How Much to Charge for Window Cleaning, Per Pane and Visit

Short answer: How much to charge for window cleaning comes from panes per hour, not dollars per pane. Count pane units, sort them into access classes — ground level, ladder, water-fed pole, lift — and apply the production rate you have actually timed for each. Ground-level exterior glass runs roughly 45 to 80 units an hour; second-story ladder work drops to 15 to 30. Multiply hours by your loaded hourly cost, add margin, and never quote below your trip minimum.

Window cleaning is sold per pane and delivered per hour, and the whole craft of pricing it is holding those two facts together. A house with 36 pieces of glass can be two hours or five, and nothing about the pane count tells you which. What tells you is where the glass is, what is stuck to it, and how many times somebody has to move a ladder.

What am I actually selling — panes, elevations, or visits?

Three units, and the job type picks one.

Job type	Unit	Why
Residential, one-time or annual	Pane units, interior and exterior counted separately	The customer can count windows, and it makes the quote checkable
Storefront route	Per visit, flat	Small, repetitive, and the drive is a larger share than the glass
Commercial mid-rise	Per elevation or per drop	Access setup dominates, and it is not proportional to pane count
Post-construction	Per hour, or per pane at a restoration rate	Nobody can predict what is stuck to the glass until they scrape one
Recurring contract	Per visit at a frequency-adjusted rate	Soil load at arrival is lighter, and your timing proves it

The mistake most operators make is quoting post-construction at a cleaning rate. Construction glass has stucco splatter, paint overspray, silicone, and label adhesive on it. That is remediation work with blade risk and a scratch-liability conversation attached, and it belongs at its own rate.

Which glass counts as more than one pane unit?

Count in minutes rather than in abstract units and the arguments disappear. A pane unit is whatever you have timed at roughly one minute of exterior ground-level work, and everything else gets measured against that.

Glass	Counts as	Reason
Standard double-hung sash	1.0	The baseline
Casement or awning	1.0	Slightly more frame, slightly less reach
Picture window over about 12 sq ft	1.5 to 2.0	Wider channel, more passes, sometimes two hands
Bay or bow assembly	Count each individual light	Three or five pieces of glass, not one window
True divided lite, six over six	1.75 to 2.5	Every lite detailed by hand
Grids sealed inside the sealed unit	1.0	The grid is between the panes and adds nothing
French door	1.5 to 2.0 per door	Many small lites and a frame that shows every miss
Sliding patio panel	1.5	Large, heavy, and the track comes with it
Basement hopper, transom	0.5 to 0.75	Small, but you still set up for it
Garden or greenhouse window	2.5 to 3.5	Five surfaces and an awkward reach on all of them
Skylight	2.0 to 4.0 plus an access line	Roof work with a fall hazard
Storm window	1.0 extra plus handling	Two more faces, plus remove and reinstall

Do the count on the site walk with a clicker and write it on the estimate, elevation by elevation. A count you can show is a count the customer stops disputing.

How many pane units an hour do I actually clean?

Access class is the single biggest lever in this trade, larger than pane type and much larger than soil.

Class	What it is	Pane units per technician hour
A	Ground level, both sides reachable	45 to 80 exterior, 25 to 45 interior
B	Extension ladder, second story	15 to 30, including set and move
C	Water-fed pole from grade	30 to 55, exterior only, no wiping
D	Boom or scissor lift	20 to 40, plus a fixed equipment day
E	Rope descent or suspended platform	12 to 25, plus rigging hours and documentation

Class E is the one to be careful quoting. OSHA’s walking-working surfaces rule requires written building-owner certification that each anchorage has been tested and is capable of supporting the system, and that paperwork has to exist before anyone ties in. Hours spent obtaining it are billable hours.

Interior work is slower than exterior at the same height, and it always surprises people. Blinds come down, furniture moves, a drop cloth goes under every sill, and a homeowner stands there talking to you. Budget interior at roughly half your exterior rate in an occupied home.

Then the add-ons, all timed per unit:

Task	Minutes each
Screen — remove, wash, dry, reinstall	1.0 to 2.0
Track and sill detail	1.0 to 2.0 per opening
Storm window — remove, clean both faces, reinstall	3.0 to 5.0
Hard water spot removal, per pane	4.0 to 12.0
Construction debris scrape, per pane	3.0 to 10.0

Hard water and construction glass belong in the second table for a reason. Those are not cleaning minutes, they are restoration minutes, and quoting them inside a per-pane cleaning price is how a two-hour job becomes a six-hour one.

