How much should I charge for pressure washing?

Price by the job, not the hour, and work backwards from what you need per day. Most established operators target a day rate and then size jobs to hit it — if you need $800 a day and a house wash takes three hours, that job needs to be around $350, not $150. Charging by the square foot sounds professional but it punishes you on awkward access, heavy staining and long hose runs, which is exactly where the time goes.

Is pressure washing actually profitable?

The margins are good because the consumables are cheap — the cost of a job is mostly your time, fuel and a few dollars of chemical. What kills profitability is not price, it is unbilled time: driving across town between two small jobs, quoting in person for work you do not win, and re-doing surfaces you underpriced. Operators who make real money are usually the ones who solved routing and quoting, not the ones who bought a bigger machine.

Do I need a licence and insurance?

Insurance is not optional and customers increasingly ask. General liability is the baseline; if you are working on roofs or at height you will want that reflected in the policy. Licensing varies by state and municipality, and some areas regulate wastewater runoff into storm drains specifically for this trade. Check locally before you quote commercial work, because commercial clients will ask for certificates you cannot produce retroactively.

How do I get my first pressure washing customers?

Work the street you are already on. Finish a driveway, then knock on four neighbouring doors while the contrast is still visible and offer the same job that week at the same rate. It costs nothing, the proof is literally on the ground in front of them, and it builds route density from day one instead of leaving you criss-crossing a city for single jobs.

Should I do residential or commercial?

Start residential, move toward commercial as you can carry the terms. Residential pays immediately and lets you build reviews fast. Commercial is bigger, repeats on a schedule and is far more stable, but it wants insurance certificates, net-30 or net-60 payment, and often evening or overnight work. Most operators bridge the two by picking up small commercial — restaurants, small retail, property managers — before chasing anything large.

How to Run a Pressure Washing Business That Actually Makes Money

Key takeaways:

Price to a day rate, not a square foot — access and staining decide your time, not area
Route density beats job size: two jobs on one street beat three across a city
Quote fast and remotely where you can; in-person quoting is unpaid labour
Reviews are the whole marketing engine in a trade nobody plans for in advance
The first hire should remove driving from your day, not washing

Pressure washing has one of the lowest barriers to entry of any trade, which is both why people start and why so many stall. A machine, a truck and a weekend of practice gets you working. It does not get you a business. The operators still going in year three have almost always fixed the same three things — what they charge, how far they drive, and whether anyone hears about the job afterwards.

Price to a day, not to a surface

The most common early mistake is quoting by square footage because it sounds objective. It is not, because area is not what costs you. A 900-square-foot driveway with clean access and a tap by the garage is an hour. The same driveway behind a locked side gate, with heavy oil staining and a 200-foot hose run, is three. Charge per square foot and you have just guaranteed you lose money on the second one.

Work the other way. Decide what a day of your time needs to produce, then size jobs to reach it. If the number is $800 and you can realistically complete two to three houses, each job has to land around $300 to $350. That figure will feel high the first few times you say it out loud. Say it anyway — the customers who balk at it are the ones who were going to haggle over every extra inch of the job regardless.

Route density is the real profit lever

Here is the arithmetic nobody mentions when you are starting out: a $350 job twenty minutes away and a $350 job forty minutes the other side of town are not the same job. Once you add travel, setup, breakdown and the fuel, the second is worth substantially less per hour, and you cannot see that on the invoice.

The operators who quietly do well cluster their work. They finish a driveway and knock the four neighbouring doors before packing up. They offer a slightly lower rate to book the same street on the same day. They tell a customer in a far suburb that they are out that way next Thursday rather than driving out specially. None of this requires a bigger machine, and all of it raises your effective hourly rate more than a price rise would.

Stop quoting in person

Driving across town to look at a driveway for fifteen minutes, then driving home, is two hours of unpaid work for a job you might not win. Do it enough and it quietly becomes your main activity.

Most residential jobs can be quoted from photos and an address. Ask for three pictures, look at the property on a map for access and surface area, and send a number the same day with a clear note that it holds unless there is something the photos did not show. You will occasionally be wrong; build a little margin in for that. You will also quote five jobs in the time an in-person visit takes one, and speed of response wins more work in this trade than almost anything else.

Seasonality is a planning problem, not a fact of life

Exterior cleaning bunches into spring and early summer, and the temptation is to accept a thin winter. The operators who smooth it out do specific things: gutter clearing in autumn, Christmas light installation in some markets, commercial contracts that run year-round because a restaurant's bin area does not care what month it is, and pre-booking next spring's work at a discount while you are still on site in October.

The other half is cash. A trade with a strong season and a weak one is a trade where you have to carry the quiet months deliberately rather than discovering them. Price the busy season knowing it is funding the slow one.

Reviews are not marketing here — they are the whole funnel

Almost nobody plans to hire a pressure washer. They look at the driveway one Saturday, decide it has got bad, and search. There is no consideration phase, no shortlist built over weeks, no brand loyalty. They open the map results and call someone who looks credible.

Which means your review count and rating are doing the entire job that advertising does in other industries. A business with fifteen reviews and one with two hundred are not competing on equal terms in that moment, and the gap compounds — more reviews means more calls, which means more reviews.

The good news is that pressure washing is the easiest trade in the world to collect them in. You are standing next to the customer at the exact moment the result is most obvious, on a job where the before and after is genuinely dramatic. The bad news is that this moment lasts about a minute. Ask while you are both looking at the clean surface, not in an email three days later when the novelty has worn off and they have stopped noticing.

Two practical things. Give them something to scan there and then — a QR code on your invoice, your clipboard, the side of the van — because “I will text you a link later” usually means you forget. And ask them to mention what you actually cleaned; “took the black streaks off the render and the moss off the patio” is worth more to the next person searching than another five stars saying “great job”.

Your first hire should take driving off your plate

The instinct is to hire someone to wash so you can wash more. That is usually backwards. The bottleneck in a one-person operation is rarely the washing — it is everything around it: quoting, scheduling, invoicing, chasing payment, driving.

A second van doubles your washing capacity and also doubles the admin, which lands entirely on you. Automating the quote, the reminder and the review request first means your first hire adds capacity rather than adding chaos. Plenty of two-van operators earn less per hour than they did alone, for exactly this reason.

The mistakes that end businesses

Underpricing to win early work and then being unable to raise rates on a customer base built entirely on being cheap. Taking any job anywhere and discovering six months later that half the week is spent driving. Buying a bigger machine to solve a problem that was never about equipment. And collecting nothing — no reviews, no photos, no record — so that after two years of solid work the business still looks brand new to anyone searching.

None of those are dramatic failures. They are all slow ones, which is what makes them worth naming in advance.

SnappyRatings puts a QR code in your van and on your invoices, then sends the follow-up automatically if nobody scans. Start a 21-day free trial →