Pressure washing has the lowest barrier to entry in home services, which is why the market is full of $99 driveway specials. The cost structure is not low at all — a $199 driveway with 3.5 hours of total time costs $273 to deliver. Doing more of them makes the year worse.
In this article
- The easiest trade to enter is the hardest to price
- Where pressure washing leads come from
- Pricing by the job, never by the hour
- A month in numbers
- The visit is the sales call
- The commercial book nobody is fighting for
- Weather is a scheduling problem, not an excuse
- Beating "$99 driveway special"
- Five mistakes
- The five numbers
- Frequently asked questions
The easiest trade to enter is the hardest to price
Pressure washing has the lowest barrier to entry in home services. A machine, a truck and a weekend, and someone is in business. That is why the market is crowded with $99 driveway specials, and why the companies that earn well look almost nothing like the ones that do not.
The trap is that the equipment cost is low and the perceived value is low, so operators compete on the only dimension a homeowner can compare. Meanwhile the actual cost structure is not low at all: a truck, a trailer, water, chemicals, insurance, surface cleaners, and a job that takes three to five hours with travel.
A $199 driveway with 3.5 hours of total time — drive, setup, wash, pack — at a loaded cost near $78 an hour costs $273 to deliver. It is not a thin job. It is a losing job, and doing more of them makes the year worse.
Stop selling surfaces and start selling the exterior. House wash, driveway, walkways, patio, fence and gutters as one visit is a $900 to $1,800 ticket with one setup and one drive. Same truck, same day, three to five times the revenue — and the customer prefers it, because they wanted the house to look finished, not the driveway to look clean.
Where pressure washing leads come from
Meta and Instagram. Unusually strong here, because the product is dramatic and visual. A half-cleaned driveway in a fifteen-second video outperforms almost any written offer, and it creates demand from people who were not looking.
Local search and the map pack. "Pressure washing near me," "house washing [city]," "roof cleaning." Steady intent, and the map pack compounds through reviews.
Route-adjacent door work. The highest-return hour in the trade. Neighborhoods were built at the same time, so the houses on that street have the same siding, the same algae and the same age. A crew already on site with a visibly clean house behind them is the best advertisement that exists.
Realtors and property managers. Pre-listing cleanups, turnover washes, HOA common areas. Repeat volume, scheduled in advance, and priced without an argument.
Commercial contracts. Restaurants, gas stations, retail centers, dumpster pads, sidewalks. Lower per-visit price, recurring, dense, and mostly invisible to the residential operators fighting over driveways.
Past customers. Exterior surfaces dirty on a schedule. A house washed eighteen months ago is a live job today, and a text with a photo of their own house converts better than any advertising.
Keep reading — free
The rest of this article is worth the 20 seconds
Tell us where to send it and the full piece unlocks right here, along with everything else on this blog.
Rather just talk? Message us on WhatsApp.
Pricing by the job, never by the hour
Measure and price by square foot, then quote a flat number. Internally use rates per square foot by surface — house wash, concrete, pavers, roof — because they differ enormously in speed and chemical use. Externally quote one number, because customers compare totals.
Set a minimum that covers the roll. Below roughly $250 in most markets, the setup and drive consume the job. A minimum is not arrogance; it is the number under which the truck cannot pay for itself.
Price soft washing as its own product. Roofs and siding require low pressure, chemistry and knowledge. It is the highest-margin work in the trade and it should never be quoted at concrete rates.
Bundle by default. Quote the full exterior first and let the customer remove items, rather than quoting one surface and hoping to add. The anchor decides the ticket.
Charge for water and access problems. No spigot, a long carry, a third-floor gutter, a locked gate. These are real costs and they belong in the quote, not absorbed silently.