What does an hour of a window cleaner cost, water included?

Build the cost against on-site hours, then let the ratio of on-site to paid hours do the work.

Layer	Calculation	Per on-site hour
Wage plus burden	$22.00 × 1.28 × 1,750 paid hours ÷ 1,180 on-site hours	$41.76
Equipment and consumables	Squeegees, rubber, soap, DI resin, pole system, ladders, tank: $14,800 ÷ 1,180	$12.54
Operating cost		$54.30
Overhead	Van, insurance, phone, software, advertising, admin: $37,000 ÷ 1,180	$31.36
Fully loaded		$85.66

At a 25 percent margin, $85.66 ÷ 0.75 = $114.21 per billed on-site hour.

The one consumable worth measuring rather than assuming is deionizing resin, if you run a water-fed pole. Its cost per gallon moves with your incoming water: the harder the supply, the sooner the output climbs past 10 ppm and the tank needs recharging. Published figures span from a couple of hundred gallons per cubic foot on hard water to well over a thousand on soft, which is a range too wide to price from. Put a TDS meter on the inlet and a flow meter on the cart, log gallons per resin change for a month, and divide. An RO pre-filter strips most of the solids before the resin sees them and changes the arithmetic substantially.

Why does a small job need a minimum, and how big should it be?

Because the smallest jobs consume a disproportionate share of the day. Your billed hourly rate carries an average amount of drive and setup. A twenty-eight minute storefront is far worse than average.

Work it out from paid hours instead. Total annual cost is $101,080 across 1,750 paid technician hours, which is $57.76 per paid hour. The smallest realistic stop — 0.46 hours of glass, 0.35 hours of drive, 0.15 hours of unload and pack — consumes 0.96 paid hours, or $55.45 of cost. At a 25 percent margin that is $73.93.

Post a $75 minimum. Below it you are paying for the parking.

What does the math look like on a real house?

Two-story colonial, interior and exterior, screens and tracks included. Ground floor is class A, second story is class B on a ladder.

Glass	Count	Exterior minutes	Interior minutes
Ground-floor double-hung sash	14	16.8	30.8
Second-story double-hung sash	12	38.4	26.4
Ground-floor picture window	2	5.2	7.0
French door, ten lites	2	9.0	10.0
Sliding patio panel	2	4.8	6.0
Basement hopper	4	4.0	5.6
Subtotal	36	78.2	85.8

Add	Minutes
26 screens at 1.4	36.4
20 openings of track detail at 1.2	24.0
Walk-through, drop cloths, ladder staging, final check	25.0
Total on site	249.4 min = 4.16 technician hours

Step	Calculation	Amount
Cost	4.16 × $85.66	$356.35
Price at 25% margin	$356.35 ÷ 0.75	$475.13
Quoted	Rounded	$475.00

That is $13.19 per piece of glass — but the useful figure is the other one. Second-story exterior is 12 panes consuming 38.4 minutes while 14 ground-floor panes consume 16.8. Same glass, less than half the count, more than double the time. Anyone quoting this house at a flat rate per window is losing money on the upstairs and overcharging on the down.

How does frequency change a storefront price?

It changes it because your own timing changes, not because you are discounting. Glass cleaned two weeks ago has less on it, and your minutes per pane prove it.

Frequency	Minutes per exterior pane unit	Price relative to a first clean
One-time or first clean	1.6	1.00
Monthly	1.1	0.72
Biweekly	0.9	0.60
Weekly	0.75	0.51

Take a 22-unit storefront. The first clean is 35.2 minutes of glass plus 10 of setup — 0.75 hours, priced at $86. On biweekly maintenance it drops to 19.8 minutes plus 8 of setup, 0.46 hours, a computed price of $53. That lands under the minimum, so the biweekly visit prices at $75 anyway. Route density is the only thing that makes small recurring stops work, which is why a single storefront twenty minutes off your route is a decline and four on the same block is a good week.

Am I adding markup or taking margin?

