Pressure Washing Pricing: Charge for the Water You Catch

Start at a wage floor, and know what it does not cover

Be precise here. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes no occupation called pressure washing contractor. The closest published trade is janitors and building cleaners, which covers people who keep buildings clean and orderly, not people running a rig on a driveway.

Used carefully it is still a floor.

Read that as a labor floor for a helper. You are not selling a cleaner. You are selling a machine, a water supply, chemical knowledge, and liability cover on someone’s building.

The billable hour is never the wage you pay

Payroll taxes, workers comp, liability, the truck and trailer, the machine, hoses, fuel, and chemical ride on the hours you bill. So does drive time and the free walk-through.

Washing also buries unbillable hours inside billable ones. Setup, water source, masking plants and fixtures, and coiling hose happen before a surface gets clean. Quote the clean, eat the setup, and the loaded hour is fiction. That gap is labor burden.

SimplyWise Cost Estimator turns a photo into an itemized, branded estimate in about 6 seconds. It breaks out material, labor, and fee lines.

One square foot rate cannot cover every surface

Open flat concrete is the fastest work you will do. A rotary surface cleaner runs wide overlapping passes and the square feet fall quickly. That is the surface competitors price from, which is why a flat neighborhood rate looks cheap.

Everything else fights back. Siding, soffits, and gutters go on a wand at ladder height. Wood decks need lower pressure and more passes. Brick, pavers, and roofs each want their own approach too. Stains needing dwell time add chemical and a second pass.

So run a menu, not a number. Square foot for open flat areas you can measure from the driveway. Flat rate for repeat jobs you have done enough times to time. Hourly for unknown scope, where nobody knows what is under the growth until you start.

The washwater is a regulated line

Nobody on the cheap flat rate quote priced this. Storm drains are not sewers. As EPA puts it, unlike wastewater, which flows to a treatment plant, stormwater generally flows to waterways without any additional treatment.

An illicit discharge is any discharge into a storm drain system that is not entirely composed of stormwater, with narrow exceptions for firefighting water and permitted discharges. EPA names surfactants, pathogens, nutrients, and toxic pollutants among what those discharges carry. Detergent is a surfactant, and wash water carrying it is not stormwater, so it lands inside that definition.

Enforcement is local and widespread. Smaller municipal storm sewer systems must run a detection program that includes an ordinance prohibiting illicit discharges. There are roughly 6,695 of those systems, and about 855 larger ones operating under their own permits.

Put the invisible work on its own line

The wand is the cheap part. Water source, chemical, masking, containment and reclaim, access, disposal, and the drive are where the money goes. Bury them in one square foot number and you lose the bid, then lose money on the next.

So state each one. Those lines also recover your overhead instead of burying it.

Build your pressure washing pricing in this order

1. Start at the loaded hour

   Take the wage you pay. Add taxes, insurance, the rig, fuel, chemical, and the setup hours nobody bills. Then divide by the hours you can sell.

2. Pick the unit per surface

   Square foot for open flat areas, flat rate for repeat jobs you have timed, hourly when the scope is unknown. Put a minimum under all three.

3. Price the water you catch

   Confirm the local storm drain rule, then quote containment, reclaim, and disposal as their own line rather than absorbing them.

4. Apply margin last

   Margin goes on after labor, chemical, access, and disposal are on the page. Applied earlier it hides a cost you forgot.