Pressure Washing Prices & Rates

When it comes to pricing your pressure washing services it's very difficult to simply say, "our price is X" on all services. In most cases you will need to actually see the job to give a truly accurate estimate, but nonetheless it's important to have guidelines from which you base your pricing.

• Time
• Materials
• Profit
• National Pricing Averages

Time, Materials & Profit. Those are your primary factors when estimating your jobs. How long will it take, what costs will you incur to provide the service and how much profit above and beyond you wish to factor in.

Time
The easiest way to learn time is to do jobs. You will quickly get an idea of how long it takes to do a typical house, driveway, boat, whatever. No matter if you are doing the work or if you have an employee doing it, time should still be factored in.

Materials
When it comes to materials costs for a job, there's direct costs and indirect. The direct costs are pretty easy and should never be overlooked. If you are losing money on your direct costs with jobs your business is going to struggle. Direct materials costs are things like the chemicals used on the job, gas burned on the job, and anything else purchased specifically for that job that won't be used on other jobs.

Indirect costs are other expenses you incur to perform your services in general, but not due to one specific job. The cost of your pressure washer is a clear indirect cost. You need to be very aware of these costs, but addressing them more from an overall picture and less by specific jobs.

Profit
On top of your direct costs, how much do you add onto the top? Everyone expects you to add a little bit, unless you are just a non-profit organization, but this area can determine how fair and/or how competitive you are. Don't cheat your customers, but don't cheat yourself either. Do a good and thorough job, be professional, and your customers won't mind paying a respectable rate.

NOTE: Just about every pressure washing business how-to-book and video I have ever seen mentions somewhere about setting your prices based on the caliber of neighborhood you are working in. In other words, stick it to the bigger houses because they have the money. I personally find this way of thinking ludicrous, unethical and flat out dumb. Just because you perceive someone "to have the money" does not entitle you to it. Provide excellent service and charge all customers fairly. Period.

Mixing Them Together

Learn to maximize your time. Develop an efficient "system" to follow on each job so that not a single minute is wasted. It will never be perfect and will take several jobs to develop, but streamlining is the key to any business - including yours. Don't skimp on your cleaning chemicals to the point of a lousy job, but don't be wasteful either. Try to maximize your buying power as much as possible with chemicals. Buying in larger volumes can greatly reduce your per job chemical costs. Remember, efficiency = profit. Run a tight ship and you can charge your clients very competitive rates and still keep a nice profit.

Explaining Your Pricing To Your Customers

When you are discussing your pricing with a client it is important to let them know something semi-concrete from which you base your pricing. Far too often I see service contractors of all sorts say, "oh we'll do it for X" almost as if his mood that day played a part in the price. I like to explain to our customers, "for the basic house wash we charge X per square foot" so a house your size is going to be X. You can always adjust your per square foot rate if needed.

Below are some general industry averages for several pressure washing services.

Attention Pressure Washers!
Join PressureNet Forums today and start growing!