Window Cleaning Pricing: Per Pane, Per Hour, and the Commercial Premium

What should you charge for window cleaning?

Residential window cleaning runs $8 to $16 per window, or $4 to $8 per pane for ground-floor exterior work, with most whole-house jobs landing between $150 and $450. Commercial is priced differently — $0.50 to $2.50 per square foot, or $5.50 to $15.00 per window (Jobber, Housecall Pro).

The two adjustments people forget are the ones that decide profitability: interior work roughly doubles the job, and second-story panes carry a real surcharge. Quote a whole-house exterior-and-interior clean at exterior rates and you've halved your effective hourly rate.

Residential pays once. Commercial pays every month.

This is the structural fact about window cleaning and most operators underweight it.

A residential job is a good day: $250, maybe twice a year if the customer remembers. A storefront on a monthly schedule is that same money every month, for years, with no re-selling, no new estimate, and a route you can plan around.

The economics diverge further than the headline rates suggest:

• Acquisition cost amortizes. Winning a residential customer costs the same as winning a commercial one, but the commercial contract spreads that cost across dozens of visits.
• Commercial work is predictable. Same building, same panes, same time. You get faster at a specific site in a way you never do across scattered homes.
• The competition is thinner. Far more window cleaners target homeowners than target property managers, and commercial search phrases are correspondingly less contested.

The catch is that commercial buyers search differently — "commercial window cleaning," "storefront window cleaning," "monthly window cleaning contract," not "window cleaning near me." A site with one general services page competes for the residential term and misses the recurring work entirely. Splitting them is the point of the window cleaning Jobsite template.

Charge for the specialist work as specialist work

Hard water stain removal, paint overspray, post-construction cleanup, and glass restoration are not window cleaning with extra steps. They're different jobs with different chemicals, different time, and different risk — and they should not be priced off your per-pane rate.

Two things make them worth building out:

They command a premium and rarely get compared. A homeowner shopping a standard clean will call three companies. Someone with etched glass from a sprinkler system is looking for anyone who can actually fix it, and price is a secondary concern.

Almost nobody has a page for them. Search results for these terms are thin, which is unusual in a trade this crowded. That's the same pattern we found across the lead-cost pages: the general term is contested and unwinnable, while the specific one sits open.

Post-construction is the highest-value version. Builders and general contractors need it on every job, they buy repeatedly, and they care about scheduling reliability far more than rate.

The rebooking problem

Windows need doing roughly twice a year, and customers reliably forget. That's the quiet leak in most window cleaning businesses: every clean starts the sale from zero because nothing brings the customer back on schedule.

The fix is unglamorous and it works — a scheduled follow-up that reaches the customer when they're actually due, before the windows look bad enough for them to start shopping again. You already earned this customer. Re-earning them costs almost nothing compared to finding a new one, and it's the closest a residential window cleaner gets to the commercial route's predictability.

If you're running windows alongside other exterior work, the same logic applies across services — a customer who booked a spring house wash is a candidate for autumn gutters. Rates for the neighbouring trades: pressure washing pricing and gutter cleaning pricing.