A month in numbers
A two-truck residential company, before and after moving from surfaces to exteriors:
Before — selling driveways:
• Acquisition spend: $3,900 · leads 121 · jobs 74
• Average ticket: $241 · revenue $17,834
• Jobs per truck per day: 3.1 · gross margin 34%
• Cost per booked job: $53
After — quoting the full exterior, same spend, same leads:
• Jobs 61 (fewer, because some declined the larger scope)
• Average ticket: $742 · revenue $45,262
• Jobs per truck per day: 1.9 · gross margin 47%
• Cost per booked job: $64
Thirteen fewer jobs, $27,428 more revenue, and thirteen points of margin — because the second version spreads one drive and one setup across five surfaces instead of one. The crews work less and earn more, and the customer ends up with the outcome they actually wanted.
The cost per booked job went up, which is exactly the trap in this trade: the metric that looks worse belongs to the version that made $27,000 more. Cost per lead means nothing without the ticket attached to it.
One more line worth reading carefully: jobs per truck per day fell from 3.1 to 1.9, which looks like a productivity loss and is the opposite. Three small jobs mean three drives, three setups and three teardowns; two large ones mean two. The crew spends more of the day washing and less of it loading, which is where the thirteen points of margin came from.
The visit is the sales call
Once a crew is on site, everything else costs only time.
Walk the property before starting. Point out the fence, the patio, the north-facing siding with algae, the gutters streaked black. Not as a pitch — as a walkthrough, with a price for each. Add-on acceptance while the truck is already there runs far above anything sold cold.
Show the difference. Wash one section of siding and stop. The contrast sells the house wash more effectively than any before-and-after photo of somebody else's home.
Book the next visit before leaving. Concrete and siding dirty on a predictable cycle, usually twelve to twenty-four months depending on shade and climate. An appointment on the calendar converts a one-time customer into a route.
Ask about the neighbors. "We're on this street today — if anyone next door wants theirs done while we're set up, I can do it at a better price." One setup, two jobs, and the discount costs less than the drive it saves.
Photograph the result before you leave. A clean house shot from the street, sent by text the same afternoon, does three jobs at once: it closes out the visit, it supplies the review request while the customer is still pleased, and it becomes the ad you run to that neighborhood next season. In a trade this visual, the marketing asset is produced free on every job and most operators drive away without it.
The commercial book nobody is fighting for
Residential pressure washing is crowded because it is easy to start. Commercial work is not crowded, because it requires insurance, invoicing, scheduling reliability and sometimes night work — a set of unglamorous requirements that eliminate most competitors.
What is available: restaurants that need dumpster pads and drive-throughs monthly, gas stations, retail centers with sidewalks and awnings, apartment complexes with breezeways and garages, HOA common areas.
The economics are different and better in one specific way: it is recurring and scheduled. A restaurant on a monthly pad cleaning at $280 is $3,360 a year sold once. Ten of those fill a truck's slow weeks and carry the business through the residential winter.
Selling it takes patience — a property manager or regional facilities contact, a certificate of insurance, a written scope and a trial. The cycle is weeks rather than days, which is precisely why so few operators do it, and precisely why it is worth doing.
Weather is a scheduling problem, not an excuse
Pressure washing is weather-dependent in a way that most operators handle by improvising, and improvising is what produces the no-show reputation the whole trade carries.
Three habits fix nearly all of it. Overbook the schedule deliberately by about 15% against expected weather loss, so a clear day absorbs the backlog rather than a lost day creating one. Publish a rain policy at the quote — what happens, who calls whom, and how fast the reschedule lands — because the customer's complaint is almost never the rain, it is the silence afterwards. And move work indoors and undercover when the forecast turns: garages, breezeways, covered patios, commercial dumpster pads, parking structures. A day that cannot wash a roof can still wash a restaurant.
In cold markets, the season itself is the constraint, and the answer is the same as in every seasonal trade: sell the recurring commercial book in the busy months so the slow months have a floor, and start advertising for spring six weeks before the first warm week rather than during it. The operator who begins advertising the day the phone starts ringing is bidding against everyone else for the same week, at the worst price of the year.
