Your margin isn’t leaving on labour. It’s leaving in a jug.
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Same method, costed for the work you actually do. All of them are in the $49 bundle.
Get the free Job Pricing Starter — loaded labour cost, overhead, break-even and the price to quote, on one sheet. It also shows what pricing on markup instead of margin costs you per job. No card.
Cost the job up from your own numbers, not from a price list. Add the chemicals you will actually pour, the crew hours including drive time, the truck cost for the round trip, and your overhead. That total is your break-even — the number below which the job costs you money. Your price is the break-even divided by one minus your target margin. The Pressure Washing Pricing Calculator does this on every job and shows the break-even separately, so you always know your floor before you quote.
Published US ranges run about $0.15 to $0.75 per square foot overall, roughly $0.30 to $0.55 for driveways and concrete, and $0.10 to $0.50 for a soft-wash house. A typical residential job lands between $150 and $500, averaging about $275, and most contractors hold a $100 to $150 minimum to cover drive time and setup. But those are national averages — your chemical prices, your wages and your market move the real number. The calculator prices from your own inputs and then checks the answer against the published band for that surface.
About $11 to $16 on a typical house wash, and that has climbed 15 to 22 percent since 2024. Sodium hypochlorite at 12.5% runs $2 to $4 a gallon, house-wash surfactant $25 to $40 a gallon, and degreaser for oil stains $30 to $50 a gallon. A solo operator spends roughly $2,000 to $5,000 a year on chemicals. This is the single most-forgotten line item in the trade, which is why the calculator costs it explicitly on every job instead of burying it in overhead.
There are plenty of free pressure washing estimate templates, but nearly all of them are blank forms — you still have to know what number to write in. They total up a price you supply. This one works the other way round: it tells you what the price should be, and warns you in dollars when the price you had in mind loses money.
Companies bill $50 to $160 an hour depending on the work: roughly $60 to $125 for high-pressure hard surfaces like driveways, and $100 to $175 for soft washing roofs, siding and wood. A solo operator needs about $120 to $130 an hour to clear $75,000 take-home once overhead and non-billable hours are accounted for. The calculator shows your effective earnings per crew-hour on every job so you can see which work actually pays.
Yes — Excel and Google Sheets. Nothing to install.
Yes, $39 one-time. Field-service software covering the same job costs $29 to $79 every month.
