw, your chlorine price and your drive time. What follows is that build, run end to end. Getting the money in afterward is a separate job, covered in how to invoice after pressure washing, and the habits that keep slow payers from becoming free work are in how to get clients to pay.

How much should I charge for pressure washing?

Six steps, in this order:

1. Pick the unit for that surface — square foot, linear foot, or per item.
2. Measure it and divide by your timed production rate to get wash hours.
3. Add setup, teardown and travel to get gate-to-gate hours.
4. Cost the chemical from your dilution and your injector draw.
5. Multiply hours by loaded labor plus overhead per hour.
6. Divide by one minus your margin, and never go below your minimum charge.

Skip step three and you will price the trigger time instead of the job, which is the specific way pressure washers go broke while staying busy.

Which unit do I price each surface in?

One rate across the whole property is how you lose money on the hard parts. Each surface has its own unit and its own process.

Surface	Unit	What you measure	The trap
Driveway, patio, sidewalk	per sq ft	length × width, walks separately	Edges and trim work are wand time, not surface-cleaner time
Vinyl or fiber cement siding	per sq ft of wall	perimeter × wall height	Soft wash only; second story adds reach gear
Asphalt shingle roof	per sq ft of roof	footprint × pitch factor	Chemical job, not a pressure job
Wood deck	per sq ft, rails by linear ft	deck area, then rail LF	Two chemicals and two passes, not one
Fence	per linear ft, per side	LF × sides	Both sides is two jobs, price it that way
Gutter faces	per linear ft	run length	Oxidation stripes need a separate cleaner and a brush
Brick, stone, stucco	per sq ft, hand priced	area plus a test spot	Pressure eats mortar joints; go low and go slow

Roofs and siding are where the money and the liability both sit. High pressure on shingles strips granules, and on vinyl it drives water behind the panels and into the sheathing. Those get a soft wash — chemistry and dwell time, applied at garden-hose pressure — and they get priced for the dwell and the rinse, not for the wand.

How fast does my machine actually clean?

Production rate is the number that converts square feet into hours, and it comes from flow, not pressure. GPM does the cleaning; PSI just gets it there. A 4 GPM machine runs a 16- to 20-inch surface cleaner. Double the flow and you can pull a 28-inch bar, and the same driveway comes in near half the time.

Time your own work for two weeks and build a table like this. These are starting points, not your numbers.

Setup	Condition	Example rate
4 GPM, 16” surface cleaner, cold	light soiling	700–900 sq ft/hr
4 GPM, 16” surface cleaner, cold	pre-treated, heavy organic	500–700 sq ft/hr
4 GPM + hot water	light to moderate	900–1,100 sq ft/hr
8 GPM, 28” surface cleaner, cold	light to moderate	1,400–1,800 sq ft/hr
Wand only, no surface cleaner	any	200–350 sq ft/hr

That last row is why a surface cleaner pays for itself in a month, and why “just wand it” on a 1,000 square foot driveway turns a two-hour job into a five-hour one.

What does the chemical actually cost per job?

Sodium hypochlorite is your main cost, and most operators guess at it. Two numbers fix that.

First, your injector’s draw ratio. Put a measured gallon of water in a jug, run the gun on the soap tip for two minutes, and see how much disappeared. If it pulled 0.4 gallons against a 4 GPM machine, you are diluting at roughly 19 parts water to 1 part mix at the tip.

Second, what that ratio does to your strength at the wall:

Draw at the tip	Straight 12.5% SH becomes
8:1	1.39%
10:1	1.14%
15:1	0.78%
20:1	0.60%

Most house wash work lands somewhere near 1% at the wall. Work backward: the tank strength you need equals your target percentage times the ratio plus one. With a lazy 20:1 injector, straight 12.5% concentrate barely gets you to 0.6%, which means longer dwell, a second pass, and more gallons burned. Your injector ratio is a cost line, not a gear preference.

Then price it honestly. Log gallons of SH used per job for a month, multiply by what you pay per gallon, add surfactant, add any degreaser or oxalic rust remover, and divide by the square feet. Now you have a chemical cost per 1,000 square feet you can defend. Buy chlorine fresh and store it out of the sun — it loses strength sitting in a hot truck, and a weak batch costs you a return trip.