Window cleaning is almost pure labor, so there is barely anything to mark up — which makes the margin arithmetic the only lever you have, and the one most often applied backwards.

Margin you want	Divide cost by	An $85.66 cost becomes
20%	0.80	$107.08
25%	0.75	$114.21
30%	0.70	$122.37
35%	0.65	$131.78

Adding 25 percent to $85.66 gives $107.08 — that is a 20 percent margin, not 25. Markup is a percentage of cost, margin is a share of price, and the conversion is markup = margin ÷ (1 − margin). On a route running six houses a week the difference is a truck payment a year.

Is my per-pane number sane for my market?

Convert your quote back into three numbers you can compare across your own jobs: dollars per pane unit, dollars per on-site hour, and revenue per route day. Those tell you more than any published range, because they normalize a bungalow against a colonial.

Published per-window prices vary by more than double between markets and shift with season and access mix, and almost none of them state whether screens, tracks, storms, or interiors were included — which on the house above is 60 of the 249 minutes. Use them only to catch an order-of-magnitude error. If your figure lands far above local pricing, look at route density and ladder time before touching the rate. If it lands far below, you have almost certainly forgotten interiors, screens, or the trip minimum. Line-by-line quoting discipline for all of that is in the window cleaning estimate template.

What should I record when the route is done?

Actual minutes per stop against quoted minutes, screen and storm counts, any pane you photographed as already scratched or etched, and the miles between stops. The scratch photograph in particular is worth more than any disclaimer — take it before you touch the glass.

Keel handles the paperwork side without leaving the van. The invoice goes out from the curb with your own numbering, your logo, and a payment link rendered as a QR code the customer scans while you coil the hose, which is the single most effective habit for getting clients to pay on a residential route. Resin, rubber, soap, and equipment receipts get photographed at the counter and read on the device by Apple Intelligence, which is how your consumables-per-hour figure stays a measurement rather than a guess. Every leg between stops logs as mileage — for a route business that is often the largest single deduction and the most under-claimed; what a compliant record contains is in how to track mileage for taxes. Everything stays on the phone: no account, no bank connection, no cloud, and an App Store privacy label that reads Data Not Collected. Keel is free with unlimited invoices, receipts, and mileage; Keel Pro is a one-time $249.99 Lifetime purchase rather than a subscription.

Frequently asked questions

How do I price window cleaning per pane? Count pane units on the site walk, weighting large, divided, and awkward glass above the standard sash. Sort them by access class, apply the panes-per-hour rate you have timed for each class, add screens, tracks, storms, and setup as separate minutes, then multiply the total hours by your loaded hourly cost and divide by one minus your margin.

How many windows can one person clean in an hour? At ground level with both sides reachable, roughly 45 to 80 pane units an hour on the exterior and 25 to 45 on the interior of an occupied home. On an extension ladder at the second story it falls to 15 to 30 once ladder sets and moves are counted. Time your own crew for a week rather than trusting any published figure, including this one.

Should I charge extra for screens and window tracks? Yes, as separate line items with their own counts. A screen takes one to two minutes to remove, wash, dry, and reinstall, and track detailing takes one to two minutes per opening — on a 36-pane house that is around an hour of work. Folding it into the per-pane price makes the houses with the most screens the least profitable ones you do.

What should my window cleaning minimum charge be? Enough to cover the paid hours the smallest stop consumes, including the drive and the unload. A job with under half an hour of glass still eats close to a full hour of the day, which at a $58 cost per paid hour and a 25 percent margin is roughly $74. A $75 minimum is arithmetic. State it when the customer calls, not after you have arrived.

How do I price post-construction window cleaning? As restoration, not cleaning. Stucco splatter, paint overspray, silicone, and label adhesive take three to ten minutes a pane with a blade, and blade work on tempered glass carries a scratch-liability risk that has to be discussed and documented in advance. Price it hourly or at a separate per-pane restoration rate, and photograph pre-existing damage before starting.

Why should a recurring window cleaning visit cost less than a one-time clean? Because it takes you less time, not because you are discounting. Glass cleaned two weeks earlier arrives with far less on it, so exterior minutes per pane can fall by a third or more. Derive the recurring price from your own timing on maintenance visits rather than picking a percentage off, and keep the trip minimum in place regardless of frequency.

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