Beating "$99 driveway special"
You cannot win the price fight and you do not need to. The homeowner comparing you to a $99 operator has three real fears, and none of them is cost.
Damage. Stripped paint, etched concrete, water forced behind siding, a ruined roof. State your insurance, state that siding and roofs are soft washed at low pressure, and say what happens if something goes wrong.
Showing up. This trade has a reputation for no-shows and weather cancellations that never get rescheduled. A confirmed date, a reminder and a rain policy in writing is worth more than any discount.
A finished result. The $99 job cleans a driveway and makes the rest of the house look worse. Selling the exterior as one outcome answers a problem the cheap quote creates.
Swap test: if a competitor could put their logo on your sentence and it would still be true, it is not an offer. "Free estimates, fully insured" fails. "Roofs and siding are soft washed at under 500 psi, and if we damage anything we repair it — in writing on every quote" passes.
Five mistakes
1. Selling one surface. One drive and one setup should carry five surfaces, not one.
2. Competing on the driveway price. There is always someone with a machine and no overhead willing to lose money faster than you.
3. Pressure washing everything. Roofs and siding need chemistry and low pressure; treating them like concrete produces the damage claim that ends a small company.
4. No minimum. Below roughly $250 the setup and drive eat the job, and volume makes it worse rather than better.
5. Ignoring commercial. The recurring, scheduled, uncrowded half of the market, avoided because it requires paperwork.
The five numbers
Average ticket. The number that separates a business from a side job, and the one that responds fastest to quoting the exterior instead of a surface.
Revenue per truck per day, not jobs per day. Fewer, larger jobs is the goal.
Add-on acceptance rate on site. Below 30%, the crew is washing rather than walking the property.
Percentage of revenue that is recurring — commercial contracts and rebooked residential. It is what carries the slow season.
Cost per booked job against average ticket, always together. Either number alone will point you at the wrong decision.
Cost per lead means nothing without the ticket attached
Send us your spend, your average ticket and your close rate. In this trade the cheapest leads usually belong to the least profitable version of the business, and the metric that looks worse is often the one making the money.
Frequently asked questions
How should a pressure washing company price its work?
Measure and price by square foot internally, using different rates per surface — house wash, concrete, pavers, roof — because they differ enormously in speed and chemical consumption, then quote one flat number externally, because customers compare totals rather than rates. Set a minimum around $250 in most markets, below which the setup and drive consume the job. Price soft washing as its own product, since roofs and siding require low pressure and chemistry and should never be quoted at concrete rates. And quote the full exterior first, letting the customer remove items, rather than quoting one surface and hoping to add — the anchor decides the ticket.
Why is selling the whole exterior better than selling a driveway?
Because one drive and one setup can carry five surfaces instead of one. A company that moved from quoting driveways to quoting full exteriors, on the same spend and the same leads, went from 74 jobs at a $241 average ticket and $17,834 of revenue to 61 jobs at a $742 average ticket and $45,262 — thirteen fewer jobs, $27,428 more revenue and thirteen more points of margin. Jobs per truck per day fell from 3.1 to 1.9, which reads as a productivity loss and is the opposite: the crew spends more of the day washing and less of it loading. Note that cost per booked job rose from $53 to $64, which is the trap in this trade — the metric that looks worse belongs to the version that made $27,000 more.
Is commercial pressure washing worth pursuing?
Yes, and it is far less crowded than residential precisely because it requires the unglamorous things most operators avoid: insurance certificates, invoicing, scheduling reliability and sometimes night work. What is available is restaurants needing dumpster pads and drive-throughs monthly, gas stations, retail centers with sidewalks and awnings, apartment complexes and HOA common areas. The key difference is that it is recurring and scheduled — a restaurant on a monthly pad cleaning at $280 is $3,360 a year sold once, and ten of those carry a truck through the residential slow season. The sales cycle runs weeks rather than days, which is why few competitors bother.