Why does a small job need a minimum charge?

Because the clock starts long before the trigger does. Unrolling 200 feet of hose to a gated backyard, priming the pump, mixing the tank, tarping the plants, then reeling it all back in runs 30 to 45 minutes whether you clean 300 square feet or 3,000.

Look at what a cheap little sidewalk job really pays:

Line	Small sidewalk job
350 sq ft quoted at $0.20/sq ft	$70.00
Drive time, round trip	0.67 h
Setup and teardown	0.70 h
Actual wash time	0.45 h
Gate-to-gate hours	1.82 h
Chemical and fuel	$8.00
Effective recovery: ($70 − $8) ÷ 1.82	$34.07/hr

Against a combined labor-and-overhead cost near $60 an hour, that job loses about $47 and takes half a morning. The fix is not a higher square-foot rate. The fix is a floor:

Minimum = (travel + setup/teardown + half an hour of production) × your hourly cost, plus a chemical allowance, divided by one minus your margin.

Run the numbers above through it — (0.6 + 0.7 + 0.5) × $60 = $108, plus $10 of chemical, divided by 0.70 — and the floor is about $169. Call it $175 and stop apologizing for it. Every operator’s floor is different because every operator’s drive radius and overhead are different.

How do I turn hours and chemicals into a price?

Three costs stack, then margin goes on top of the stack.

Loaded hourly cost is not what you want to take home. It is what an hour of production costs once self-employment tax, workers’ comp and liability are in it. A solo operator aiming at $32 an hour in hand is looking at something near $46 loaded.

Overhead per hour is annual overhead divided by real production hours — not 2,000, because estimating, driving, buying chemical and rain days do not turn the pump.

Overhead line	Example year
Truck payment and insurance	$4,200
General liability and coverage on the rig	$1,450
Pump service, hoses, tips, surface cleaner bearings	$2,200
Phone, website, software	$900
Marketing and lead fees	$3,000
Licensing, permits, dump and fill fees	$750
Accountant and admin	$700
Tool and gear replacement	$1,500
Total	$14,700

At 1,050 production hours, that is $14 per hour. Add it to $46 loaded labor and every gate-to-gate hour costs you $60 before you have earned a dime.

Now a 1,000 square foot driveway, cold water, 4 GPM, moderate soiling:

Line	Example
Wash at 800 sq ft/hr	1.25 h
Pre-treat, post-treat, wand the edges	0.50 h
Setup and teardown	0.70 h
Travel, round trip	0.50 h
Gate-to-gate	2.95 h
Labor and overhead: 2.95 × $60	$177.00
Chemical (1.5 gal SH plus surfactant)	$12.00
Fuel	$5.00
Cost subtotal	$194.00
Price at 30% margin ($194 ÷ 0.70)	$277

That is about $0.28 per square foot — a number you can now explain line by line instead of guessing at.

And here is the mistake that quietly eats a season: markup is not margin.

Markup you add to cost	Margin you actually keep
20%	16.7%
25%	20.0%
30%	23.1%
43%	30.1%
50%	33.3%

To truly keep 30%, divide your cost by 0.70. Adding 30% leaves you 23.1%.

What changes the price once I walk the property?

Never quote a wash off a phone call. Walk it with this list.

Condition	What it does to the job
No spigot, or under 5 GPM	Buffer tank plus a fill trip; a 100-gallon tank feeds a 4 GPM machine 25 minutes
Oil or transmission stains	Degreaser, dwell, second pass, sometimes hot water — price per stain, not per sq ft
Rust from fertilizer or well water	Oxalic-based product, separate application, and no promise of 100% removal
Heavy black organic growth	Pre-treat and dwell, production rate drops toward 500 sq ft/hr
Second story or dormers	Reach gear or a 12V roof setup instead of the wand
Wash water can’t reach the storm drain	Containment mats or vacuum recovery — real gear, real hours
Landscaping tight to the wall	Pre-wet and rinse plants; that is billable time on every soft wash
Below 45°F	Chemistry slows, lines freeze, water ices the walk
Long hose pull or locked gate	200+ feet of hose is setup cost, not a favor

That storm drain row is a legal question in a lot of towns, not a courtesy. Wash water carrying detergent, chlorine, oil or paint chips into a storm drain is a discharge, and local rules under the EPA’s stormwater program frequently require it to be contained or routed to sanitary sewer with permission. The EPA’s national menu of stormwater best management practices is the starting point; your municipality writes the actual rule. Find out before the job, and bid the containment if it applies.

