Pressure Washing Pricing: Per Square Foot, Per Hour, or Flat Rate

What should you charge for pressure washing?

Pressure washing is priced three ways: $0.15 to $0.75 per square foot depending on surface, $50 to $160 per hour, or a flat project rate of $100 to $1,400. Most established operators quote flat rates and calculate them from square footage privately (HomeGuide, Housecall Pro).

And the number most new operators forget: a minimum service fee of $100 to $150, regardless of square footage, to cover drive time and setup. Without it, small jobs lose money before you unspool the hose.

Which pricing model to use, and when each one hurts you

The three models are not interchangeable — each fails in a specific, predictable way.

Per square foot is the most defensible and the easiest to quote from satellite imagery without a site visit. It fails on jobs where the work isn't proportional to area: a small, filthy, north-facing patio under a tree can take longer than triple the square footage of clean concrete.

Hourly protects you on unknown conditions, which is why it survives for restoration and one-off commercial work. It also punishes you for being good. Buy a surface cleaner that halves your driveway time and hourly billing hands the entire gain to the customer. Worse, it invites the customer to watch the clock instead of the result.

Flat rate is what most profitable operators land on. The customer gets certainty, you keep every efficiency gain you invest in, and the quote is a single number instead of a formula they'll argue with. The failure mode is underestimating — which is why you calculate the flat rate from square footage internally, then quote the total.

A practical default: price per square foot in your head, quote flat, and hold a minimum. Reserve hourly for jobs where you genuinely can't see the condition in advance.

Soft washing is a different job — price it that way

Most house washing is not pressure washing. Vinyl siding, painted wood, and stucco are damaged by direct high-pressure spray, so the actual method is a low-pressure chemical application that breaks down mold, mildew, and algae, then rinses.

That matters commercially for two reasons.

First, it costs more to deliver — the chemicals are a real line item, which is where the 10–20% premium over straight concrete cleaning comes from. Operators who quote house washes at driveway rates are quietly funding the customer's detergent.

Second, it's a different search and a better customer. Someone typing "soft wash roof cleaning" has already researched enough to know that blasting shingles is a mistake. They are pre-sold on method and far less likely to be shopping purely on price than someone searching for generic pressure washing. That's an easier sale at a higher rate, and it deserves its own page rather than a paragraph buried in a general services list — which is what a pressure washing Jobsite generates by default.

The season is the real constraint

Pressure washing demand concentrates hard into spring and summer and collapses in winter. That shapes pricing more than most operators admit.

In season, your constraint is hours, not customers. When the calendar is full, discounting is strictly a loss — every discounted job displaces a full-price one. This is the moment to raise rates, not to run promotions, and the operators who do it are the ones who stop being fully booked and broke at the same time.

Out of season, your constraint is customers. Lower prices don't create demand that isn't there — nobody books a house wash in February because it's cheap. The out-of-season play is visibility, not price: rankings take weeks to build, so the crews that own April are the ones who were already visible in February.

That's also the argument for adding an adjacent service rather than discounting through winter. Gutters peak in autumn and windows run year-round, so many exterior-cleaning operators carry two or three of these. We've written up the rates for both: gutter cleaning pricing and window cleaning pricing.