How do I check my real hourly before I send the number?

Published averages swing so hard by metro, season and job condition that they are only useful for spotting a mistake of a factor of two. Use these instead:

• Effective recovery. Price minus chemical and fuel, divided by gate-to-gate hours. If that is not clearly above your $60 combined cost, the margin is imaginary.
• Chemical share. On a residential wash, chemical usually lands around 5 to 12% of price. Pushing 25% means you underbid the hours or your injector is starving.
• The drive tax. Total drive minutes divided by total gate-to-gate minutes for the week. Above 25% and your problem is route density, not your rate.
• Your own last ten jobs. Better market data than any national average. If this one prices 40% under them, find out why before you send it.

What do I do after the customer says yes?

The quote wins the job; the paperwork decides whether you keep the money. The gap that costs operators most is the one between rolling up the hose and raising the invoice — every day it sits, more of the job’s detail goes fuzzy and the payment date moves further out.

Keel is an iOS app that runs entirely on the device — no account, no bank connection, no cloud, no login, and an App Store privacy label that reads Data Not Collected. You can raise the invoice from the driveway in under a minute with your own numbering, logo and brand color, and a payment link rendered as a QR code the customer scans before you pull away. Photograph the chlorine and surfactant receipts and Apple Intelligence reads them on device, which matters because those are the costs that prove your per-job chemical number is real. Log the run to the supply house and back too; the IRS mileage rate for 2026 is worth more over a washing season than most operators expect, given how much of the day is windshield time.

Freeboard shows what is actually yours: cash minus tax reserve, minus committed invoices, minus a buffer — useful in a trade with a hard winter and a summer that pays for it, and it pairs with how much to set aside for 1099 taxes. At year end it exports as a single file, with an Accountant Pack of CSV plus a one-page summary PDF. The free tier is $0 with unlimited invoices, receipts and mileage; Keel Pro is a one-time $249.99 lifetime purchase, not a subscription.

Frequently asked questions

How much do pressure washers charge per square foot?

Commonly quoted residential flatwork sits somewhere around $0.10 to $0.30 per square foot, and house washing often lands in a similar band per square foot of wall. Treat those as a sanity check only. Region, water access, soiling level and season move them hard, and a number copied from a forum will not cover your overhead or your drive time.

Should I charge by the hour or by the square foot?

Quote the customer a square-foot or per-surface price, but calculate it from hours underneath. Hourly quotes punish you for buying a faster machine, since an 8 GPM rig finishing in half the time earns half the money. Price the result, keep the timing to yourself, and let equipment upgrades increase your effective hourly instead of shrinking your invoice.

What is a good minimum charge for pressure washing?

Your minimum is a calculation, not a number you copy. Take travel plus setup and teardown plus half an hour of production, multiply by your combined labor-and-overhead hourly cost, add a chemical allowance, then divide by one minus your margin. For most solo operators that lands well above $100, and anything under it means you paid for the privilege of working.

How much chemical does a house wash use?

That depends on your injector draw, the growth level and the surface, so measure rather than guess. Log gallons of sodium hypochlorite per job for a month and divide by square feet. A weak draw ratio means more gallons and more dwell time for the same result, which is why testing your injector is worth more than shopping for cheaper chlorine.

Do I charge extra if the customer has no water?

Yes, and charge for it explicitly. Hauling a buffer tank means a fill stop, the fill time, the extra fuel and the weight on the truck, plus the risk of running dry mid-job. A 100-gallon tank supports about 25 minutes of trigger time on a 4 GPM machine. Price the tank as a line item so the customer sees the cause.

Should I take a deposit for a pressure washing job?

On a same-day residential wash most operators collect in full at completion rather than taking a deposit, since there is no custom material bought up front. On larger commercial work, multi-day jobs or anything requiring wash water containment, a deposit covering mobilization is reasonable. State the amount, the balance timing and the accepted payment methods in the quote.

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This article is general information, not professional or tax advice.